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.

You're often looking at writing from writers who, for the most part, are working in forms that traditionally fit into other genres. But sometimes, in the midst of their better-known stuff, there's this wayward thing, and because it's wayward it isn't considered representative of their work, so it falls through the cracks.

You create your own audience, and your own community of peers, and in some ways you create your own forebears as well.

Sometimes the essay is where we end up when everything that we know must change.

The intimate and meditative form that Plutarch became known for was completely new in his day.

I'm not worried about what part of their life they needed to massage in order to achieve something that I get to experience as transcendent. Because that's the point of literature, I think: to connect.

Yet there are some critics in the nonfiction world who still look at some of today's stranger interpretations of the essay and say "You don't belong here. That's not how we do things." I think that's problematic.