Anne Fadiman is the editor of The American Scholar, a quarterly journal devoted to the essay published by the Phi Beta Kappa Society, and served as the guest editor for Best American Essays 2003. Her first book, The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down: A Hmong Child, Her American Doctors, and the Collision of Two Cultures, won a National Book Critics Circle Award. Her second book, Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader, is a compilation of her columns reflecting on the joys of books and reading originally published in Civilization, the magazine of the Library of Congress. Fadiman's essays and articles have appeared in Harper’s, The New Yorker, Life, Esquire, The New York Times, and The Washington Post. (Anne Fadiman sat for this interview just weeks before the announcement of her controversial departure from The American Scholar.)

What is an essay? How do you define the genre?

There are almost innumerable ways to skin the essay cat. Any nonfiction prose piece that's not overly long and that relies on the author's own speculations, ruminations, memories, or analysis rather than primarily on reportage fits the bill as far as I'm concerned. I'm also fond of Montaigne's view that the essay--"essaie"--is an attempt, an experiment. Though I've read plenty of perfectly formed and perfectly completed essays, he provides a certain license for risk-taking that's attractive to me as a writer and an editor.

Do you make a distinction between a "personal essay" and the "classic essay"?

Absolutely not! Again, look at Montaigne, who invented the form! No one could be more "classic," and yet no one could be more personal. He wrote, "Here, drawn from life, you will read of my defects and my native form so far as respect for social convention allows; for had I found myself among those peoples who are said still to live under the sweet liberty of Nature's primal laws, I can assure you that I would most willingly have portrayed myself whole, and wholly naked." In other words, he says he's stripping himself just as bare as society allows. Of course, there are plenty of other essay genres--critical, expository, polemical, and so on--that have been practiced in the past and are still being practiced. All one can say is that at the moment the personal essay seems to be particularly popular.

What draws you to the genre?

As a writer, what drew me was necessity. Previously a reporter, I was stuck in bed for nine months during a problem pregnancy, and writing essays seemed like the most practical response. What else could I do? In fact, I enjoyed essay-writing so much that I continued long after my son was born--and although I'll probably write another reportorial book some day, essays are still the genre I currently feel most at home in. As a reader, I deeply enjoy hearing a writer's voice--and although of course fiction writers often have strong voices too, there's often a fair amount of ventriloquism involved (is that the writer's voice or her character's)? With essays, it's all the writer. Within nonfiction, I particularly enjoy the somewhat meandering routes that essays are permitted to take; though there are of course exceptions, they tend to contain more surprises than reportage.

In most genres, the first, or hook, paragraph is the most important. Is that true for an essay? Why or why not?

I don't know if it's the most important, but it's certainly important. If a reader isn't caught by the opening paragraph, it doesn't matter how deathless the rest of the essay is; it won't get read. However, that doesn't mean that the first paragraph should be gimmicky or different in tone from the rest of the essay. As an editor, I read all too many essays whose writers tried too hard in their first paragraph or two. The result is a kind of self-conscious trickiness that tends to evaporate as soon as they get to the meat--they write more naturally and comfortably there because they're in familiar territory, dealing with a subject they know something about, and not sweating too hard. Then they tighten up again in the last paragraph, because the "oh my God, this is so important" bells start going off once more in their heads.

You were the editor of the Best American Essays 2003, and in your introduction you describe the process for selecting the essays -- sifting through dozens of essays chosen by the series editor, Robert Atwan, and then narrowing them down to the 24 chosen for the collection. Were there any essays which you had read independent of those sent by Mr. Atwan which you thought should have been included? What was the most difficult essay to turn down?

The guest editor is free to add essays to the list suggested by Bob Atwan; I added three or four. There were many essays that were hard to turn down, but the one that probably saddened me the most was an essay by an unknown writer published in a small journal: "The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating" by Elisabeth Schuman (The Missouri Review, vol. 25, no. 2). It exemplified two of the things I most love about the personal essay as a genre: its boundless capacity for eccentricity—even weirdness--and the marvelous way it lends itself to synecdoche, in which something small stands for and gives us an entree to something large. During a long illness, the author kept a woodland snail in a terrarium next to her bed. Because she had nothing else to do, she observed the snail--what it ate, when it slept, how it moved--with obsessive interest. The snail was so close by that she could actually hear it chew a violet petal (hence the title); the sound "was of someone very small munching celery continuously." The snail's captivity and the smallness of its universe paralleled her own, and just as she was eventually freed from her illness and her bedroom, so the snail was eventually freed from its terrarium. Every paragraph contained something surprising, and reading the essay as a whole was a kind of Alice-in-Wonderland experience, in which one felt oneself shrinking and shrinking until one was snail-size oneself. But the essay would have needed a bit of editing in order to be stylistically and structurally as tight as the other pieces in the volume, and one of the rules of the "Best American" series is that their contents must be published essentially the way they were originally printed. So, with great reluctance, I had to set the essay (though not the pleasure I took in it) aside.