On the Essay as Political Discourse

I have to begin with the feminist tenet, ‘the personal is political’. There’s a popular idea that there’s this distinct type of thinking and writing that is ‘political’ – a credo I do not adhere to. This belief is usually espoused by people who think the status quo is settled truth, absolute reality, uncontestable normality etc. But if you believe, as I do, that every position is political, then in a sense every piece of writing is political. You write a haiku poem about the frogs and not about the toxic waste in the pond, or vice versa – those are political decisions.

On Choosing Essays for The Best American Essays 2019

The submissions for The Best American Essays were really interesting because I found myself thinking some of them were better than others, but also some of them didn’t feel like essays, and so I had to ask myself, ‘What makes something an essay or not?’ And there were pieces that felt … at one end of the spectrum like memoir. They weren’t really asking, ‘Well what are the general principles underlying my personal experience?’, ‘What could we understand about race or gender or childhood or families or the human experience?’, ‘How is my personal experience connected to broader experiences, to categories of experience, or questions of meaning, or the economic or ecological construction of that experience?’

On Journalism and the Essay

There were also essays that functioned more like journalism, reporting more broadly without really contextualizing, critiquing, meditating on the material. I was trained as a journalist. I have a degree from UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism, which I got partly because writing programs did not recognize nonfiction as creative back in those dark ages so long ago, and partly because I needed to make a living. I was quite poor, needed some skills, and journalism, unlike creative writing, promised that I might get a job. But there is a bullshit ideology in journalism that your work is neutral – for example, journalists should not over-interpret the data they gather or cite.