The internet is an ideal home for the essay

As literary culture reels from the web’s dominance, American women are leading a rebirth of Montaigne’s venerable form online

The streets of America may be “haunted by the ghosts of bookstores”, with writers hovering “between a decent poverty and an indecent one” as Leon Wieseltier suggests, but even as the internet has wreaked havoc on literary culture, American women have been fomenting a renaissance in the essay. Leslie Jamison, Meghan Daum, Rebecca Solnit, Roxane Gay and Maggie Nelson are just some of a new band of writers who have taken Montaigne’s project to know the self into the digital age.

Just look at Gay, who won the PEN Center USA’s Freedom to Write award earlier this week, a writer who built her career from contributing to sites such as Htmlgiant and the Rumpus. Her work ranges from literary criticism to critiques of rape culture to the political responsibilities of being a writer and intersectionality. Her writing about pop culture resembles the “thick description” pioneered by anthropologist Clifford Geertz. One of the hallmarks of Gay’s writing is a combination of justified anger and personal vulnerability which resonates with the reader. In 2012, in response to commenters who wanted to hold an 11-year old-girl culpable for her gang rape by 20 men, she wrote:

Maybe we don’t know how to talk about children or even think about children because we don’t want to remember how little we once knew or face how much we would someday know.

Creation is always in the dark because you can only do the work of making by not quite knowing what you’re doing, by walking into darkness, not staying in the light. Ideas emerge from edges and shadows to arrive in the light, and though that’s where they may be seen by others, that’s not where they’re born.

Related: Roxane Gay wins PEN Freedom to Write award

Sure, some news is bigger news than other news. War is bigger news than a girl having mixed feelings about the way some guy slept with her and didn’t call. But I don’t believe in a finite economy of empathy; I happen to think that paying attention yields as much as it taxes. You learn to start seeing.

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