I wrote my first published essay in September 1965. It explored a tension between a local county council’s education policy and the needs of my community.

I knew even then that writing was something I was bound to do.

At fourteen I attended night school to learn typing. I took my sister’s portable typewriter on what became a ten-year loan, and I bought a large leather-bound journal in which I intended to write. Yet a curious thing happened. I never wrote in it. Instead, that journal accumulated loose sheets of foolscap paper covered with thoughts, explorations and provisional ideas that never quite found their way onto those carefully prepared pages.

Essaying is often provisional.

By the age of eighteen I had already spent more than a year helping my father prepare and present evidence to the Donovan Commission in the United Kingdom. Before long I was working first in government and later as a freelance for several universities, writing, teaching and developing material for a variety of audiences. In one form or another, I have spent most of my life earning a living through writing.

Looking back, I see that I have rarely left one field because I had ceased to value it. When I moved from industrial relations and public affairs into writing, a colleague, Tom Sawyer, asked whether I would miss “the sharp end”. I replied that I would. But I would not regret leaving it. The answer surprised even me. What mattered was not remaining at the centre of events, but following the questions they left behind. Much of my writing has arisen in this way: not from abandoning an experience, but from continuing the inquiry it began.

Over the years I have written in many forms and for many purposes. Gradually I began to notice that beneath these different activities there was a particular way of working to which I kept returning. The subject matter changed. The audiences changed. The institutions changed. Yet the underlying habit of inquiry remained remarkably constant.

The creation of Essayism.org is not a passive act of documentation. It is, in part, an effort to reclaim my own history as an essayist. Not only the published work, but the traces left around it: the loose foolscap pages, the old booklets, and even a Northern College coffee mug presented to me by Mo Mowlam after a week teaching there, which still sits among the accumulated evidence of a life spent writing.

Recently I came across a booklet I had written for senior corporate executives called Managing Risk. It opened not with instructions, advice or analysis, but with an essay describing the tensions their roles required them to navigate. Looking back, I recognised something familiar.

Essayism begins with attention.

An essay may begin with a question, an observation, a recollection, a problem, a place, a conversation, or simply something that catches our attention. We do not necessarily know where it will lead. Writing becomes a way of finding out.

This website itself emerged from a tension. Throughout my life I have been described as a writer, journalist, consultant, researcher or editor. Rarely have I been described as an essayist. Yet when I reflect upon my life’s work, essayist is the title that seems most fitting.

The existence of this page reflects another tension: that between message and provenance. I have always believed that a message matters more than the biography of its messenger. Yet several respected colleagues suggested that readers would better understand this site if they understood something of the person behind it.

So this page is here.

Even now, as I write, I begin with only a loose sense of structure. I do not know precisely where the final sentence will arrive. The creation of Essayism.org is not a passive act of documentation. It is, in part, an effort to reclaim my own history as an essayist.

For that reason, I use the word essayism here not as the name of a literary genre, nor as a doctrine, but as a practice of inquiry through writing.

Of course, I do not own the word. No one does.

Brian Dillon’s Essayism, published in 2017, sits on my desk from time to time because it forms part of the contemporary conversation. But I had been using the word in my own thinking long before I encountered his book. I use it here to describe something that has emerged from decades of writing, thinking and observing.

Nor is this site an attempt to define essayism once and for all.

The opposite is true.

The definitions presented here were written quickly and provisionally. Like those loose foolscap pages of the 1960s and 1970s, they are working notes rather than final conclusions. I already recognise places where they are too certain, too declarative, too eager to arrive at an answer. In time I expect them to change.

My purpose is not to settle the meaning of essayism but to recognise what I myself have been doing. My work is rarely organised around status, categories or conclusions. It is organised around relationships and encounters accumulated through time.

But at this stage of life I find myself less interested in declaring what an essay is than in observing what essays actually do.

And, of course, in continuing to write them.

Further information

Identity: https://dm.ie

At Home: https://h.dm.ie

Writer’s shingle: https://marshall.ie