John D'Agata Quotes

#1. As a student at the time, I kind of felt like my only options as a nonfiction writer were to either jump on the personal essay bus or linger back at the station, hoping that some other heretofore unknown mode of transportation was going to magically show up to take me where I wanted to go.

John D'Agata

#2. 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.

John D'Agata

#3. 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

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

John D'Agata

#5. If Plutarch is the essayist I want to believe he is, he would want us all to sit in his chair.

John D'Agata

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

John D'Agata

#7. In some ways we want definitions that can help protect our own interpretations of the genre.

John D'Agata

#8. For a while I just couldn't imagine that there was a place for me in nonfiction. I looked around at what we were calling nonfiction and I thought, "Maybe you do have to go to poetry in order to do this other weird thing in nonfiction."

John D'Agata

#9. 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 time. That's why I joined the poetry program in grad school.

John D'Agata

#10. I wanted to create an environment in which more than just personal essays could be represented, and in which stranger approaches to making essays could be celebrated.

John D'Agata

#11. 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

#12. As frustrating as my time in grad school felt, it also helped tremendously because it challenged me to figure out what it was I thought I wanted.

John D'Agata

#13. 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 not their kind of writer.

John D'Agata

#14. 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.

John D'Agata

#15. And Lopate's anthology helped a lot too. It came out the same year I started grad school, and I remember the book's publication feeling eventful and celebratory. It got a ton of attention for giving voice to this form that had sort of slipped between the cracks. That was exciting to see.

John D'Agata

#16. I know it sounds silly, but disrespecting a dead writer by sitting in a chair that probably never belonged to him still felt like a risk to me. So I chickened out.

John D'Agata

#17. The whole movement of an essay is propelled by a fundamentally human impulse to want to figure things out.

John D'Agata

#18. 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.

John D'Agata

#19. 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 we're writing. Or if it's a definition that we want to defend and uphold, we are given a sense of the boundaries within which we can work.

John D'Agata

#20. Plutarch's peers were writing "rhetorics," which were these dry philosophical treatises that made really broad gestures about life and death and fate. Plutarch stepped out of the stream to create an essayistic form that relied on a digressive structure and down to earth anecdotes.

John D'Agata

#21. I felt a little lost as a student. At Iowa, I felt as if I had gotten into this program that was going to save me, and so I moved myself across the country for grad school and yet still didn't have a home. It was upsetting. And I know that's a common feeling.

John D'Agata

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

John D'Agata

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

John D'Agata

#24. 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

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

John D'Agata

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

John D'Agata

#27. 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

#28. 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

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

John D'Agata

#30. While I was in school, trying to figure out how to write an essay that could both satisfy my nonfiction workshops and still pass as something hybrid-y enough for my poetry workshops, I was looking for models, for forebears.

John D'Agata

#31. 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

#32. 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

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

John D'Agata