Charles D’Ambrosio: I feel like a good personal essay captures the nap and texture of the mind thinking, so I know I’m all over every piece I write, and in that sense I’m not surprised. Samuel Johnson could write The Life of a Broomstick and you’d mostly come away with a keen appreciation of Dr. Johnson, and incidentally you might also learn something about late-Classical attitudes toward broomsticks. No matter what the subject, I’m there in the sound of the sentences, the timing or rhythm that makes a thing funny, my eye for details. Or there’s my brand of existential Catholicism, which fuels so much of my thinking: I believe and I can’t quite believe, and it’s just my nature to choose both, with equal fervor. And then there’s always the enormous pressure my own ignorance and confusion brings to the subject. And here I don’t just mean my stupidity but something more like the absences, the negative space. In writing, the gaps and omissions, the silences, all of that shapes the form of the thing. It’s not just the notes you play but the interval between that puts a personal stamp on things as surely as a fingerprint and shouldn’t be discounted. What’s not there has something to say too…. I feel like I should have something more mysterious to say about this, but the truth is boringly practical. I improvised a way of being in the world. Without any guidance about how to read –no assignments, no themes to analyze, no symbolisms to unearth, no papers due—I’d find some book and underline passages I thought were beautiful. Then I’d wonder why they were beautiful and how they got that way. I used a waxy dull red pencil to underline, turning whole books into a series of rubrics. I used 3×5 cards as bookmarks and kept a list of all the words I didn’t know on them. Then I’d look up the words and type out their definitions, right down to the last archaic sense division. Also, I’d copy favorite sentences and interesting ideas into a journal, creating my own commonplace book. I was naïve reader and in many ways still am, so the things I favored had three simple tests, they had to be beautiful, they had to be edifying, and they had to be about life. That’s how the stuff went in, and, years later, writing essays, that’s how it came back out.

— Charls D’Ambrosio Via Ayjay