The whole movement of an essay is propelled by a fundamentally human impulse to want to figure things out. — John D'Agata Copy Share Image
I think that in a lot of readers' minds the essay is a lot more utilitarian than it is art. — John D'Agata Copy Share Image
Sometimes the essay is where we end up when everything that we know must change. — John D'Agata Copy Share Image
If there's a poster boy for the fact that all essays are written through personae, it's Crèvecoeur. — John D'Agata Copy Share Image
In college I studied essays with a poet, and so I think my interpretation of the genre was always going to be… — John D'Agata Copy Share Image
I wanted to create an environment in which more than just personal essays could be represented, and in which stranger approaches to… — John D'Agata Copy Share Image
I thought that I wasn't an essayist because I just didn't see myself in a lot of the essays that were popular… — John D'Agata Copy Share Image
While I was in school, trying to figure out how to write an essay that could both satisfy my nonfiction workshops and… — John D'Agata Copy Share Image
Yet there are some critics in the nonfiction world who still look at some of today's stranger interpretations of the essay and… — John D'Agata Copy Share Image
An essay is something that tracks the evolution of a human mind. It tracks the evolution of a single consciousness in order… — John D'Agata Copy Share Image
As a student at the time, I kind of felt like my only options as a nonfiction writer were to either jump… — John D'Agata Copy Share Image
Of course it's possible for political essays to be artful. I just want to call into question the dominance of content over… — John D'Agata Copy Share Image
The essay community should have hundreds of anthologies from hundreds of different perspectives that are constantly introducing us to new writers, new… — John D'Agata Copy Share Image
Back in the day, a lot of our instructors in nonfiction were actually fiction scholars. So they would bring in stories as… — John D'Agata Copy Share Image
We approach nonfiction at a much different level than we approach fiction or poetry or drama: that there's almost no room for… — John D'Agata Copy Share Image
Inclusiveness isn't what I want to push back against. The obsession with facts is. — John D'Agata Copy Share
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… — John D'Agata Copy Share
I think that in a lot of readers' minds the essay is a lot more utilitarian than it is art. — John D'Agata Copy Share
As frustrating as my time in grad school felt, it also helped tremendously because it challenged me to figure out what it was I… — John D'Agata Copy Share
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… — John D'Agata Copy Share
You create your own audience, and your own community of peers, and in some ways you create your own forebears as well. — John D'Agata Copy Share
Even if it's a definition that feels oppressive to us, that oppression can be inspiring because it helps us push up against something while… — John D'Agata Copy Share
I thought that I wasn't an essayist because I just didn't see myself in a lot of the essays that were popular at the… — John D'Agata Copy Share
You move your life across the country and make a commitment to a place, and to a genre, and then you realize that neither… — John D'Agata Copy Share
Pedagogically, we need definitions and borders. They help us get our heads around what we're talking about. — John D'Agata Copy Share
“Maybe every essay automatically is in some way experimental — less an outline traveling toward a foregone conclusion than an unmapped quest that has… — John D'Agata Copy Share
I wanted to create an environment in which more than just personal essays could be represented, and in which stranger approaches to making essays… — John D'Agata Copy Share
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… — John D'Agata Copy Share
