David Lazar, an essayist

"But if essays are works of "reading" they are also works "wrought," a thinking that occurs through the material fabrication of language, a work and a working in language, not simply a working through intellectually or emotionally--language not as a summary of findings but as the inventor of findings" --"Occasional Desire: On the essay and the Memoir" David Lazar

I always wonder if I'm completely honest in the claim that I am a writer. It sounds so presumptuous, so sure of itself, so hopeful...and quixotic. I essay on the page, grappling with language in an attempt to form art. In form, essays invite conversation. They include the reader in an adventure of questions and discovery. Reading an essay is a process of experiencing the work; an essay cannot happen with the writer alone. An essay requires a reader in order to live. Quality art is not a representation, it is. It is an object and experience to itself. Therefore, in order for an essay to succeed it must wave the reader into the flow of an inquiring mind and encourage tangentials from the writer and the reader (hence the habitual parentheticals that scatter across essays like spilled milk. You can always smell them after a few days, lingering on your mind like a pleasantly sour stain). An essay challenges ideas, but it also challenges language--pushing possibility and potential. It cannot be a summary of answers, a confessional narrative, an anecdote on its own--an essay must be a new experience every time. It is both the inventor and the invented. Because essays are art, they must be wrougth (and wrought carefully), but they must be read in order for thought to be discovered.