With the whole project in mind, I'd like to get at a rather unanswerable question (via Charles Ives's piece of the same name): "What was being American?" which could register as being for Americans of the past, or for the contemporary loss of "being American", or for future historians looking back at whatever happens to us. Perhaps too impressionist, not to mention naive. In practice, at the moment, it's just writing by people I care about, and the conceit in all of this is that merely curating good writing, we could get at an "ontology" a bit tongue in cheek.
“The writer is always the ghost of the writer he wants to be.”