What is an essay?

Essays are "not reports of objective truth but explorations of...attitudes and thoughts." --Douglas Hunt

Essays "are experiments in making sense of things." --Scott Russell Sanders

"An essay is the closest thing we have, on paper, to a record of the individual mind at work and play.... The writing of an essay is like finding one's way through a forest without being quite sure what game you are chasing, what landmark you are seeking." --Scott Russell Sanders

An essay is not a "demonstration of understanding--after a writer has worked through his or her uncertainty." It is the use of "writing as a means of achieving understanding." --Kurt Spellmeyer

"The hallmark of the personal essay is its intimacy. The writer seems to be speaking directly into your ear, confiding everything from gossip to wisdom.... At the core of the personal essay is the supposition that there is a certain unity to human experience." --Philip Lopate

"We tell ourselves stories in order to live." --Joan Didion

"In the manner of the soapbox orator, I now turn my hunch into a fact and state boldly that in America these days the personal essay is flourishing. Why are so many writers taking up this risky form, and why are so many readers--to judge by the statistics of book and magazine publication--seeking it out? In this era of prepackaged thought, the essay is the closest thing we have on paper, to record the individual mind at work and at play." --Scott Russell Sanders

"One's sense of personal identity depends upon the recapture in memory of the key places in which one's life has taken place. The phrase--'taken place' is a kind of pun: we live by occupying, by taking possession of, a succession of places. Human experience is always concretely circumstantial." --Rockwell Gray

 Please read the following excerpts from an essay by Edward Hoagland, entitled "Essay: What I Think, What I Am":

"Essays, however, hang somewhere on a line between two sturdy poles: this is what I think, and this is what I am. Autobiographies which aren't novels are generally extended essays, indeed. A personal essay is like the human voice talking, its order the mind's natural flow, instead of a systematized outline of ideas. Though more wayward or informal than an article or treatise, somewhere it contains a point which is its real center, even if the point couldn't be expressed in fewer words than the essayist has employed. Essays don't usually 'boil down' to a summary, as articles do, but on the other hand they have fewer 'levels' than first-rate fiction--a flatter surface--because we aren't supposed to argue about their meaning. In the old distinction between teaching versus story-telling--however cleverly the author muddles it up--an essay is intended to convey the same point to each of us.
This emphasis upon mind speaking to mind is what makes essays less universal in their appeal than stories. They are addressed to an educated, perhaps a middle-class, reader, with certain presuppositions shared, a frame of reference, even a commitment to civility--not the grand and golden empathy inherent in every man which the story-teller has a chance to tap. At the same time, of course, the artful 'I' of an essay can be as chameleon as any narrator in fiction: and essays do tell a story just as often as a short story stakes a claim to a particular viewpoint.
...The extraordinary flexibility of essays is what has enabled them to ride out rough weather and hybridize into forms to suit the times. And just as one of the first things a fiction writer learns is that he needn't actually be writing fiction to write a short story--he can tell his own history or anyone else's as exactly as he remembers it and it will still be 'fiction' if it remains primarily a story--an essayist soon discovers that he doesn't have to tell the whole truth and nothing but the truth, he can shape or shave his memories as long as the purpose is served of elucidating a truthful point. A personal essay frequently is not autobiographical at all, but what it does keep in common with autobiography is that, though its tone and tumbling progression, it conveys the quality of the author's mind. Nothing gets in the way. Because essays are directly concerned with the mind and its idiosyncrasy, the very freedom the mind possesses is bestowed on this branch of literature that does honor to it, and the fascination of the mind is the fascination of the essay."