I received the following email last week that I thought raised a good question on a topic I take for granted a lot:

Claire,

I just read your post about writing great personal essays.

I've got a question. I've been a writer and journalist for 15 years. Here in the UK we don't use the term "personal essay", but I hear it a lot from American writers.

This might sound dumb, but could you please explain just what a person essay is, and how it's different from a regular journalism feature where the "I" of the writer might pop up on occasion.

Hope you can help.

Neil Baker

Freelance writer and editor

I happen to be getting my Masters in Creative Writing at Northwestern University, with my focus on nonfiction writing. One of the topics that seems to get beaten to death is "What IS creative nonfiction"? It seems like we talk about it so much that we very conveniently forget the question. Anyway, I wanted to answer Neil's question by posing it to one of my teachers at Northwestern, Sandi Wisenberg, codirector of the Masters in Creative Writing program and practicing fiction/nonfiction writer. Her response to Neil is:

I have a partial reply. Personal essay is opposed to a scholarly or argumentative essay. It doesn't necessarily reveal personal secret info; it can be "cool" and "distant" but still show the writer's MIND AT WORK. That's what Phillip Lopate says. Thus it is traditionally more thought-driven than story-driven. A memoir tells a story and has reflections. It's told after, sometimes way after, the fact. Literary journalism could be the same as good feature writing. I define literary journalism and writing that would still be interesting 10 years later, when the news peg is no longer so hot. The piece is intrinsically interesting. An interesting project for someone would be to read all the introductions by guest editors of The Best American Essays and analyse what we are told an essay is and is not. The term "personal essay" has gotten to be so overused that the definition is very loose at this point. It falls under the rubric of creative nonfiction. Commonly Montaigne is considered the father of the modern, secular, non-moralistic personal essay. His wander around everywhere and can be found on the web. His motto, similar to Michael Feldman's--What do I know? Que sais-je?