I think we’re still adjusting to the idea that we now get our porn and our mother’s emails and our groceries and our professional and social reinforcement—and our “longreads”—from the same place. But in many ways the essay feels like a natural fit, with its intuitive blend of the personal and the critical. The essay seems well-designed for engaging response, which it would seem is what a lot of Internet writing seeks to do. It’s also very plastic, it can bend every which way. It was looking kind of grim for a while there, but it seems like more and more writers are exploring that plasticity at places like The Rumpus and Thought Catalog, This Recording etc. That’s exciting to me.

AK: Your first book, The Sicily Papers, is set in Sicily, and throughout This Is Running For Your Life you discuss Beirut, Hawaii, the US by way of Canada — clearly travel is integral to your life and therefore your writing. Have you always been a traveler? Do you think you wrote because you were traveling, or you traveled because you were writing, or are the two entirely separate?

MO: Growing up, we spent a chunk of the summer in northern Ontario, and I remember the seven-hour drive as this interminable passage into another world. I looked forward to those trips all year. It wasn’t all that far, but still further away than most of my friends went, and the nature of the trip—my family has a camp on the Georgian Bay, extremely isolated, no electricity, etc.—gave it a sense of adventure.

I was lucky in that there were other trips—to Florida, Mexico, British Columbia—and I learned that I loved everything about the experience of travel, from the airplanes to the sights to the sense of being a different person—an “away” self—to the letters you could write and the stories you told when you got home. So I always took opportunities to travel.