Even if it's a definition that feels oppressive to us, that oppression can be inspiring because it helps us push up against… — John D'Agata Copy Share Image
Sometimes what I'm looking for is the thing that will help renew people's interest in a writer that they may have written… — John D'Agata Copy Share Image
I know it sounds silly, but disrespecting a dead writer by sitting in a chair that probably never belonged to him still… — John D'Agata Copy Share Image
I look for the kind of text that doesn't look like the writer I'm considering. Plutarch is a great example. — John D'Agata Copy Share Image
You're often looking at writing from writers who, for the most part, are working in forms that traditionally fit into other genres.… — John D'Agata Copy Share Image
What I didn't realize when I was in school and what I suspect a lot of young writers today don't get either… — John D'Agata Copy Share Image
I'm not a poet, but I was in the poetry program. And I'm also not much of a nonfiction writer, at least… — John D'Agata Copy Share Image
When you're a young writer and you look at people praising a big hefty anthology that has uncovered a long lost genre,… — 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
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
Plutarch's peers were writing "rhetorics," which were these dry philosophical treatises that made really broad gestures about life and death and fate.… — 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
Inclusiveness isn't what I want to push back against. The obsession with facts is. — 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 say "You… — 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
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 Image
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 Image
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 Image
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 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 at the… — John D'Agata Copy Share Image
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 Image
Pedagogically, we need definitions and borders. They help us get our heads around what we're talking about. — John D'Agata Copy Share Image
“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 Image
