In college I studied essays with a poet, and so I think my interpretation of the genre was always going to be a little off-kilter. John D'Agata More Quotes by John D'Agata More Quotes From John D'Agata Sometimes the essay is where we end up when everything that we know must change. John D'Agata essaysendssometimes I never really understood the idea that nonfiction ought to be this dispensary of data that we have at the moment. Also, roughly around the time we were doing this fact-checking. And I never really understood why people think what nonfiction's job is to give them information as opposed to something else. John D'Agata givingpeoplethinking Pedagogically, we need definitions and borders. They help us get our heads around what we're talking about. John D'Agata borderstalkingneeds The whole movement of an essay is propelled by a fundamentally human impulse to want to figure things out. John D'Agata movementfigureswant An essay is something that tracks the evolution of a human mind. It tracks the evolution of a single consciousness in order to give us an experience - an experience of looking for something and then finding ourselves in a different place by the time we've finished our journey. John D'Agata trackjourneyorder Inclusiveness isn't what I want to push back against. The obsession with facts is. John D'Agata obsessionwantfacts In some ways we want definitions that can help protect our own interpretations of the genre. John D'Agata definitionswantway Of course it's possible for political essays to be artful. I just want to call into question the dominance of content over form in the history of the essay. I want us to recognize that there's art involved in making this stuff, because we still don't approach the constructed nature of the essay with the same appreciation that we do poetry or fiction. John D'Agata politicalappreciationart I think that in a lot of readers' minds the essay is a lot more utilitarian than it is art. John D'Agata mindartthinking An essay is something that tracks the evolution of a human mind. John D'Agata trackevolutionmind When you're a young writer and you look at people praising a big hefty anthology that has uncovered a long lost genre, it can be disorienting to look inside it and think, "But what it's uncovered still isn't me. What does this mean? Do I not belong in this genre, or is there more of the genre yet to find?" John D'Agata longmeanthinking What I didn't realize when I was in school and what I suspect a lot of young writers today don't get either is that you have to create the world that you want to exist in as an artist. John D'Agata artistworldschool The best stuff that Cicero wrote, in the first century in Rome, were the Philippics, a series of speeches that he delivered against Marc Antony, whom he thought was irreparably dismantling the Republic of Rome. Those speeches are powerful because they're not only really pointed but they're thrillingly beautiful - and that's precisely what made them dangerous: the fact that people wanted to read them. John D'Agata romepowerfulbeautiful You move your life across the country and make a commitment to a place, and to a genre, and then you realize that neither the place nor the genre might be what you thought they were going to be, or that the world you thought you were going to find in school doesn't actually exist. John D'Agata countrycommitmentmoving We approach nonfiction at a much different level than we approach fiction or poetry or drama: that there's almost no room for metaphor. We expect the "I" in any nonfiction text to be an autobiographical "I" when there is a history in the essay of the "I" being a persona. John D'Agata metaphordifferentdrama The intimate and meditative form that Plutarch became known for was completely new in his day. John D'Agata intimateknownform 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. John D'Agata funkymainstreamforever 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 kindexamplelooks 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. John D'Agata crackswritingfall It's fun to just skim through piles of books in the stacks of a library. John D'Agata libraryfunbook
