John D'Agata

Inclusiveness isn't what I want to push back against. The obsession with facts is.

— John D'Agata

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

I think that in a lot of readers' minds the essay is a lot more utilitarian than it is art.

— John D'Agata

As frustrating as my time in grad school felt, it also helped tremendously because it challenged me to figure out what it…

— John D'Agata

I'm not worried about what part of their life they needed to massage in order to achieve something that I get to…

— John D'Agata

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

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

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

A risk is something that feels risky to the person who's taking it.

— John D'Agata

You move your life across the country and make a commitment to a place, and to a genre, and then you realize…

— John D'Agata

Pedagogically, we need definitions and borders. They help us get our heads around what we're talking about.

— John D'Agata

“Maybe every essay automatically is in some way experimental — less an outline traveling toward a foregone conclusion than an unmapped quest…

— John D'Agata

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

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

It's fun to just skim through piles of books in the stacks of a library.

— John D'Agata

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

— John D'Agata

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

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

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

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

— John D'Agata

When I'm teaching, I'm not really doing my job if the student who's always comfortable doing wacko stuff all over the page…

— John D'Agata

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

I get emails from students at programs all over the country who want to transfer to Iowa, and in most cases their…

— John D'Agata

The best stuff that Cicero wrote, in the first century in Rome, were the Philippics, a series of speeches that he delivered…

— John D'Agata

“What happens when an essayist starts imagining things, making things up, filling in blank spaces, or — worse yet — leaving the blanks blank?”

— John D'Agata