As someone who works across various genres, are there subjects that you feel are best approached through essays as opposed to fiction or poetry?

An essay is like elastic, because it gives in just the right way (and it snaps back sometimes too). It allows me a form that offers something intimate, but it can also let me think my way through something. I mention sophrosyne in one of the essays—the Greek concept of freedom through a disciplined life—and this isn’t something I can pursue in poetry or fiction. So I love the fact that an essay lets me explore a question in different ways. Poetry lends itself to something a little wild, almost strange, like a dream state, and fiction encompasses a whole world that I inhabit fully, while with an essay, I can engage in what it’s like to accompany someone who is dying, or what it means to consider what a bee perceives. I feel released into essays after writing poetry or fiction because, as you say, I can approach certain subjects much more easily.

Given this book offers different forms—poetry, essays, illustration—how do you see these forms communicating with, complementing, or pushing against each other?

The way I can answer this by referring to an experiment that the painter and colour theorist, Johannes Itten, did with his students (he talks about this in The Art of Color). He asked them to choose the colours that best represented them, and many students chose one set of colours, as expected. But one student chose different clusters of colours, which were quite different from one another. On the first day, she chose silver, blue, white, and red. On another day, she chose black, gold, orange, and purple. When asked why, she responded, “I have a feeling these colors are just as important to me as the others.”

Not unlike the student who needed more than one colour cluster, each form is important to me. I find there’s a multi-dimensionality to essays if there are poems and drawings that also reveal the ‘thinking’. No one thing is enough: I need that push and pull between them. I like what happens when there are sparks of electricity between disparate forms.

In this book, you draw from the personal, but also engage with classical philosophy and literature. What is it about these texts that compels you to revisit works in your own writing process?

It’s really the hunger to understand. How is the Iliad relevant to us? What does it show us about ourselves? To write is to participate in a conversation about the world: it might be a conversation about courage, one that started long before Plato, I imagine, and it continues in the writing of Atul Gawande. Or it might be a conversation about vulnerability, which Martha Nussbaum articulates so well.

Both philosophy and literature ask questions that I find fascinating. And people around me ask questions that also get me thinking. Katherine Lawrence, a poet in Saskatchewan, asked a question, or a series of questions, that I thought about for years: “What does poetry do? Does it do anything? Does it help anyone?” That’s the real excitement about writing essays: engaging with these questions to find out where you stand as a writer, as a person.