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Quote by John D'Agata

“What I didn't realize when I was in school and what I suspect a lot of young writers today don't get either is that you have to create the world that you want to exist in as an artist.”

Quote by John D'Agata

Author

John D'Agata is an American essayist known for his distinctive writing style and profound insights into the reality of the world. His works often explore the edges and limits of human existence, as well as the boundaries between language and truth. more

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“You create your own audience, and your own community of peers, and in some ways you create your own forebears as well.”

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“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.”

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“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.”

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“As frustrating as my time in grad school felt, it also helped tremendously because it challenged me to figure out what it was I thought I wanted.”

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“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.”

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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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“And Lopate's anthology helped a lot too. It came out the same year I started grad school, and I remember the book's publication feeling eventful and celebratory. It got a ton of attention for giving voice to this form that had sort of slipped between the cracks. That was exciting to see.”

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“When you're a young writer and you look at people praising a big hefty anthology that has uncovered a long lost genre, it can be disorienting to look inside it and think, "But what it's uncovered still isn't me. What does this mean? Do I not belong in this genre, or is there more of the genre yet to find?"”

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“I was really interested in 20th century communalism and alternative communities, the boom of communes in the 60s and 70s. That led me back to the 19th century. I was shocked to find what I would describe as far more utopian ideas in the 19th century than in the 20th century. Not only were the ideas so extreme, but surprising people were adopting them.”

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“I thought that I wasn't an essayist because I just didn't see myself in a lot of the essays that were popular at the time. That's why I joined the poetry program in grad school.”

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