Dagoberto Gilb on Writing Essays

On writing essays: "I assure you, every one of them has given me such pleasure and satisfaction, the same kind I had when I used to cut wood with my skilsaw and drive nails and build.... Each word is a rock I've placed personally into a wall--five go in and I pick through a pile and find another, shift them all around until it's right. I've chipped and nicked at most so they look to me like good sentences, good paragraphs. If I don't think of myself as the smartest, I do feel a strength in my working of the craft, so that every time I finish something, I'm maybe too proud of myself, can hardly believe that I did it, that I could. The words are beyond my own physical self or nature, because I was not born to be a writer, I've just done it anyway. Often this work is outright fun, almost as fun as a good construction job where we were all muscles sweating and laughing and building shit and getting paid at the same time--living and working--except writing work is alone, only an imaginary crew." (Introduction, xiv)