I get emails from students at programs all over the country who want to transfer to Iowa, and … - John D'Agata

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True glory consists in doing what deserves to be written, and writing what deserves to be read.

John D'Agata

I get emails from students at programs all over the country who want to transfer to Iowa, and in most cases their frustrations have absolutely nothing to do with the programs they're attending. They have to do with the growing pains that they're undergoing as writers and with the growing pains that our own genre is constantly undergoing.

Country, Emails, Frustration, Genre, Nothing, Pain

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

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I never really understood the idea that nonfiction ought to be this dispensary of data that we have at the moment. Also, roughly around the time we were doing this fact-checking. And I never really understood why people think what nonfiction's job is to give them information as opposed to something else.

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

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

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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.

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