Some pieces arrive knowing what they are. - Others arrive in disguise.

A little while ago I started writing about a pair of espadrilles. At least, that was what I thought I was writing about. The subject seemed slight enough. A pair of shoes. A memory. An anecdote.

But writing has a habit of refusing the boundaries we assign to it.

As I followed the thread, the piece became something else. The espadrilles remained, but they were no longer the subject. They had become a doorway into questions of identity, memory, place, absence, and change. What had begun as an observation turned into a discovery.

That experience reminded me of an important distinction. We often imagine that writing is the act of expressing what we already know. Yet some of the most rewarding writing does the opposite. We begin with one perception and finish with another. The act of writing becomes a means of finding out what we think.

The finished piece is here:

Essays: The Espadrilles

What makes this piece valuable to me is that I also wrote about the process surrounding it. Before finishing it, I found myself trying to understand why I was being drawn towards it in the first place:

The Essayist’s Notebook: First Notebook Essay

Then, after the story was complete, I wrote again, reflecting on what had happened and what the piece had revealed:

The Essayist’s Notebook: Second Notebook Essay

Taken together, the three pieces form a small constellation: the approach, the encounter, and the reflection afterwards. Perhaps that is what interests me most these days. Not simply the finished work, but the movement of thought that produces it. The path by which something apparently ordinary discloses an unexpected depth. Sometimes a pair of espadrilles is just a pair of espadrilles. And sometimes it turns out to be a way of seeing.

This is not the last time I will write about writing. My next post will introduce another piece whose origins lay in governance and public policy, but which ultimately emerged as a short story. It was an experiment in using narrative to explore how institutional decisions travel outward into the everyday experiences of ordinary people

David Marshall
Letter from an Essayist

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 a 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, I doubt I could have defined an essay beyond the requirements of school. Yet looking back, I suspect Montaigne would have recognised the impulse immediately. So too, perhaps, would Addison and Steele, whose popularisation of the craft delighted me, helping to carry the essay from the private study, into the café and the corner house.

The subjects I wrote of 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 south-west 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.

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 south-west France. Alongside it stands a barn whose walls were originally part of a tower house and château, the very culture 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 emerges from what came before.

Standing in that barn, looking at stones and 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.

David Marshall.
Flic en Flac
September 2026

So I’ve started this little place for letters to other essayists.

Nothing grand. No schedule. No particular promise of wisdom.

Just an occasional letter, and perhaps a note, because there seems to be a space for a thought where only another essayist might wander, and understand.

Sometimes it will be a nag of doubt that trails back to something I’ve written elsewhere. Sometimes it may be no more than a thought that hasn’t yet found its proper shape — I’m a fan of the unfinished question.

But the idea is simple enough: to have a conversation.

So — hello.

I’m glad you’ve stopped by.

David