Having edited the esteemed The Art of the Personal Essay, Phillip Lopate is back now with two new volumes: Portrait Inside My Head, a new collection, and To Show and To Tell, a how-to guide to the crafting of personal essays. They tantalise with the promise of direct address to the reader. Novelists and authors of literary non-fiction operate within tightly structured, rigorously policed formats, but other forms - the personal essay, the collection of letters - offer the possibility of bypassing what might be seen as the stodgy formality of literature. But writers are also driven to write because, like everyone else, they are lonely, and aching to be heard. Why do writers write? For reasons much like anyone else enters the profession of their choice: for money, for security, for professional advancement, to prove their skill.
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