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John D'Agata Biography

John D’Agata (born 1975 on Cape Cod, Massachusetts) is an American essayist. He is the author of six books of nonfiction, including The Next American Essay (2003), The Lost Origins of the Essay (2009) and The Making of the American Essay—all part of the trilogy of essay anthologies called "A New History of the Essay." He also wrote The Lifespan of a Fact, "Halls of Fame," and "About a Mountain."

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John D'Agata Quotes

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

Art, Essay, Mind, Minds, Think, Thinking

Back in the day, a lot of our instructors in nonfiction were actually fiction scholars. So they would bring in stories as models for the essay. And in some ways that's a good idea, because we can all learn from other genres. But I think it also made me realize that I literally didn't have an essay model, and that if I wanted one I would have to find it.

Actually, Essay, Ideas, Learn, Nonfiction, Thinking

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

Feels, Persons, Risk, Taking

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.

Appreciation, Approach, Art, Political

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.

Felt, Probably, Risk, Silly, Sound

I look for the kind of text that doesn't look like the writer I'm considering. Plutarch is a great example.

Considering, Example, Kind, Like, Looks, Plutarch

The essay community should have hundreds of anthologies from hundreds of different perspectives that are constantly introducing us to new writers, new work, and new visions for our genre. The whole spirit of these anthologies is that there should never be a last word in how essays are interpreted or what they can be.

Should Have, Perspective, Community, Perspectives, Hundreds, Word

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.

Beautiful, Delivered, Irreparably, Powerful, Rome

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.

Evolution, Experience, Give, Journey, Order, Track

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.

Models, Poetry, School, Trying, Writing

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.

Dry, Fate, Philosophical, Relied, Writing

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.

College, Interpretation, Littles, Poet, Think, Thinking

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.

Country, Feeling, Gotten, Home, School

When I'm teaching, I'm not really doing my job if the student who's always comfortable doing wacko stuff all over the page keeps getting gold stars from me for doing wacko stuff all over the page. A riskier assignment for that student, who might be used to hiding behind a lot of formal armor, would be to try to do something straightforward, traditionally, in which they are much more directly laid bare for the reader.

Jobs, Keeps, Stars, Student, Teaching

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.

Across, Commitment, Country, Moving, Realize, School

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.

Cracks, Fall, Genres, Stuff, Writers, Writing

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.

Different, Drama, Metaphor, Nonfiction, Text

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.

Against, Definitions, Oppressive, Want, Work, Writing

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.

Nonfiction, Poetry, Sense, Thinking, Way

If there's a poster boy for the fact that all essays are written through personae, it's Crèvecoeur.

Boys, Crevecoeur, Fact, Facts, Personae, Posters

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