In November 2013, Mary Cappello brought essayist David Lazar to campus to share and celebrate his latest book, Occasional Desire in our Read/Write Series. Earlier in the year, Cappello and Lazar, both of whom work in the vanguard of the essay and new nonfiction form, interviewed each other for Andy Fitch’s magnificent archive, The Conversant. Can an interview approximate the intensities of an essay’s occasional desires? Click here to read Lazar and Cappello on convergence, coincidence, peregrination, digression, improvisation, conundra and conundrums, character actors, psychoanalytic logics, the auditory sublime, mood rooms, Georges Perec, Charlie Chaplin, creative writing pedagogy, and overcoats.