Funds for Bookworm are provided in part by Lannin Foundation.

You are a human animal.

You are a very special breed.

For you are the only animal.

Who can think, who can reason, who can read.

Hello and welcome to Bookworm.

I'm Michael Silverblad, and today my guest is John de Gata.

His book is Halls of Fame.

It's published by Grey Wolf Press.

And it's a book of essays, but by essays, many things are meant.

I came across the book and flipping through its pages, I was immediately interested in it.

Formally, the essays, as Flannery O'Connor used to say, look funny on the page.

And I'm often drawn to things that look funny on the page.

Then my interest was piqued by an early review of the book by Guy Davenport, who pointed out that John Dagata is potentially the inventor

of what is to be called the lyric essay form, and by a recent New York Times book review

where the writer talking about the things that one can do in times of grave national danger

mentioned some of the books that she was reading as a form of comfort and consolation,

and she mentioned John Dagada's Halls of Fame also.

It's his first book, and I wanted to begin by asking you as best you can to say what leads you to the essay

rather than to poetry or to fiction. Probably it's just in my background. I was oddly sent to a tutor when I was maybe around eight or nine by my mom, a Latin tutor.

And most of what I was attracted to in Latin was prose.

And so I guess, and I stayed with Latin all through school, through junior high, through high school.

...