John D'Agata Quotes - Page 2

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• 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.

  John D'Agata

  Country, School, Home

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• 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.

  John D'Agata

  Country, Pain, Frustration

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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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.

  John D'Agata

  Community, Way, Peers

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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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.

  John D'Agata

  Writing, School, Trying

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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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.

  John D'Agata

  College, Thinking, Littles

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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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.

  John D'Agata

  School, Grad, Figures

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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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.

  John D'Agata

  Thinking, Ideas, Fiction

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• 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.

  John D'Agata

  Fall, Writing, Cracks

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• It's fun to just skim through piles of books in the stacks of a library.

  John D'Agata

  Fun, Book, Library

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• I would ask the people who were generous toward my own work. After class one day a poetry professor said to me, "Hey, there's this guy Basho you would find interesting," and so I found Basho. A fiction teacher told me, "You ought to read Clarice Lispector if you're interested in that sort of in-between stuff," and then Lispector appeared. It's not magic. You just keep your eyes open.

  John D'Agata

  Teacher, Eye, Class

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• Yet there are some critics in the nonfiction world who still look at some of today's stranger interpretations of the essay and say "You don't belong here. That's not how we do things." I think that's problematic.

  John D'Agata

  Thinking, World, Today

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• For a while I just couldn't imagine that there was a place for me in nonfiction. I looked around at what we were calling nonfiction and I thought, "Maybe you do have to go to poetry in order to do this other weird thing in nonfiction."

  John D'Agata

  Order, Calling, Nonfiction

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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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.

  John D'Agata

  School, Program, Grad

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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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.

  John D'Agata

  Book, School, Years

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4 Copy quote

• 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.

  John D'Agata

  Should Have, Perspective, Community

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• If Plutarch is the essayist I want to believe he is, he would want us all to sit in his chair.

  John D'Agata

  Believe, Want, Chairs

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• 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.

  John D'Agata

  Silly, Risk, Sound

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  5 Copy quote

• 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.

  John D'Agata

  Jobs, Stars, Teaching

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• I wanted to create an environment in which more than just personal essays could be represented, and in which stranger approaches to making essays could be celebrated.

  John D'Agata

  Environment, Stranger, Wanted

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• 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.

  John D'Agata

  Writing, Definitions, Want

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• 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.

  John D'Agata

  Drama, Different, Metaphor

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

  4 Copy quote

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