When Poets & Writers Magazine interviewed Phillip Lopate a few years ago, it cited his well-deserved reputation as "one of the most important essayists of our time." But Lopate himself originally wanted to be a novelist or poet, he told us via e-mail. "It took me a while to fall in love with essays," he said. Then I saw that I could combine story­telling and character from fiction, and associative leaps and consciousness tracking from poetry, and put them all together in one flexible form. In my early 30s I stumbled on the great 19th-century English essayist William Hazlitt, who turned me on to Charles Lamb and Michel de Montaigne, and from that point I was hooked. The essay, Lopate said, is "the intellectual bellwether of any society. But it always has to squeeze its way into the canon, in the cracks left over from fiction and poetry. The funny thing is that people really like to read essays, only they don't always realize that's what they're reading; they think they're taking in articles or simply interesting nonfiction. They associate essays negatively with argument-driven college compositions they were required to write. The whole genre is "at a particularly interesting transitional moment," he added. You've got articulate essayists emerging from every specialty: medicine, art criticism, physics, undertaking, sports, food, nature, astronomy, birding and fiction. Whoever has a strong point of view, a sparkling literary style and an appetite for doubt and paradox can and will join the parade. Lopate reviews Jonathan Franzen's new essay collection, "Farther Away," in this week's Book Review.