Notebooks: Essay Workshop with Charles D’Ambrosio, 2018

“I give you my thoughts as they came to me,” writes Virginia Woolf in A Room of One’s Own. She praises the essays of Charles Lamb for their “wild flash of imagination, that lightning crack of genius in the middle of them which leaves them flawed and imperfect and starred with poetry.”

Charles D’Ambrosio quotes:

“Every draft is essential to the process. In this draft, there’s a kind of reluctance. I prefer some reluctance, but it has to earn its place.”

“In an essay, there’s a dual action. It’s not about the thing. It’s about the thinking about a thing. A great essay takes you inside the thinking.”

“With any piece of writing, I’m courting failure. And failure for a writer is silence.”

“The achievement is intimately bound with the problem in writing.”

“I like to think of a draft as a dream. You accept all the elements. You don’t reject anything because of your need for coherence.”

“Coherence is not supplied by narrative sequence.”

“The problem in a personal essay can be made the subject.”

“Every draft becomes a little quiet deposit of possibilities.”

“I like the resistances life throws in my way. These resistances call me out of myself.”

“If you’re going through a forbidden space, you’re going to find something forbidden. It’s a haunted house.”

“If you’re not vulnerable, you’re not available.”