Up: [[Personal Essay and Memoir]] Course: The Art of the Personal Essay with Dinty Moore for Jane Friedman Created: 2024-03-21 [[Michel de Montaigne]], who probably originated the essay form, called them *essais* (attempts). But not just any old written attempt. An essay is not a lecture or an explanation or a statement or even a diatribe. It's using your unique perspective and sensibilities to finding the meanings and connections to a topic that make it fresh and new, says Dinty Moore. Phillip Lopate calls them ''thought excursions", says their plot consists of the twists and turns of a mind working out a problem. [Dinty Moore](https://dintywmoore.com) calls the essay *a way of taking the reader on a curated journey.* By this he means that the writer is composing and shaping the story on the page, not simply thinking out loud. Memoirs can be essays because essays often include elements of the author's life. But a memoir isn't automatically an essay because a memoir can strictly be a reflection on an experience whereas an essay connects to things outside of that experience. We’ve moved far from Montaigne’s model of an essay. Now we treat just about anything in creative nonfiction as an essay — memoir, travelogue, reportage. But the original characteristics of an essay is that they were: idea driven, associative, meditative. In Virginia Woolf’s words they were *associations of the mind*. In Samuel Johnson’s, a *loose sally of the mind* and in Montaigne's, *thorny undertaking… to follow a movement so wandering as that of our mind.* This reminds me of [[Marion Milner's Self-Exploration Study]]. There are so many topics for which I’d like to track the wanderings of my mind. There are all kinds of names for essays: memoir, memoir essay, think piece, essay, op-ed (not always but often), Substack, blog. What it's called isn't important. What’s key is to express a story in new and fresh ways. There are great connections between journals and essays but they aren’t the same. You can use an insight from a journal to launch an essay, but journals allow you to get away with fragments whereas an essay has to add up to something more. [[Rebecca Solnit]] is an essayist. So is Roxane Gay. There are a bazillion markets for essays from newspapers to blogs to magazines. And there are magazines for everything under the sun. Dinty showed a magazine for people who raise emus, one for knitting toy pets, and another for portable restroom operators.