“I have bougainvillea and a magnolia tree outside my window. Not that anything wi…” — Meghan Daum

I love the essay. It's my favorite genre to work in.

I think people seem to want to read pieces that are shorter but not as short as the pieces they can read in small bites on the Internet. It may be that the sort of long essays are hitting a sweet spot between the tiny morsels online and the full-length book.

Writers are the ones who figure out how to put their observations into words.

The point of essays is the point of writing anything. It's not to tell people what they already think or to give them more of what they already believe; it's to challenge people, and it's to suggest alternate ways of thinking about things.