essay is the Pomona College Center for Speaking, Writing and the Image’s yearly journal, which publishes exclusively first-year and transfer student work. The origin story of the essay as a form began in the late sixteenth century, when Michel Eyquem de Montaigne took the word from the French essayer, “to try,” to describe the writing with which he was experimenting in his retirement from political life: roaming, curious, digressive, associative, critical (most of all his own ideas and perceptions), and deeply, devotedly engaged with the self, the world, and the self in the world. Since that first volume of Essais in 1580, the essay has been defined, written, read, and redefined over and over again across the continents. For some, it is a free, ecstatic way to explore the self; for some, it participates in describing the fabric of a nation; for some, it is an urgent intellectual and political force; for others, its critical, playful essence resists definition, and in so resisting, resists totalization. For all, it is, as the essayist Gabriel Zaid puts it, “the laboratory itself, where life is put to the test in a text.”
essay is interested in engaging the ways that writing processes are necessarily diverse and messy, and is less concerned with collecting “good” writing. Here at the CSWIM, we are privileged to spend most of our time engaged with the emotional side of writing: with the process, not the product. essay gives its readers a little glimpse of the process, the beating heart at the core of writing center work. It showcases the parts of writing that are hidden within the final polished piece: all the absurd mistakes and unexpected discoveries, the edits that bounced back and forth endlessly, the sentence that you became obsessed with, and made you cry a little when you erased it.