The Essayist's Notebook

To democratize the essay means stripping away academic gatekeeping and returning to its radical, foundational core: the act of “digging where you stand.” Becoming an essayist does not require an exhaustive literary pedigree or an elite reading list. It requires the raw, accessible willingness to accurately map your own position in the world, writing de bonne foi (in good faith), and maintaining total fidelity to the architecture of your own thoughts.

By shifting the barrier to entry from exogenous knowledge (what you have read) to endogenous honesty (what you perceive), the craft becomes available to anyone with a vantage point.

The most convincing argument for democratising the essay came from mature women in my university classrooms. Sent there by their trade unions, often after years spent raising children, caring for family members and balancing work with responsibility, they arrived with a deep knowledge of everyday life. The union representative role gave them permission to speak publicly, but it did not give them insight. They already possessed that. Doreen, Eileen, Siobhán, Marie and Joan understood the texture of ordinary experience and could command the language of daily life with remarkable precision. What they lacked was not capability but permission: permission to treat their own attention as worthy of sustained inquiry. Once that permission was granted, the essay became available to them.

In this note I'm thinking about how I reconstruct the path to becoming an essayist for these women and men and women like them.

There are three democratic pillars

1: Dig Where You Stand

• The immediate landscape is the primary text. You do not need to look outward for grand, abstract themes to be worthy of writing. • Vantage over pedigree. Every inquiry begins exactly where your feet meet the ground – your specific memory, your local contradiction, or your immediate observation. • Radical accessibility. If you are alive and paying attention to your environment, you already possess the necessary raw material.

2: Operating with Good Faith – De Bonne Foi

• The Montaigne accord. Honoring the classic pact that the text is an honest, unvarnished mirror of a human mind. • Relinquishing performative authority. Writing without a hidden agenda, political posture, or the need to sound like an “expert.” • Visible limitations. Acknowledging your own biases, history, and blind spots as part of the narrative landscape.

3: Fidelity to the Mind's Movement

• Accurate internal reporting. Capturing a thought as it actually occurs, rather than how it should look to satisfy an audience or an editor. • Preserving the mess. Resisting the temptation to tidy up intellectual contradictions or uncertainties just to manufacture a clean conclusion. • The text as a dynamic record. Treating writing as a mirror of an evolving mind in motion, rather than a monument to a settled opinion.

This philosophical shift turns the essay back into a living tool for public utility and self-discovery, rather than a cloistered literary exercise.

David Marshall Montory