I cannot tell you how to write an essay.
The essay has never been a fixed form, and essayism is wider still. It includes habits of attention, ways of asking questions, and approaches to understanding that often resist prescription. The contributions of the essayists mentioned in the first two essayist posts demonstrate the breadth of the approach.
What I can do is demonstrate my own practice.
I maintain three related publications, each serving a different purpose. Together they form a record of how I approach essayism, not as a theory, but as an ongoing activity.
The Essayist’s Notebook
The notebook is the least finished of the three publications.
It is a place for observations, fragments, working notes, and ideas that have not yet found their final shape. Some remain unfinished. Others develop into essays elsewhere. Many simply record a moment of attention before it disappears.
Readers looking for conclusions may not always find them here. Readers interested in process may find the notebook the most revealing of the three sites.
What to look for: beginnings, experiments, questions and provisional thoughts.
The Essayist
The Essayist explores essaying itself.
Here the subject is often the essay, the essayist, or the practice of inquiry through writing. Many of the pieces examine how essays work, what distinguishes them from other forms of writing, and how understanding emerges through observation, reflection and revision.
If the notebook records the raw material of essayism, The Essayist reflects on the craft and practice through which that material becomes writing.
What to look for: reflections on method, inquiry, attention and the essayist’s craft.
Essays
Essays is the principal publication.
The focus here is less on writing itself and more on the subjects that writing seeks to understand: society, culture, memory, public governance, the geometry of landscapes, and the shape of everyday life
The essays are not intended to provide definitive answers. They are attempts to clarify relationships, examine assumptions and bring overlooked aspects of experience into view.
Where The Essayist examines the practice, Essays puts that practice to work.
What to look for: reflective writing on society and the shape of life.
Why Three Sites?
The distinctions are not absolute, but they are useful.
A notebook allows uncertainty. A publication about essaying allows reflection on method. A collection of essays allows inquiry to be directed towards the world.
Keeping them separate helps preserve those different intentions while allowing them to remain connected and visible.
Together they show one approach to essayism: a movement from observation, through reflection, towards understanding.
From here, the work opens outward toward
where the essayist meets the world.
This page is a living surface. Last revised: August 2026