The longer I have worked on Essayism.org, the more I have come to suspect that essayism cannot really be discovered through definitions. It has to be encountered in practice. For me, that practice began long before my thoughts dwelt on Montaigne. He was merely a name in school classroom.

As a schoolboy, I was already writing pieces that began not with answers but with tensions. Something in the world would not quite fit. An explanation that everyone accepted seemed incomplete. A relationship between things would catch my attention. Writing became a way of following the question. I would not have called it essaying.

At fourteen years of age, I doubt I could have defined an essay beyond the requirements of school. Yet looking back, I suspect Montaigne would have recognized the impulse immediately. So too, perhaps, would Addison and Steele, who carried the essay from the private study into the public conversation.

The subjects changed over the years but the habit remained remarkably constant. Again and again I found myself drawn less to facts than to relationships. Less to conclusions than to processes. Less to what something was, than to how it had become what it was.

Only much later did I encounter Montaigne himself. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that we became acquainted. Like many readers, I first approached him through his reputation. The inventor of the essay. The retired mayor of Bordeaux. The French gentleman writing in a tower in SW France. The distant figure from literary history.

What I discovered instead was something unexpectedly familiar. Montaigne was not proclaiming doctrines. He was thinking on the page. He was following observations wherever they led. He was examining experience as something unfinished and perpetually unfolding. I recognised the process immediately.

The deeper companionship, however, emerged not through reading but through building. For a number of years I have been engaged in the renovation of a sixteenth-century house in SW France. Alongside it stands a barn whose walls were originally part of the tower house and chateau of the Duc de Treville, the very family into which Montaigne's mother was born. History sits lightly in such places until one starts to work on them.

A beam, a wall, a doorway, a repair carried out centuries ago. Every intervention reveals traces of previous interventions. Every structure becomes a record of change through time. Nothing is entirely finished. Nothing is entirely original. Everything is becoming.

Standing in that barn, looking at stones and the beams that had once formed part of another structure entirely, I found myself asking questions that were unmistakably essayistic.

Not what is this? But what has this become? Not what was intended But what emerged? Not what conclusion should be drawn? But what relationships are now visible? In a curious way, the old stones became companions in inquiry.

The renovation taught me something that years of reading alone could not. Essaying is not simply a literary activity. It is an orientation toward the world. It is a willingness to attend to processes, relationships, transformations, and tensions. The page merely provides one place in which that attention can become visible.

Essayism.org emerges from that realisation.

The site is not intended as a monument to a settled doctrine. It is a working surface. A place to examine what essaying is, how it has appeared in different writers, and why it continues to matter in a world increasingly impatient for immediate certainty.

Montaigne gave us a word. Other essayists developed a tradition. My own contribution, if there is one, is simply to continue the inquiry. In that sense, the site's launch feels less like the completion of a project than the marking of a stage in a much longer journey.

The truth is that I was essaying long before I knew the name for it. Essayism.org is merely where those paths finally meet.

David Marshall Skerries

When I went to look for a domain name the market's contribution was:

Essayism.org: $7 Essaying.org: $4300 Essaying.lol: $1.50

Which immediately raises a question: What exactly is being valued here? A merchant says traffic. A marketer says keywords. A domain investor says scarcity.

An essayist notices that none of these is the same thing as meaning.

In a strange way, that's a Montaignian moment. An apparently trivial fact becomes a point of entry into a larger inquiry. And if I'm being honest, I'd rather own essayism.org than essaying.org even if they were the same price.

“Essaying” describes an activity. “Essayism” describes a territory.

The former tells people what you are doing. The latter invites them to ask what the thing is. That's much more interesting.

And, after all, every good essay begins with someone noticing that the thing everybody values is not necessarily the thing that matters.

My seven-dollar domain registration of essayism.org may be a case in point. 😊

David Marshall Skerries

The map arrives before the journey.

Recognition arrives before understanding.

Structure arrives before growth.

& how does a desert stay honest when it's raining.

Part I emerged from that irritation; a definition of the role. Then a friend observed: “Well, you don’t actually say what you do.” Part II arrived quickly after that.

And even as I clicked publish on Part II, the tension I know persists between writer and architect began needling its way into my thinking. More accurately, a tension that lives within me began demanding expression.

So here is my draft Part III.

The Publication Architect: Part III
The Essayist and the Architect

The Dual Movement Behind the Work

These two movements are the Essayist and the Publication Architect.

They are not competing identities. They are complementary disciplines. The work only becomes fully itself when both are present.

The Essayist: The Surface of Attention

The Essayist’s work is exploratory. It begins with curiosity. It asks: What is happening here? What does this mean? What does this reveal? The Essayist does not begin with structure. S/he begins with encounter. The writing is shaped by the world as s/he sees it.

But perception alone is not enough.

The Publication Architect:
The Structure Beneath the Surface

The Architect works beneath the surface of the essay. S/he shapes the route through which understanding will unfold. S/he decides what is revealed first, what is held back, what is repeated, what is contrasted, what is resolved. S/he builds the architecture through which meaning can accumulate.

Where the Essayist perceives, the Architect arranges. Where the Essayist explores, the Architect guides. Where the Essayist sees, the Architect shows.

These are different disciplines. Yet they must coexist.

The Tension Between Them The Essayist wants freedom. The Architect wants order.

The Essayist wants to follow the movement of thought. The Architect wants to shape the movement of understanding.

The Essayist wants to write what s/he sees. The Architect wants the reader to see it.

If either discipline dominates, the work collapses.

An essay without architecture drifts. It may contain insight, but the insight does not land. It lacks force. It lacks clarity. It lacks the sequence through which understanding becomes inevitable.

Architecture without essayism is sterile. It may be clear, but it is empty. It lacks perception. It lacks encounter. It lacks the human movement that gives writing its purpose.

The work requires both.

The Dual Identity of the Writer

This dual identity is not a technique. It is a stance — a way of thinking. It recognises that understanding does not emerge from content alone, but from the relationship between content and structure, between perception and design, between what is seen and how it is revealed. As I have said before: revision is epistemology.

The Essayist provides the material. The Architect provides the form. Meaning arises from their tension.

Where the Work Truly Happens

The writer therefore moves continually between the two roles. S/he perceives, then designs. S/he discovers, then arranges. S/he writes, then rebuilds. S/he stands somewhere, then constructs the path that allows the reader to stand there too.

This is the dual movement behind the work.

Conclusion

The Essayist gives the writing its voice. The Architect gives the writing its structure. Together they give the writing its meaning.

This is the tension that defines the craft. This is the dual movement that makes the work possible. This is where the writer stands

David Marshall Skerries

https://rvw.ie/h1the-publication-architect-brwhy-structure-matters-more-than-content-h1

addendum Part I of this essay introduced the idea that a publication is an architecture rather than a stream of content. I’ve now added Part II, completing the description of the method behind that architecture. Its future home will be essayist.ie, where it will form the method page. Until that site is ready, both parts remain on The Marshall Review.

And now the tension between my two declared roles of Publication Architect and Essayist demands to be explored. I suspect that will follow quickly here on esy.ie

The Espadrilles began with a contradiction.

For fifty years I have been vegetarian. For almost as long, I have lived with the small observations and challenges that accompany that choice. Some are thoughtful. Some less so. One in particular returns with remarkable perseverance.

“But you wear leather shoes.”

The observation is fair. The contradiction is real.

Originally, I imagined I was writing an essay about that contradiction and about the larger difficulty of aligning conduct with conviction. The piece would be concerned with the distance between the people we imagine ourselves to be and the people revealed by our daily actions.

But somewhere in the hills east of Tardets, and where I sit at this moment, the essay began moving in a different direction.

What began as a reflection on personal inconsistency slowly became an exploration of recognition. Of those moments when we encounter another person and experience a sense of affinity. Not because we share the same opinions, but because we appear to value many of the same things.

The artisan at the centre of the essay is such a figure.

Through his treatment of materials, his respect for craft, his regard for tradition, place and workmanship, he appeared to embody many of the qualities I most admire. As the essay developed, I found myself less interested in the shoes than in the relationship emerging between two people who seemed to understand the world in broadly similar ways.

Then came the leather. Not as compromise, but as excellence.

Not as a failure of values, but as their fullest expression. The moment mattered because it revealed something more interesting than contradiction. It revealed the limits of consensus.

We often imagine that shared values naturally lead to shared conclusions. That if people are thoughtful enough, careful enough and sincere enough, they will eventually agree about what is good. Yet life repeatedly presents us with examples of decent people who share many fundamental values and nevertheless arrive at very different understandings of what those values demand.

The essay does not attempt to resolve that tension. Indeed, one of its ambitions is to resist resolution. Too often essays become vehicles for conclusions already reached. I am interested in essays as places of observation; places where a question can be examined without being immediately answered.

Increasingly, I find myself reserving the term essay for writing that remains genuinely exploratory. Not the presentation of a conclusion already reached, but an attempt to understand something not yet fully understood. A place of observation rather than advocacy. A place where writer and reader may linger with a question long enough for it to reveal more of itself.

It may also be that this is a heritage thing. Or perhaps a geographical one. Living among the hills and small communities of rural France, I find myself less interested than I once was in advancing conclusions and more interested in living with observation. Montaigne, not so very far from here, understood the essay as an attempt rather than a verdict. Increasingly, I find that the practice of essay writing is teaching me the same perspective. That understanding often follows observation, and that the most interesting questions have a habit of becoming larger.

In that sense, The Espadrilles is less an argument than a landscape. It begins with one contradiction and ends in the presence of another. The purpose is not to tell the reader what to think, but to lead them into the field and allow them to look around for themselves. To turn their head from side to side, accommodate themselves to the breeze, and observe what becomes visible when the need for immediate answers subsides.

Whether it succeeds is for others to decide.

For my part, I am simply grateful to the artisan, the workshop, the scent of magnolia, and a box containing some of Navarre's finest leather for revealing a question I had not known I was carrying.

David Marshall Montory

All of my recently published essays have been identified by AI scanners as between 67% and 98% AI-generated.

I wrote my first published essay in 1965 and made my first documented contribution to public policy in 1969, in the United Kingdom, on the subject of arbitrary dismissal.

Since that time, my professional life has required that I write continually; essays, policy papers, reports, breifings, teaching materials & text books, letters, magazine features & jouralism, manuals and books

The suggestion that this work, or work emerging from the same habits and disciplines, is now classified as AI-generated is both curious and instructive. And even as I write this, I notice I can't help myself, but open this note with a tension. It's hard-wired. An immediate construction that emerges when my fingers connect with keys.

What's happening

I am told that as a practised writer, I may be triggering some of the same patterns that AI systems were trained to produce:

Clear, grammatical sentences with few mistakes. Consistent tone and structure throughout a piece. Balanced paragraph lengths. Predictable word choices rather than unusual or idiosyncratic phrasing. Explanatory writing that moves logically from point to point.

Apparently, and somewhat ironically, these are features that I strive for, I am after all addressing audiences that, for the most part, appreciate these things. These are features of good professional writing. And these are the very features that trigger the AI conclusion that I, or that my writing, is AI generated.

Thought: If I, and other writers, have been writing in roughly this manner for fifty, sixty years or more, and AI now writes in a similar manner, what is imitating whom?

Interim test.

So I took the seven paragraphs above, which I have written in the last five minutes or so, and ran them through the first free AI text detector that came up on bing; undetectable.ai . I did well and scored only 71% as AI drafted. Just Done gave me around 75% AI

The test assignment

Write an essay with three objectives:

1: Explain why my notebooks (like this one) are public. 2: Explain why I choose to use Write.as as my writing and publishing surface 3: Record the blogs and notebooks I maintain on Write.as and show how they link together, and how they link-in to my wider publication architecture.

Below I'm listing my structured notes that I will use to write the essay. Essentially I'll start with everything that occurs to me that I think is relevant. I will use the facility that Write.as affords me to edit and organize my notes as my thinking proceeds.

Structured Notes

I already have a notional structure in my head about the flow of the essay – the “publication architecture” as I call it.

I seem to be carrying an explanation of why the process of public thinking matters to me as an essayist. Write.as happens to be the tool.

I'm tempted to structure it around these questions: why I make my notes public / the open notebook concept why I want the foundations visible how my essays are the pursuit of understanding why write.as revision as navigation The notebooks/blogs as a defined appendix

Why I Write in Public

The discipline : People sometimes ask why so much of my writing appears in public notebooks rather than only in finished essays. The question assumes that the notebooks exist in order to reveal the process behind the essays. That is partly true. But disclosure is not the principal reason. Publishing notes is not an act of disclosure. It is an act of discipline.

Obligation : One of the most important lessons I learned from teaching is that public speech creates responsibility. The moment a statement enters the public domain, the person making that statement becomes accountable for it. That responsibility exists even when one is simply reporting the views of others...

If I write that the Environmental Party chooses to prioritise a particular issue, I remain accountable for whether I have represented that position fairly, accurately and honestly. Public communication imposes obligations.

It requires care not only in what is said but also in how it is said. A private note can remain vague. A public note demands greater precision. The audience may be large or small. There may be no audience at all. That is beside the point. Publication itself creates a standard to which the author must answer. The public note becomes a challenge: “Are you prepared to stand over this?”

Why the Foundations Matter

Many of my essays, reviews and policy pieces contain observations, interpretations and conclusions. Those observations emerge from somewhere. They arise from notebooks, fragments, field observations, discarded ideas, references, questions, conversations and research. Increasingly, I have felt that if the conclusions are visible, then at least some of their foundations should also be visible.

There is something almost contradictory about that. Foundations are usually hidden. Yet I find myself wanting to expose parts of the structure rather than conceal it. Not because I believe it to be beyond criticism. Almost the opposite. I want it to remain open to criticism. In a sense I am inviting the reader to become an editor and sub-editor peering over my shoulder. The notebooks are not merely supporting documents. They are part of the conversation. The reader is able to examine not only the finished essay but some of the path by which the essay emerged.

Essays and Understanding

I describe my essays as attempts at understanding rather than acts of advocacy. Advocacy begins with a destination. The essay begins with a question. Or a tension. Or a contradiction. Or an observation that refuses to go away.

My task is not primarily to persuade. My task is to understand. And to share that understaning. The closest I come to advocay is the pursuit of a shared understanding. If I claim that my essays pursue understanding rather than advocacy, then I should be accountable to that claim.

The notebooks help provide that accountability. They reveal whether I have genuinely followed the evidence. They reveal whether I have acknowledged ambiguity. They reveal whether reality persuaded me before I attempted to persuade the reader. If I claim merely to illuminate a tension, then I must be prepared to show how I arrived there. The notebooks become part of the discipline of intellectual honesty.

My View of Essay Writing

The essay is not journalism. Neither is it academic writing nor opinion. It is a mode of inquiry. The essay begins with a tension and follows that tension wherever it leads. The essayist starts not with a conclusion but with a problem. Through reflection, observation, research and writing, relationships previously hidden become visible.

The purpose of the essay is not necessarily resolution. Sometimes the deepest achievement of an essay is simply to reveal what is actually being argued about. Or what relationship has remained unseen. The essay is therefore a journey towards perception. Not toward persuasion.

Why Write.as?

The reasons are partly philosophical and partly practical. Write.as allows me to work almost anywhere. I can work from a phone while travelling. I can capture a thought before it disappears. I can draft a paragraph while waiting for a train or sitting in a harbour. Good sentences rarely arrive according to schedule. The platform accommodates that reality.

More importantly, Write.as has altered my relationship with composition. Years ago I would often compose large sections of text in my head before writing them down. The arrival of increasingly sophisticated software encouraged a different habit. Revision became too easy. Drafting became fragmented. Composition increasingly moved from the mind to the screen. Write.as on my phone, nudges me back towards mental composition. I find myself crafting paragraphs internally before typing them. It encourages me to think first and edit later.

The Freedom of Not Knowing

Perhaps the most important characteristic of Write.as is that a piece does not need to know what it is when it begins. I can sketch a structure anonymously. I can create an outline. I can develop an idea. I can begin writing without deciding where it belongs. Indeed, I can finish a piece before making any decision about what sort of piece it is.

Only afterwards do I decide whether it belongs in: • a notebook, • a field note, • a review, • a briefing, • a policy essay, • an essay collection, • or somewhere else entirely. There is enormous freedom in that. The classification follows the writing. The work discovers what it is before being assigned a home.

Publication Architecture

Part of this arises from the way I work. I sometimes think of myself not only as an essayist but as a publication architect. I am often interested in structures before I am interested in destinations. I want to understand the shape of an argument. The relationships between ideas. The route through a landscape.

Only later do I determine where a piece belongs. Write.as makes that possible. A piece can exist before its final form is known.

Revision

Revision occupies a different role in my work than it does for many writers. The important epistemological work often happens in the first draft. The writing itself generates understanding. Relationships emerge. Connections become visible. Assumptions reveal themselves. The first draft is frequently where discovery occurs.

Subsequent revision is something different. Less an act of knowing. More an act of navigation. Like choosing the best line through a bend on a favourite motorcycle. Or selecting the ideal moment to tack in a sailing race. The destination remains unchanged. The craft lies in finding the cleanest route.

The Open Notebook

The various notebooks and publications form something like an open notebook. Most websites display conclusions. These sites document parts of the process that precedes conclusions. Ideas begin as observations. Observations become notes. Notes become briefings. Briefings become essays. Essays become reviews, policy pieces or larger works. Not all observations become essays. Not all notes deserve publication beyond the notebook. Some remain exactly as they began. Yet together they document an attempt to understand rather than to persuade. Persuasion is left to the set of relationships between the revealed in the elements of the source material, and the reader

Appendix: The Write.as Publications

The Marshall Review (rvw.ie) The most polished publication in the network. Essays and reviews concerning culture, ideas, books, music and public life.

An Essayist's Notebook (esy.ie) Questions, fragments, observations and developing ideas. The closest thing to a public working notebook.

Field Notes (notes.marshall.ie) Research notes, sources, references and supporting material. An attempt to make visible some of the foundations from which essays emerge.

Radar Signals (signals.marshall.ie) Observations, anomalies, developments and emerging patterns whose significance may not yet be fully understood.

Briefing Insights (insights.marshall.ie) Short analytical briefings and concise explorations arising from ongoing inquiry.

The Marginalia of Sigi (sigi.ie) Annotations, side notes, reflections and intellectual wanderings that do not naturally belong elsewhere.

Wordpress & Substack

Marshall on Policy (plcy.ie) Essays and reflections dealing with governance, public policy and civic questions.

Ontology (ontology.marshall.ie) Explorations of meaning, relationships, categories and the structures through which ideas acquire significance.

The Writing Network Taken together, these sites function less as separate blogs than as different views of a single intellectual process. Some contain signals. Some contain research. Some contain questions. Some contain essays. All form part of the same endeavour: the attempt to understand the world through inquiry, and to conduct that inquiry in public

Not because he's careless with it. Quite the opposite. His punctuation is disciplined, systematic, almost instructional. He treats it as a framework through which thought is organised and communicated.

I realised that I approach it differently. For me, punctuation has never felt like a set of rules imposed upon language. It feels more like part of the act of expression itself. A comma is not a traffic sign. A dash is not a regulation. A full stop is not an instruction.

They are closer to the traces left by a thought in motion.

When I write, punctuation feels less like the Highway Code and more like the controls of a motorcycle. Not because it governs the journey, but because it becomes part of the journey. Rider and machine gradually disappear into a single act of movement. The controls cease to be separate things. They become extensions of perception.

The same is true of a painter's brush. The brushstroke is not there to organize the painting. It is evidence of the painting being made. And then, because I have spent so much time recently thinking about my next series of articles on music, it occurred to me that the distinction might be even clearer there.

A score is not music.

A score is an extraordinary achievement. It captures relationships, structures, timings, possibilities. But it does not contain music any more than a map contains a landscape.

Music happens when a performer inhabits those symbols.

Two musicians can play identical notes from the same score and produce entirely different experiences. What changes is not the notation but the performance. Perhaps writing contains a similar tension. Grammar, punctuation, and style guides are forms of notation. They help us record, preserve, and share expression. But they are not the expression itself.

The mistake comes when we confuse one for the other.

The score matters: The performance matters more.

[Trask, I suspect, would disapproved of the colon there, and most defitely of my use of this:– ] (square bracket).

Perhaps that is why I sometimes find myself resisting systems that seek to make writing simpler by turning it into rules. Simplicity can emerge in another way through practice. Not the practise of grammar rules, but the practise of the expression of ones own thought. Not through codification, but through feel.

A motorcyclist does not become graceful by memorising the Highway Code. A musician does not become expressive by memorising notation. A writer does not become eloquent by memorising punctuation rules. Those things matter. But they belong to a different realm.

They are the score: The living thing begins when someone starts to play.

David Marshall Montory

Afterthought: Punctuation, at a minimum, is guidance on cadence.

These boundaries are useful. They help readers find what interests them and avoid what doesn't. We do not read newspapers from cover to cover; we navigate them by habit and interest. Websites are no different.

Yet life continually presents things that sit beyond such categories. A queue. A speed bump. A campervan parked outside the house. An overheard remark. An assumption nobody seems to question. A small irritation that turns out to reveal something larger.

These things rarely justify an essay. They are often too slight for policy and too personal for review. Yet they are frequently where thought begins. That realisation has led to the creation of INQ. Unlike my other sites, INQ is not organised around a subject. It is organised around attention. The working strapline is:

INQ.ie Marshall on Things.

It is a place for observations, questions, curiosities, irritations and occasional convictions. A place where the subject need not justify itself before it is allowed onto the page. Perhaps the simplest way of putting it is this: INQ is where I intend to write in my own voice, unboxed.

Not recklessly. Not carelessly. But without feeling obliged to fit every thought into a pre-existing category or publication. If Marshall on Policy asks what should be done, and The Marshall Review asks what should be made of something, INQ asks a simpler question:

What's going on here?

The answer may sometimes turn into an essay. It may occasionally become a policy piece. More often it will remain simply an observation. And that is enough. As a reminder to myself, should I ever become too polite, too cautious, or too eager to self-censor: Speak up, man.

And, oh yeah, it's pronounced ink.

Looking back, I realise I spent decades trying to acquire something for which I had no name. Beginning in my teens, I found myself drawn not to answers but to relationships, not to conclusions but to unfolding processes.

Only much later did I understand that what I had been cultivating was a mode of attention. My writing voice was not something I invented. It was something that emerged from that attention. What emerges from my thinking here is a distinction that feels both simple and significant:

Voice is what readers hear. Attention is what produces it.

Perhaps, too: Style can be learned. Voice can be developed. But a mode of attention is cultivated over a lifetime.

I suspect that my development as a writer owed much to skills learned elsewhere. As a motorcyclist, and later as a volunteer RAC examiner, I was trained to observe systematically. Good riders do not merely look. They follow a disciplined process of observation, anticipation and continuous reassessment. Over time I seem to have applied similar disciplines to perception itself. The road became the world. Hazards became questions. Observation became inquiry.

University lecturing taught me another form of attention. I learned to observe not only what students said, but how understanding emerged within them. Often one could sense comprehension taking shape before a student had the words to express it. Teaching required attentiveness to thought in motion, to the subtle interaction between explanation, confusion, recognition and insight.

Social action taught me yet another form of attention. If advanced motorcycling trained me to observe situations and lecturing trained me to observe understanding, social action trained me to observe underlying conditions. It encouraged me to look beyond individual events towards the forces that made them possible. Repeatedly I found that what was visible was only the surface expression of deeper relationships and structures. This habit of looking beneath appearances became part of my writing. It reinforced a tendency to ask not merely what is happening, but what conditions are giving rise to what is happening.

Taken together, these experiences seem less like separate chapters in a life than different expressions of the same discipline. They cultivated habits of watching carefully, tracing relationships, recognising patterns and resisting premature conclusions. If I were to sketch the progression, it might look something like this:

Observation → Systematic Observation → Disciplined Attention → Insight → Voice

The voice comes last. What comes first is the trained capacity to see what others overlook. That capacity was not developed primarily through writing. Writing became the place where the results of that lifelong training found expression.

I was reminded of this some years ago while trying a guitar amplifier in a music shop. Another customer, a landscape gardener in his fifties, recognised my name and struck up a conversation about writing. He told me he wanted to start a blog but had been attending a creative writing course and had come away with the belief that he first needed to acquire a voice.

This took me aback.

Within minutes it was obvious to me that he already had one. He had spent half a century working, observing, thinking, solving problems and making sense of the world. He had a perspective. He had a way of seeing. In short, he had a voice.

What he lacked was not a voice but confidence in it.

He began talking about grammar. I told him to forget grammar for the moment. Write about what you know. Readers will come for your perspective, not your punctuation. Grammar and style can be learned. What mattered was that he had already spent decades cultivating a way of seeing the world. The writing would develop in time.

The encounter stayed with me because it revealed a common misunderstanding. Voice is often treated as though it were a literary technique that must be acquired before one can begin writing. Yet my experience suggests the reverse. Most people acquire a voice through living. They acquire writing through writing.

I do not suggest that every essayist arrives at a voice in this way. This is simply an attempt to understand how my own voice emerged. What continues to deepen it is a subject for another note. Yet the reflection does raise a further question. If my voice emerged from a lifelong mode of attention, what lies behind the voices of other essayists?

I suspect the answer is rarely a matter of style alone. Behind every distinctive voice there may be some equally deep disposition, habit of mind, preoccupation or way of attending to experience. Long before the pen touches paper or the fingers strike the keys, the writer has already spent years, perhaps decades, learning what to notice and what questions cannot be left alone.

Perhaps a mature voice is not something a writer acquires. Perhaps it is what becomes audible when a lifelong way of paying attention finally finds its form.

David Marshall Sna Sceirí