Lopate describes essaying

To Philip Lopate’s mind, honesty is of prime importance in essays, but it’s not easy to achieve. “We fool ourselves so easily,” he said. “I try to be honest, but I’m always aware of a tendency to rationalize, to put myself in the best light, so that has to be guarded against, as does self-righteousness, defensiveness, and so on. But it’s inevitable; I don’t think you can ever cure yourself of it. The hardest thing to do is to accurately assess your strengths as well as your weaknesses. It’s distorting to pretend that you’re totally inept if you’re not, so you have to somehow tip off the reader to your assets as well as your liabilities without seeming to be bragging. It’s a curiosity about yourself, not smugness and not self-dislike.”"

Though he receives the most recognition for his personal essays, Lopate found that his experience with fiction, poetry, and film writing proved invaluable to the formation of his essayistic voice. “The heroic forms are fiction and poetry, and I first wanted to be a fiction writer; I don’t think many adolescents fantasize about becoming essayists. I wrote stories and novels, and then my life got very complicated and difficult and I began writing poetry. After several years, I came at last to the personal essay, which seemed to be a way of combining poetry and fiction, to take from poetry that associate leaping quality and not have to build the arc quite so much the way you do in a short story, but to still have a through line, a kind of plot....

I found that I had written a kind of unconscious collection of personal essays, which I only realized when I began to read the great masters of the essay form, like Hazlitt and Montaigne. It may be unfair of me to say this, but it’s a form that young people are not as well-equipped for because it requires a certain amount of experience and reflection. This was a form that had been lying in wait for me all my life.”

from:
Getting Personal with Phillip Lopate By Colin Marshall
www.independent.com Thursday, February 21, 2008