A quick shout out to our friends down the road in Moorhead, Minnesota where Concordia College publishes Assay: A Journal of Nonfiction Studies. The website is beautiful. The content is thought provoking. And the impulse to consider and reflect on the essay as a kind of writing is particularly valuable in the 21st century when the lines between fiction and nonfiction, essays and creative work, truth and fantasy, and other longstanding oppositional categories have begun to fray around the edges. Reflecting on what makes nonfiction work and distinct is part of this growing tension between what we know and what we imagine.

So check out Assay and do some reading of its first two issues. Also be sure to check out their massive, searchable index of the Best American Essays.