Best American Essays 1989

"In 1989, when I was 34, I was browsing in an Edinburgh bookshop and bought a copy of that year's Best American Essays, the annual collection that scours the USA's literary magazines, harvesting a yearly crop of excellence. I'd never heard of the series. I thought 'essay' meant written assignments done at school. I had a vague awareness of it also being a literary genre, something associated with names like Addison, Steele and Lamb. Essentially, though, "essay" had none of the appeal of what I considered real literature – novels, poetry, plays.

Best American Essays changed all this and made me realise the potential of this type of writing. I'm still not sure what made me buy that first volume – maybe it was the promise of what its editor Robert Atwan said in his introduction, that the gathered essays "are intimate, candid, revealing, close to the pulse of human experience."

It had a profound impact on my life. I read it avidly, then started writing essays of my own. I'd tried my hand at poetry and fiction, but despite some modest successes it wasn't until the essay fell into my lap, courtesy of that volume, that I found a genre in which I felt completely at home. I don't know how my writing would have developed without it."

As told to Katrina Goldstone

Chris Arthur's Words of the Grey Wind (Blackstaff Press) is out this month