While revising one of the essays on method, a question emerged that felt larger than the editing itself.

Which sentence is the defining sentence?

Literary criticism often looks for one. The sentence that unlocks the piece. The sentence from which everything else follows. The sentence that resolves the argument and allows the essay to close neatly upon itself.

There is elegance in that approach. But I find myself increasingly resistant to it.

It's a question of focus – here are a few words I scribbled in the margin: I think at this point I don't want the piece to have a clarity of focus – I want a vagueness to it – that encourages the reader to explore, perhaps to define for themselves – I don't want to close the circle in that way – I know that literary critics would see that as elegant, but a pedestrican crossing is more than stripes on the tarmac.

Yes the image that came to mind was a pedestrian crossing.

A critic might look at a pedestrian crossing and see a successful arrangement of white stripes on tarmac. They might admire the geometry, the symmetry, or the way each stripe contributes to the overall design.

Yet a pedestrian crossing is more than stripes on the road. It may even have lights. It is an invitation to cross. A convention shared by drivers and pedestrians. A piece of civic infrastructure. A relationship between risk and trust. The visible part is not one thing, and it's not the whole thing.

I am trying to construct my essays to work in a similar way. Readers rarely leave carrying away an entire argument. More often they carry fragments. A phrase. An image. A question. A way of looking; perhaps even an adjusted disposition.

One reader may remember: Dig where you stand. Another may remember: The contradiction remains interesting. Someone else may carry away: The argument can wait.

I am not convinced that any one of these must become the master key to the others. Readers bring themselves to the page. They are not all some idealized type.

The temptation to identify a single defining sentence is really a temptation to close the circle. To say: this is what the essay is about. Yet some essays are less concerned with bringing a reader to a destination than equipping them for a journey. Perhaps essays do not always need a centre. Perhaps they need landmarks.

A landmark is not the destination. Nor does it prescribe a route. It helps someone orient themselves within a larger landscape. That thought seems increasingly important to my own practice. I am less interested in delivering conclusions than in offering navigation tools.

A useful essay may not tell a reader where to go next. It may simply help them recognise where they are standing. And from there, they can decide the direction for themselves. David Marshall Flic en Flac, Mauritius

Rebellion against a false premis

There is no single route into the work. Style must be capable of meeting readers in different terrains without sacrificing coherence.

In writing The Campervan, my intent was to expose the invisible friction that exists between static belonging and dynamic mobility. A tension that is quietly defining modern Irish life. Mary and her unnamed visitor represent two entirely contrasting responses to the same foundational crisis: the sudden, altering reality of loss. Mary chooses the architecture of stasis. Her “exit road” from bereavement is built on preservation, strict domestic routines, and an aggressive defense of her physical boundaries – her view, her sea, her husband’s old preferences. To Mary, the encroaching campervans are not merely an aesthetic nuisance; they are mobile symbols of a fluid, modern world that threatens to overwrite her memories.

Conversely, the traveller’s exit road is one of motion and confrontation. He drives the very object of his grief back to the place of its making, using mobility as a mechanism for closure and eventual release. When these two perspectives collide over a simple kettle of water, the narrative shifts from a dispute about spatial intrusion to a shared recognition of human vulnerability. It is a reminder that the modern forces we often perceive as disruptions to our traditional heritage are frequently piloted by individuals carrying the exact same timeless griefs, histories, and traditions as our own.

If we are to successfully transform Ireland's communities, our policy frameworks must become as flexible and hospitable as Mary's kitchen table – capable of holding space for both those who need to stand fast, and those who need to move through.

The Campervan can be found at https://rvw.ie/the-campervan

Addendum

Temporal Friction and the Lived Experience of Governance

Transforming Ireland is the title I have chosen for a forthcoming series of the opportunities and the impact of the circular economy. And the Campervan is an experiment on how I might use fiction to illustrate those impacts.

In The Campervan, my aim was to look past the technical vocabulary of spatial planning and examine the human impact of what policy analysts call “temporal friction.” This friction occurs when macro-level regional development frameworks move at one speed, while the socio-emotional landscape of an established community moves at another.

Mary’s sudden exasperation – captured in her plea that “The Council should do something about it, it's not fair” – is a classic manifestation of this disconnect. To an administrator looking at a map or an infrastructure portfolio, the influx of mobile domestic tourism along our coastline represents a successful activation of public assets or a metric of regional economic diversification. However, to the resident on the ground, it can feel like a sudden, unmediated disruption of local spatial heritage and personal stasis.

References:

https://www.gov.ie/en/department-of-housing-local-government-and-heritage/press-releases/report-on-national-coastal-change-management-strategy-sets-out-long-term-blueprint-to-deal-with-future-coastal-change/

https://irishgeography.ie/index.php/irishgeography/article/download/1484/1194/6030)

This tension underscores a core finding in recent spatial analyses, such as the OECD Rural Policy Review of Ireland. The report notes that Ireland's highly centralized administrative structures often lack the “spatial differentiation” required to fully account for how local people actually experience change. When national planning goals; whether under the National Planning Framework or coastal management strategies; are handed down to local authorities, the system often defaults to regulating spaces rather than facilitating the community transitions within them.

References:

https://assets.gov.ie/static/documents/1f40d206-report-of-the-inter-departmental-group-on-national-coastal-change-management-.pdf

https://www.gov.ie/en/department-of-housing-local-government-and-heritage/publications/overview-of-planning-in-ireland/

https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/rural-policy-review-of-ireland-2026_d53ea78f-en/full-report/making-rural-policy-work-from-strategy-to-delivery_388f48d4.html

The story does not seek to arbitrate whether Mary’s desire for preservation or the traveller’s right to mobility is the “correct” use of the strand. Rather, it serves as an observation of a structural dilemma. If our evolving governance systems are to navigate the transformation of rural and coastal Ireland successfully, they must find a way to reconcile the swift, fluid movement of modern policy and tourism with the slower, deeply human timelines of the people who call those places home.

References:

https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/rural-policy-review-of-ireland-2026_d53ea78f-en/full-report/making-rural-policy-work-from-strategy-to-delivery_388f48d4.html

A week ago, esx.ie was quietly configured as the short-link domain for the Essayism family: essayism.org, essayism.ie, essay.ie, esy.ie, essayist.ie and so forth.

The logic seemed perfectly obvious. They all begin with es; x is an agreeable little code-letter for everything that follows. Neat, compact, almost self-explanatory.

Then, without announcement, promotion, or meaningful use – apart from a default error page and one modest footer appearance – esx.ie received 177 clicks.

This raises several possibilities. Perhaps people are intuitively drawn to concise domains. Perhaps the internet has developed a taste for unexplained initials. Or perhaps 177 accidental visitors were simply looking for somewhere called “Essex” and took a poetic wrong turn.

Whatever the reason, esx.ie has made its first small, mysterious entrance. It appears that even a link can have a life before it has a purpose.

For a micro-second I pondered

Ah. Of course. :–)

The 177 clicks may not have been a spontaneous celebration of elegant URL architecture after all. They were probably seekers of sex.ie whose fingers, morals, or browser autocomplete took a slight turn toward Essayism.

Which is rather wonderful: a short-link domain devised as an efficient code for a family of essays, accidentally masquerading as Ireland’s most optimistic typo.

“Essayism begins where expectation ends.”

David Marshall Skerries

This is the material I cut from Quietly Subversive. I'm preserving it here rather than throwing it away. It contains some of the thinking that didn't belong in the finished piece.

https://rvw.ie/quietly-subversive

Move one thing

Perhaps this explains some of the things I've been doing for years. Take the familiar priority matrix. Important and urgent. Useful, certainly. But what happens if we change the question?

Decision for now. Decision for the next generation.

The matrix is still there. But it has become a different instrument.

Or take the briefing. We normally think of a briefing as something produced at a particular moment: written, circulated, read and eventually superseded. What happens if we take the accumulated material and organise it differently? The briefing becomes not an event in time but an object of knowledge. That is part of what I'm trying to do with Brief Me.

Or take opinion itself. What happens when an opinion isn't treated as the starting point? What happens when it becomes something that can be examined? That is why I rather like the phrase: Where opinions come to be examined. And then there is another phrase I've used for a long time: Sequence is substance. We tend to think of sequence as presentation.

First this. Then that.

But the order in which we encounter things changes what we see. Change the sequence and sometimes you change the substance. Again, move one thing. Look again.

The quiet part

Perhaps that is what quietly subversive means. Not rebellion. Not confrontation. Not telling people that everything they believe is wrong. Something quieter. Take the established arrangement. Move one piece. And wait to see what becomes visible. I don't think that makes the writer neutral. Quite the contrary.

Someone has to choose what to examine.nSomeone has to notice the crack in the floorboards. Someone has to say: Look here.

But after that, I think there is an important line not to cross. The writer shouldn't occupy the reader's judgement. The job is to make the terrain visible. To expose the possibility. To put the question somewhere it can actually be examined. And then to leave the decision where it belongs. With the reader.

Perhaps that is why I am increasingly interested in the difference between persuasion and possibility. Persuasion asks: How can I get you to agree with me? Possibility asks: Have you seen this?

Those are very different acts. And perhaps the second can sometimes be more consequential than the first. Because once you have seen that there is another way of looking at something, you cannot quite return to the certainty that there wasn't.

Dig where you stand

So I don't think I have recently discovered a new way of writing. The pattern was there a long time ago. Often deliberately. What I am beginning to recognise is how much of my work it has quietly occupied. Essays. Teaching. Policy. Briefings.

The way information is organised. Even the little diagrams I've been drawing for years. Take something familiar. Move one thing. Look again. And perhaps that is what someone meant by quietly subversive.

Not changing people's minds. Not telling them where to go. Just making sure they can see that there is somewhere else to go.

Dig where you stand. Then look carefully at what you find.

“In good faith”

or “Of good faith”?

I'm working in my barn.

Midway between a church founded by Eleanor of Aquitaine, Huguenot at the time Michel de Montaigne was writing, and the home I now occupy, formerly the sixteenth-century home of the choirmaster appointed by a Catholic hierarchy to win the local protestant congregation back to the Catholic Church.

One wall of my barn is likely the remains of the tourelle of the château of the Abbé Laïque, the lay-abbot of this village, and my potager (vegetable garden) is outside, the former tithe yard of the enclosure. And the seigneur to whom they would all have owed fealty was none other than Henri of Navarre – first a Protestant, then the Catholic King of France, and the man who eventually brought an end to the Wars of Religion; exemplified in this small village landscape in which I am currently toiling.

As the labour proceeds I am reflecting on the English-language Wikipedia article I have just read on Michel de Montaigne and his Essays. Montaigne's famous Avis au lecteur opens with a declaration that he presents himself to the reader de bonne foi. English translations almost invariably render this as “in good faith”. The translation is perfectly defensible.

But as I put away my tools there is a tiny nag, and it will not go away. In modern English, in my experience, in good faith usually refers to the manner of an action. If I act in good faith, I act honestly, sincerely, without intent to deceive. The emphasis falls on conduct: “I may be mistaken, but my intentions are honourable”.

Yet I find myself hearing the French de bonne foi slightly differently.

Perhaps this is partly because of where I am standing now. Tá cúpla focal agam (I have a few words – As Gaeilge) and both Basque and Breton friends. And perhaps living amongst people whose languages have developed in such different relationships to French and English has made me more attentive to the nominal structures of language – to the way prepositions and nouns can carry meaning together rather than simply marking grammatical relationships that modern English would treat as incidental.

It has also made me wary of assuming that the grammars of modern English, and of modern French, present transparent windows onto an older language. We have compressed some things that earlier languages allowed to remain more spacious.

The old association between preposition and noun can carry something that a modern grammatical analysis is inclined to tidy away. And de seems to me to be one of those small words whose apparent simplicity becomes less certain the longer one looks at it. I am not suggesting that de simply means from here. In fact, of is perhaps what interests me first.

Un livre de bonne foi. – A book of good faith.

Even as I write this, that reads a little differently to the Wikipedia article. That sentence seems to me to ask a different question from a book written in good faith. In good faith asks something about the manner in which Montaigne writes. But of good faith seems to ask something about the constitution of the work itself: What kind of book is this? And if I allow myself to take the thought one step further, another question appears: From where does Montaigne speak?

I don't mean that de bonne foi should therefore be translated from good faith. That would be to make the speculation do more work than the language warrants. Rather, the awkwardness of the thought has made me stop.

And now I look through the opening in the barn wall towards the old church. The architecture reveals its history without needing to explain it. Catholic, Huguenot, Catholic again. The old structures of land and authority remain in the landscape, even though the people who inhabited them and the allegiances they carried have long since changed.

And suddenly the word foi begins to trouble me more than de. Because, here in this spot, foi isn't an abstract word. Faith has been lived here. It has been believed and imposed, defended and abandoned, inherited and converted, even woo'd by music. It has been bound up with allegiance, authority and trust. And perhaps that is why Montaigne's little phrase catches me.

The Avis au lecteur is unusual. Montaigne tells me, the reader, that his book has no grand public purpose beyond presenting himself honestly to his family and friends. He has not written to seek fame, instruction or public approval. Instead, he offers a plain and unadorned portrait of his character, habits and thoughts, preserving a record of himself as he is.

The book's subject is not simply the world. It is Montaigne himself encountering the world. And so he asks the reader not to expect anything more than a sincere self-portrait written de bonne foi.

I grasp his intention. Only now do I realize this. And now the nag is becoming hesitation. Past hesitation now, reluctance itself. I cannot quite accept the conventional translation without qualification.

In good faith can make Montaigne sound like a conscientious reporter of facts. Yet the Essays are not reports. They are attempts to establish a position from which a human being may speak truthfully about their own experience despite uncertainty. The essay is not founded on certainty but on a fidelity (foi) to experience.

I pick up a carpenter's pencil lying on my bench, take a rag and wipe away an area of decaying seventeenth-century plaster. And adopt the old habit I and Montaigne both share: writing to clarify:

In good faith asks: How is Montaigne speaking? Of good faith asks: What kind of work is this? From good faith asks: From where does Montaigne speak?

I wonder if the final question might be the most significant. But perhaps I am getting ahead of myself. Because I began by worrying about de, and now I find myself worrying about foi. And foi seems to open onto a much larger territory than I had intended to enter...

Faith. – Fidelity. – Trust. – Allegiance. The keeping of one's word. – Perhaps even the conditions under which one person can speak to another and ask to be believed without pretending to possess certainty.

Montaigne lived through the French Wars of Religion. Henri of Navarre, whose name is written into the history of this landscape, was first Protestant and then Catholic King of France. The very distinction between faith and allegiance was not as clean as we might now imagine. I am reminded of this almost daily, dwelling among my Gascon neighbours.

But I don't want to resolve that here. The historical landscape has already done what it needs to do. It has made the word feel heavier. I began with de. I thought I was wondering whether in good faith was quite the right way to hear de bonne foi.

Now I find myself wondering what Montaigne's foi actually asks of the reader. That is probably another note. For now, I will leave the thread where I found it. – De bonne foi.

And go back to the work- the land demands attention.

---

If you’d like to get new essays by email:

I have been thinking again about pronouns. Not because the subject is new, but because it has accompanied much of my adult life as a writer.

It has long seemed to me that pronouns matter because they support assumptions, and assumptions often support prejudice. In writing, neutrality is difficult. One either accepts inherited patterns of expression, with all the assumptions they carry, or participates in the continuing challenge to them.

My own journey began in the latter half of the 1970s.

I grew up in a family with strong left leanings and surrounded by strong women. The lesson I absorbed was simple: different therefore equal. When, as a young man working for a UK government quango, I was invited to attend a residential course at Laurieston Hall near the Scottish border on sexism and male attitudes, I approached it with confidence. I already regarded myself as broadly committed to equality.

The experience was intense and unsettling in the best possible sense. I discovered that not every radical woman stood on the political left. Not everyone on the left fully understood or acknowledged the realities of inequality. Most importantly, I discovered that I was not free of assumptions myself. I too could display prejudice through habits of speech, thought and conduct that I had scarcely noticed.

That realisation has stayed with me.

Only a year or two before, in 1976, the title Ms had begun to gain official recognition within the UK's House of Commons. Forms of address were live topics. Language itself was becoming part of the discussion.

After Laurieston, I resolved to write s/he. It was never an elegant solution, but it seemed preferable to the supposedly universal he that dominated much published writing at the time. During my freelance years I often alternated she and he throughout a piece. Editors were rarely enthusiastic and many restored the familiar masculine form. Some, however, would tolerate an article that consistently used she.

Eventually I migrated to they. For two or three decades that seemed a satisfactory answer. It allowed me to refer to a person occupying a role without implying that the role naturally belonged to a man or a woman. One also made occasional appearances, though its formality sometimes sat uneasily with my preference for a more conversational style.

But language does not stand still.

Over the past two decades, they has acquired an additional significance through its adoption by many people who prefer it as their personal pronoun. What began in particular communities has become increasingly visible throughout society. As a result, I find myself reflecting once again on my own use of language.

I briefly returned to s/he, but found it awkward. It interrupts both reading and writing. The solution I am currently considering is simpler: to alternate she, he and they within a piece, allowing each to stand naturally and unapologetically.

The intention is not linguistic innovation for its own sake. Nor is it a claim that I have found the perfect answer. It is merely a small reminder to myself and perhaps to my readers that any role, occupation, responsibility or task may be undertaken by a person of any gender.

If, in one sentence, she must undertake the task, in the next perhaps he must undertake it, and in the next they must undertake it.

The point is not the pronoun.

The point is the assumption that lies behind it.

Addendum

To Write Around The Pronoun

I began by asking which pronoun should I use? I end by asking what assumption made me think I needed to make that choice?

I'm realizing that is much more interesting than a style-guide answer.

And it gives me back to a technique I have always used, and a possible fourth position beyond s/he, alternating pronouns and singular they: sometimes the elegant solution is to write around the pronoun altogether.

There is a nice essayistic irony in that. My original ethical intervention was to make the hidden assumption visible. The more successful contemporary solution may be to make the assumption disappear without having to announce that it has disappeared.

That, I think is a genuinely elegant development of the problem I have been carrying since Laurieston.

And I rather like that the note remains unresolved. I will not rush to decide that alternating she, he and they is the answer. It may be more interesting if the notebook records the experiment; because the experiment itself is part of the history of my thinking about language.

David Marshall Skerries

Much writing presents itself as certainty. Essayistic writing often begins elsewhere: with an acknowledgement of uncertainty, position, and limitation.

Increasingly, I find myself returning to three forms of honesty.

First Honesty: Stance Every inquiry begins somewhere. The first honesty is not objectivity but position. It is the willingness to say:

This is where I stand.

A stance is not a conclusion. It is a point of departure. We see from somewhere, not from nowhere. The essayist who acknowledges a position is often more trustworthy than the writer who claims to possess none. The question is not whether we have a standpoint, but whether we are prepared to reveal it.

Second Honesty: Attention The second honesty concerns what we attend to.

Different inquiries notice different things. Some focus on individuals, others on ideas, events, places, or relationships. The character of a piece of writing is shaped less by its conclusions than by the quality of its attention. What we choose to notice, and what we choose to ignore, are rarely neutral acts.

Essayistic writing makes its attention visible. It allows the reader to see not merely what has been found, but what has been followed.

Third Honesty: Invitation The third honesty is an invitation. The writer does not simply present a finding but invites the reader into an investigation. More importantly, the invitation is genuine only if the writer remains open to influence in return. An inquiry that cannot be altered by encounter is no longer an inquiry.

The essayistic impulse contains a tacit admission:

I may discover that I am wrong. I may discover that I have overlooked something. I may discover something neither of us expected.

This openness is not weakness. It is the condition that makes discovery possible.

Together... These three honesties do not define essayism, nor are they exclusive to essayists. They are simply qualities I increasingly recognise in writing that seeks understanding rather than certainty: honesty about stance, honesty about attention, and honesty as invitation.

The first says: this is where I stand. The second says: this is what I attend to. The third says: come and look with me; both of us may see something new.

Or as I have often said:

This is where I stand. This is what I can see from here. Come and look with me

David Marshall Skerries

There is something slightly odd about launching a website devoted to essayism.

The longer I have worked on Essayism.org, the more I have come to suspect that essayism cannot really be discovered through definitions. It has to be encountered in practice. For me, that practice began long before my thoughts dwelt on Montaigne. He was merely a name in school classroom.

As a schoolboy, I was already writing pieces that began not with answers but with tensions. Something in the world would not quite fit. An explanation that everyone accepted seemed incomplete. A relationship between things would catch my attention. Writing became a way of following the question. I would not have called it essaying.

At fourteen years of age, I doubt I could have defined an essay beyond the requirements of school. Yet looking back, I suspect Montaigne would have recognized the impulse immediately. So too, perhaps, would Addison and Steele, who carried the essay from the private study into the public conversation.

The subjects changed over the years but the habit remained remarkably constant. Again and again I found myself drawn less to facts than to relationships. Less to conclusions than to processes. Less to what something was, than to how it had become what it was.

Only much later did I encounter Montaigne himself. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that we became acquainted. Like many readers, I first approached him through his reputation. The inventor of the essay. The retired mayor of Bordeaux. The French gentleman writing in a tower in SW France. The distant figure from literary history.

What I discovered instead was something unexpectedly familiar. Montaigne was not proclaiming doctrines. He was thinking on the page. He was following observations wherever they led. He was examining experience as something unfinished and perpetually unfolding. I recognised the process immediately.

The deeper companionship, however, emerged not through reading but through building. For a number of years I have been engaged in the renovation of a sixteenth-century house in SW France. Alongside it stands a barn whose walls were originally part of the tower house and chateau of the Duc de Treville, the very family into which Montaigne's mother was born. History sits lightly in such places until one starts to work on them.

A beam, a wall, a doorway, a repair carried out centuries ago. Every intervention reveals traces of previous interventions. Every structure becomes a record of change through time. Nothing is entirely finished. Nothing is entirely original. Everything is becoming.

Standing in that barn, looking at stones and the beams that had once formed part of another structure entirely, I found myself asking questions that were unmistakably essayistic.

Not what is this? But what has this become? Not what was intended But what emerged? Not what conclusion should be drawn? But what relationships are now visible? In a curious way, the old stones became companions in inquiry.

The renovation taught me something that years of reading alone could not. Essaying is not simply a literary activity. It is an orientation toward the world. It is a willingness to attend to processes, relationships, transformations, and tensions. The page merely provides one place in which that attention can become visible.

Essayism.org emerges from that realisation.

The site is not intended as a monument to a settled doctrine. It is a working surface. A place to examine what essaying is, how it has appeared in different writers, and why it continues to matter in a world increasingly impatient for immediate certainty.

Montaigne gave us a word. Other essayists developed a tradition. My own contribution, if there is one, is simply to continue the inquiry. In that sense, the site's launch feels less like the completion of a project than the marking of a stage in a much longer journey.

The truth is that I was essaying long before I knew the name for it. Essayism.org is merely where those paths finally meet.

David Marshall Skerries

I spent months, if not years, thinking about publication architecture, essayism, essaying, inquiry, disposition, and the relations between them.

When I went to look for a domain name the market's contribution was:

Essayism.org: $7 Essaying.org: $4300 Essaying.lol: $1.50

Which immediately raises a question: What exactly is being valued here? A merchant says traffic. A marketer says keywords. A domain investor says scarcity.

An essayist notices that none of these is the same thing as meaning.

In a strange way, that's a Montaignian moment. An apparently trivial fact becomes a point of entry into a larger inquiry. And if I'm being honest, I'd rather own essayism.org than essaying.org even if they were the same price.

“Essaying” describes an activity. “Essayism” describes a territory.

The former tells people what you are doing. The latter invites them to ask what the thing is. That's much more interesting.

And, after all, every good essay begins with someone noticing that the thing everybody values is not necessarily the thing that matters.

My seven-dollar domain registration of essayism.org may be a case in point. 😊

David Marshall Skerries