I like Plutarch because I've read him forever, and I know that he's incredibly funky, even though his mainstream image is as Mr. Unfunky.

An essay is something that tracks the evolution of a human mind.

Sometimes what I'm looking for is the thing that will help renew people's interest in a writer that they may have written off as not their kind of writer.

I'm not a poet, but I was in the poetry program. And I'm also not much of a nonfiction writer, at least not in the standard sense of nonfiction, nor especially in the way we were thinking about nonfiction back then, in the late 90s.

If there's a poster boy for the fact that all essays are written through personae, it's Crèvecoeur.

I get emails from students at programs all over the country who want to transfer to Iowa, and in most cases their frustrations have absolutely nothing to do with the programs they're attending. They have to do with the growing pains that they're undergoing as writers and with the growing pains that our own genre is constantly undergoing.

I look for the kind of text that doesn't look like the writer I'm considering. Plutarch is a great example.