Invitation
Invitation is the essayist’s third honesty.
The essayist cannot honestly invite a companion into an inquiry while remaining untouched by it. To invite another person to look alongside you is to acknowledge that their presence may alter what is seen. In declaring invitation, the essayist declares an openness to change.
The companion does not merely accompany the inquiry. Their presence may reveal patterns, questions and possibilities the essayist would otherwise have missed. To say, “Come and look with me” is also to say: “What we discover together may change my understanding.”
The essayist must embrace the uncertainty that accompanies exposure to revision
Moving forward from this point
If you want to stay on this site and see how this openness works in practice, you can follow it into a few different spaces. You might listen in (figuratively) on the transcription of a live conversation through the interview, or look at the underlying framework in method if you prefer to see the structural logic of the writing. If you are more interested in seeing how these ideas surface day-to-day, fragments functions as a running blog where they show up in real time.
Moving beyond this immediate site, the work branches into a wider network of text that you can navigate based on what you’re tracking. For the overarching philosophy and architecture of the craft, you can look at essayism.org. If you want to see the raw workspace, the actual notes on attention that anchor everything else, that lives in The Essayist’s Notebook. And if you just want to see how these principles look when they are fully realized, you can find a separate collection of finished Essays to read through. Finally you might visit Letter From An Essayist where you may subscribe to join in the conversation about essayism.