We need to be ambivalent - in the essay, and in life too. Ambivalence - having mixed feelings, entertaining contradiction, living with fluctuation - …

- Charles D'Ambrosio

I have lots of fiction in the drawer, but the essays I mostly kick out into the world, ready or not. Fiction incubates differently, I suppose.

- Charles D'Ambrosio

Nowadays I imagine people find freer and more accepting venues in blogs, on Tumblr and Instagram and Facebook, in the riot of shouting that trails in…

- Charles D'Ambrosio

Too much me is annoying under any circumstance, but too much me in an essay, however personal, would mar the art. My "character" in the essay is more…

- Charles D'Ambrosio

Our nostalgic dreams of perfection thrive just as dangerously in the other direction too, in the imaginary future, that bold and tantalizing future w…

- Charles D'Ambrosio

The poet Amanda Nadelberg puts it nicely in an interview when she says "often what I listen for in poems is a sense that the writer is a little lost,…

- Charles D'Ambrosio

I suppose I like certainty as much as anyone else, but I also feel that the hidden costs are high, that we pay a heavy price for our convictions. Thi…

- Charles D'Ambrosio

What the nostalgic past and the imaginary future seem to share in common is a form of idealism, perhaps a dream of wholeness. Our future is just as g…

- Charles D'Ambrosio

I'm not a very savvy operator - it's not who I am, it's not what I do - and so I have to go at things in ways that suit me. I just write what I write…

- Charles D'Ambrosio