“Given the various ways in which the essay bristles against academic writing—its resistance to introductions, to definitions, to generalization and abstraction, to accounts of origins, its freedom from discipline, rules, and criteria—it is no wonder that the field of critical work on the essay is sparse.”
— On Essays (Oxford University Press, 2020)
— On Essays (Oxford University Press, 2020)
I certainly have no intention to add to the critical field mentioned above.
One hardly need worry. The last thing the essay, as an artform, could ever fall victim to is another taxonomist tightening the cage. What I intend, instead, is to allow my own voice to join with the essay’s inherent resistance — the resistance to the enclosure of thought by the instruments of its supposed cultivation. The essay, that restless and provisional form, has been domesticated by an educational culture that measures expression by rubric, curiosity by outcome, and imagination by “learning objective.” My Wordtreks project, if nothing else in name alone, exists to remember what thinking feels like when it has not yet been told what it must prove.
The essay began, one likes to recall, as a trial of the self in thought — essayer — to attempt, to test. In Montaigne’s open spiralling fields, thought was permitted to meander, to contradict itself, to wander into digression and back again. But something happened when the essay entered the classroom. It was fixed into the five-paragraph form, trimmed of its hesitation, forced to submit a thesis at the gate. The word essay came to mean “argument,” not “experiment.” The shift matters more deeply than one is permitted to realise in today’s consumer culture, because the form of a thing shapes the soul that inhabits it. When we teach the young to write only what can be defended, we teach them that uncertainty has no place in public speech.
For me, Wordtreks ventures back out of that enclosure. The landscape I seek is rough and various — part literary, part personal, part philosophical; whether over earthen terrain or in urban flâneuresque street-haunting. I want to write from the open air and move through language as one moves through weather. That means sometimes losing the path, sometimes finding it again by sound or scent. The aim is not to reach a conclusion but to travel with attention, and indeed intention, intact.
Wordtreks is testament to a way of life, with precedents set by: Samuel Johnson’s The Rambler, Thoreau’s ‘Walker’ — “I think I cannot preserve my health and spirits, unless I spend four hours a day at least — and it is commonly more than that — sauntering through the woods and over the hills and fields, absolutely free from all worldly engagements… moreover, you must walk like a camel, which is said to be the only beast which ruminates when walking.” Or Wordsworth, whose assistant once told a visitor, “Here is his library, but his studio is out of doors.” Phenomenologically, Husserl was of the opinion that “walking is the experience by which we understand our body in relationship to the world.”
If I take any lineage, it is with those just mentioned and any others who treated the essay as a space of moral weather: Montaigne’s candor, Hazlitt’s fire, Woolf’s shimmering diffraction, Stevenson’s humane precision, the chiseled prose of Orwell. They remind me that the essay’s authority is not the scholar’s claim to proof, but the artist’s claim to presence — the living voice, thinking aloud, risking error. “To essay,” as Robert Louis Stevenson knew in his own practice, is to dare to be unfinished.
In our times, the essay is being pressed from two sides. On one, the academy drains it of pulse, treating it as a specimen of reasoning technique. On the other, the attention economy converts it into “content,” measured by clicks and engagement metrics. Both are forms of standardisation — the one bureaucratic, the other algorithmic — and both are inimical to the essay’s vital principle, which is freedom of movement. To write an essay is to insist on the dignity of thought that does not need to sell itself or defend itself, but simply to be.
”…the essay… labours emphatically on the form of its presentation. The consciousness of the non-identity between presentation and presented material forces the form to make unlimited efforts. In that respect alone the essay resembles art…” - Adorno (1958)
The question, then, is how to keep that spirit alive. For me, launching Wordtreks and putting some of my own work out there to be read, and subject myself to the inevitable criticism is an act of breathing space back into my own relationship with the form — a practice of slowness, of reading and writing as reciprocal wanderings. Each piece begins not from a thesis but from an encounter: a line of Stevenson, a fragment of landscape, a word whose etymology opens unexpectedly into moral territory. I write not to persuade, but to notice. The essay, when alive, is not a report on understanding but the record of its emergence.
When Addison and Steele launched The Spectator, they dreamed of refining conversation, not ossifying it. Their essays were addressed to “the polite reader,” which meant not the learned but the curious — the one who could sit at the table of ideas without pretension. Somewhere along the way, the table was fenced off; admission now requires credentials, citation styles, theoretical passwords. Yet the best essays, old and new, still speak in the language of invitation. They say: come walk with me.
I believe that to reclaim the essay is to reclaim a form of citizenship — of belonging to the republic of open minds. The present intellectual climate, with its culture wars and managerial universities, breeds a kind of fear: the fear of saying something without already knowing where it will land. The essay resists that fear. It is the art of thinking in public, of trusting that the path will appear underfoot.
I don’t write against learning, but against its confinement. Knowledge is not a product; it is a current. The essay is the vessel that drifts, turns, and sometimes runs aground in that current — but even that grounding can be a kind of discovery. I would rather be shipwrecked in honest thought than sail safely in prescribed waters.
So Wordtreks is my small defiance, a series of field notes from the wandering mind. It stands apart from the critical field not out of contempt but out of necessity. There are enough scholars to anatomise the essay; what interests me now about the form are practitioners who still believe in its pulse — who understand that to write an essay is to walk a line between thought and world, between solitude and speech.
If there is a creed behind this practice, it might be this: that freedom of mind is inseparable from freedom of form. The essay’s irregularities — its digressions, its hesitations, its refusal to be summed — are not defects but the signatures of a living intellect. In defending that irregularity, I hope to defend something larger: the human capacity to think for oneself in language that still feels one’s own.
- JD Hixson
One hardly need worry. The last thing the essay, as an artform, could ever fall victim to is another taxonomist tightening the cage. What I intend, instead, is to allow my own voice to join with the essay’s inherent resistance — the resistance to the enclosure of thought by the instruments of its supposed cultivation. The essay, that restless and provisional form, has been domesticated by an educational culture that measures expression by rubric, curiosity by outcome, and imagination by “learning objective.” My Wordtreks project, if nothing else in name alone, exists to remember what thinking feels like when it has not yet been told what it must prove.
The essay began, one likes to recall, as a trial of the self in thought — essayer — to attempt, to test. In Montaigne’s open spiralling fields, thought was permitted to meander, to contradict itself, to wander into digression and back again. But something happened when the essay entered the classroom. It was fixed into the five-paragraph form, trimmed of its hesitation, forced to submit a thesis at the gate. The word essay came to mean “argument,” not “experiment.” The shift matters more deeply than one is permitted to realise in today’s consumer culture, because the form of a thing shapes the soul that inhabits it. When we teach the young to write only what can be defended, we teach them that uncertainty has no place in public speech.
For me, Wordtreks ventures back out of that enclosure. The landscape I seek is rough and various — part literary, part personal, part philosophical; whether over earthen terrain or in urban flâneuresque street-haunting. I want to write from the open air and move through language as one moves through weather. That means sometimes losing the path, sometimes finding it again by sound or scent. The aim is not to reach a conclusion but to travel with attention, and indeed intention, intact.
Wordtreks is testament to a way of life, with precedents set by: Samuel Johnson’s The Rambler, Thoreau’s ‘Walker’ — “I think I cannot preserve my health and spirits, unless I spend four hours a day at least — and it is commonly more than that — sauntering through the woods and over the hills and fields, absolutely free from all worldly engagements… moreover, you must walk like a camel, which is said to be the only beast which ruminates when walking.” Or Wordsworth, whose assistant once told a visitor, “Here is his library, but his studio is out of doors.” Phenomenologically, Husserl was of the opinion that “walking is the experience by which we understand our body in relationship to the world.”
If I take any lineage, it is with those just mentioned and any others who treated the essay as a space of moral weather: Montaigne’s candor, Hazlitt’s fire, Woolf’s shimmering diffraction, Stevenson’s humane precision, the chiseled prose of Orwell. They remind me that the essay’s authority is not the scholar’s claim to proof, but the artist’s claim to presence — the living voice, thinking aloud, risking error. “To essay,” as Robert Louis Stevenson knew in his own practice, is to dare to be unfinished.
In our times, the essay is being pressed from two sides. On one, the academy drains it of pulse, treating it as a specimen of reasoning technique. On the other, the attention economy converts it into “content,” measured by clicks and engagement metrics. Both are forms of standardisation — the one bureaucratic, the other algorithmic — and both are inimical to the essay’s vital principle, which is freedom of movement. To write an essay is to insist on the dignity of thought that does not need to sell itself or defend itself, but simply to be.
”…the essay… labours emphatically on the form of its presentation. The consciousness of the non-identity between presentation and presented material forces the form to make unlimited efforts. In that respect alone the essay resembles art…” - Adorno (1958)
The question, then, is how to keep that spirit alive. For me, launching Wordtreks and putting some of my own work out there to be read, and subject myself to the inevitable criticism is an act of breathing space back into my own relationship with the form — a practice of slowness, of reading and writing as reciprocal wanderings. Each piece begins not from a thesis but from an encounter: a line of Stevenson, a fragment of landscape, a word whose etymology opens unexpectedly into moral territory. I write not to persuade, but to notice. The essay, when alive, is not a report on understanding but the record of its emergence.
When Addison and Steele launched The Spectator, they dreamed of refining conversation, not ossifying it. Their essays were addressed to “the polite reader,” which meant not the learned but the curious — the one who could sit at the table of ideas without pretension. Somewhere along the way, the table was fenced off; admission now requires credentials, citation styles, theoretical passwords. Yet the best essays, old and new, still speak in the language of invitation. They say: come walk with me.
I believe that to reclaim the essay is to reclaim a form of citizenship — of belonging to the republic of open minds. The present intellectual climate, with its culture wars and managerial universities, breeds a kind of fear: the fear of saying something without already knowing where it will land. The essay resists that fear. It is the art of thinking in public, of trusting that the path will appear underfoot.
I don’t write against learning, but against its confinement. Knowledge is not a product; it is a current. The essay is the vessel that drifts, turns, and sometimes runs aground in that current — but even that grounding can be a kind of discovery. I would rather be shipwrecked in honest thought than sail safely in prescribed waters.
So Wordtreks is my small defiance, a series of field notes from the wandering mind. It stands apart from the critical field not out of contempt but out of necessity. There are enough scholars to anatomise the essay; what interests me now about the form are practitioners who still believe in its pulse — who understand that to write an essay is to walk a line between thought and world, between solitude and speech.
If there is a creed behind this practice, it might be this: that freedom of mind is inseparable from freedom of form. The essay’s irregularities — its digressions, its hesitations, its refusal to be summed — are not defects but the signatures of a living intellect. In defending that irregularity, I hope to defend something larger: the human capacity to think for oneself in language that still feels one’s own.
- JD Hixson