Ryan Van Meter is the author of the essay collection, If You Knew Then What I Know Now. His work has appeared in The Gettysburg Review, Iowa Review, The Normal School Magazine, Ninth Letter, and Fourth Genre, among others, and has been selected for anthologies including Best American Essays 2009. He holds an MA in creative writing from DePaul University and an MFA in nonfiction writing from The University of Iowa. In an effort to fight the extinction of soap opera, he's started watching "Days of Our Lives" again, where all the same characters are doing all the same things that they were when he was five years old.