“I think people seem to want to read pieces that are shorter but not as short as …” — Meghan Daum

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

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.

I have bougainvillea and a magnolia tree outside my window. Not that anything will ever beat the view I had from my desk window in my little farmhouse in Nebraska. Just a dirt road stretching out as far as you could see, with prairie grass on either side.