Category / Writing

by Michael

Soak This Up

I need you to read and soak something up.  There is so much in these words worth reading over and over.  I’m thinking about particular sisters, one of which is my beloved, when I read and re-post this.

Professor Tamura Lomax holds a mirror off of the academe’s bathroom and turns it to us, whether or not we’re in those hallowed halls.  She’s offers it up for reflection and, necessarily, criticism.  Her voice is sustained in the midst of the sweltering and exhausting enemies of her soul as a scholar and communicator of truth, talking and writing and doing her thing in her skin.  She’s grants us a view behind an often unseen veil.  Like good truth-tellers, she’s clear.  And she makes me think about my own role in junk like this.

So, alphabetized, this reflection is for Aja, Blessing, Dawn, Ghana, and Michelle and for the academic contexts you’re currently in, considering stepping into, or pulling yourselves from.  The rest of us will love you and befriend you and be strong for you.  And we’ll use our strengths to be a revitalizing community for you that “loves you into” working and writing and thinking and doing your thing.

Read the full post here.

by Michael

Adjusting Your Dreams As Needed

Dream BIG, and pursue your dreams persistently… and be diligent in guarding yourself against anger, resentment, despair and blame when things aren’t going your way.

Don’t let the difficulty of the path convince you that you shouldn’t have BIG dreams and BIG expectations. But also, don’t let the difficulty turn you into a bitter person.

Instead, let difficulty make you ever stronger; let it guide you in adjusting your dreams as needed; let it spur you toward the path that will result in your success, no matter how close or far it is from your original dream.

I’m finished saying “manage your expectations.” Now I think a better approach is this: Keep your expectations high, but manage your response to adversity.

Read the full post from Rachelle Gardner here.

by Michael

The Warmth of Other Suns Book Giveaway

Isabel Wilkerson, whose book is wonderful for a hundred reasons, wrote about the price of writing The Warmth of Other Suns and a “cave of obligation” over at More.  In celebration of the book being in paperback for a year, I’m giving away two copies.  Leave a comment by Saturday, midnight, CST, and I’ll choose.

I awoke to the cooing of pigeons on the ledge outside my window and the sight of the slate rooftops of rue Racine, gray and streaking soot from the centuries. I could make out the murmur of traffic below, the coughs from the room across the hall, the fumbling for keys and the turning of doorknobs, the whispers and knocking of chambermaids and, in the distance, the aah-ee, aah-ee, aah-eeof an unmistakably foreign police siren. I was in Paris, the last refuge of the man who had inspired me and, in a literary sense, rescued me. I was in the hotel where he’d spent his first night here, waking to the same sky and sounds that he hoped would save him precisely 66 years ago. I’d followed him as far as the trail would lead me. I was in room 703 of the Hotel Trianon in search of the Paris of novelist Richard Wright.

Only a few years before, I’d been in a deep forest, seeking a way out. On leave from the best job I could imagine—Chicago bureau chief of theNew York Times, where I’d won a Pulitzer Prize—I had jumped into the unknown to begin writing a book, the first I’d ever attempted. It was ambitious; I wanted to tell the story of the Great Migration, from 1915 to 1970, when six million African Americans, my parents among them, fled the Jim Crow South like immigrants within their own land, changing our culture, our politics, our country. The project was taking longer than I had ever imagined. I was in year 12 or 13, having interviewed more than 1,200 people, narrowed them down to three flawed and aging protagonists and buried myself in their lives as I retraced their journeys from the rural South to the big cities of the North and West. One of the major events of the 20th century, this was a story so big, I couldn’t see the end of it.

In the middle of what was quite enough, the moorings of my own life shifted around me. I moved from the Midwest to the South, where the people I was writing about had come from. My beloved father, who had tried nudging me into the safety of an engineering career rather than the uncertainties of writing, who had reluctantly abided my decision and then saved everything I wrote (“Isabel’s story on page A14,” he noted in his draftsman’s pen at the top of a New York Timesfrom the ’90s), passed away and would not see the fruit of my hardest labor. With his death, I inherited the role of caregiver for my wheelchair-bound mother, who had always been the proudly and lovably more difficult of the two. And within a year, my marriage of 14 years ended. As for the book I’d signed to write, I was toiling away but not moving forward.

Then I came across these words in the endnotes of Richard Wright’s autobiography, Black Boy:

I was leaving the South

To fling myself into the unknown. . . .

I was taking a part of the South

To transplant in alien soil,

To see if it could grow differently,

If it could drink of new and cool rains,

Bend in strange winds,

Respond to the warmth of other suns

And, perhaps, to bloom.

These words from Wright, author of Native Son, a classic of American literature, were buried in the appendix to his autobiography, as if waiting for an obsessive like me to discover them. In these lines (which are deleted in the current-day edition), Wright contemplated the moment he fled Mississippi for Chicago as part of the Great Migration. He would become the poet laureate of this turning point in American history, whose retelling had taken hold of my life.

By the time I read Wright’s words, I had worked on my book for so long that people began to doubt if I’d ever finish it. Once, they couldn’t stop asking if I’d found my subjects or completed the prologue; now they avoided any mention of it. If I brought it up, it was as if I were talking about an invisible friend. But I saw those words, and a thin sliver of daylight broke through the forest leaves and assured me that I could finish this thing. They gave what I’d been researching all these years a purpose, a breath, a name. I raced to finish it. Published two years later, it was called The Warmth of Other Suns.

Finish reading Ms. Wilkerson’s article by clicking here.

by Michael

“…because they are strong.”

Sometimes the most penetrating words rise from fiction:

She told me about a group of people in Guinea who carry the sky on their heads.  They are the people of Creation.  Strong, tall, and mighty people who can bear anything.  Their Maker, she said, gives them the sky to carry because they are strong.  These people do not know who they are, but if you see a lot of trouble in your life, it is because you were chosen to carry part of the sky on your head.

by Michael

Writing Rules

I saw this list of Zadie Smith’s Writing Rules a couple years ago, before I started blogging, I think.  Since I saw it again here, I thought to pass it on.

  1. When still a child, make sure you read a lot of books. Spend more time doing this than anything else.
  2. When an adult, try to read your own work as a stranger would read it, or even better, as an enemy would.
  3. Don’t romanticise your ‘vocation’. You can either write good sentences or you can’t. There is no ‘writer’s lifestyle’. All that matters is what you leave on the page.
  4. Avoid your weaknesses. But do this without telling yourself that the things you can’t do aren’t worth doing. Don’t mask self-doubt with contempt.
  5. Leave a decent space of time between writing something and editing it.
  6. Avoid cliques, gangs, groups. The presence of a crowd won’t make your writing any better than it is.
  7. Work on a computer that is disconnected from the ­internet.
  8. Protect the time and space in which you write. Keep everybody away from it, even the people who are most important to you.
  9. Don’t confuse honours with achievement.
  10. Tell the truth through whichever veil comes to hand — but tell it. Resign yourself to the lifelong sadness that comes from never ­being satisfied.
by Michael

Do This Sometime This Week

I’ve had wonderful experiences expressing gratitude to the writers I read.  I’m surprised by their reactions to my thanksgiving.  Until I remember that writers and communicators are people too.  Their words come from deep, unseen places.  Their stories and anecdotes, their lessons and characters come out of things we often can’t see on the page.  And what they do matters.  Have you thought about that, how much writing matters?

It’s definitely and a nod to the importance of reading.  But words have to be printed for them to be picked up.  They have to be written to be read.  And I love what writers do.  Aside from my obvious connection as a writer and aspirant of related futures, it’s wonderful to read something life-giving.  Still, that’s not the most sparkling event of my experience.

Communicating, even just a line or two in an email, with a writer is that much more exhilarating.  It brings me back to the humanity of the writer.  It helps me recall that this person–whose words have created a world for me to sit in and walk in and breathe in–goes to the grocery store to pick up yogurt and broccoli and plums.  She goes to restroom and leaves it stinking.  He shaves and has hair to clean out of the sink.  That writer reads emails from people like me.  That writer needs to know that what she did or what he wrote wasn’t published without an impact.

So I want to challenge you to do something in the next week.  If you’ve read an article, a blog post, a book, an essay, or something written that doesn’t fall into those categories, will you write a note to the author and send it?

Thank them.  Tell them what you read and when you read it.  Tell them anything you want.

I was at a conference once, in a breakout session with a novelist I attribute as responsible for my starting to desire to write fiction.  One of the women in the room told her that she saw her at some random place in the neighborhood, which made me feel weird.  The author was gracious.

That said, don’t find them in person.  Just write them and email them.  You’ll likely have to search for them through Google, but the odds are in your favor.  They may or may not reply, but I’m certain they’ll appreciate it.  And who knows, they may just respond right after they get home from the grocery store or, perhaps, after the come from the restroom.

For those of you who have an author you can’t email–perhaps they’re dead or reclusive–post something as a comment.  Name them and their work.  I’d love to know about them.

by Michael

Nathan Bransford on Revision Fatigue

I’ve read Nathan Bransford’s blog for years and find it a chest of treasured tools.  He wrote recently about revision, a lovely mess I’m in the middle of, reflecting on a post by Jennifer Hubbard.

The best way to deal with revision fatigue is to trust in your heart that it’s a very useful and necessary feeling: what better time to turn a critical eye on your book than when you think it is an affront to humanity?

The good news is, as Jennifer says, it means you’re almost done (at least for now). The danger is getting discouraged by your fatigue and just calling your work finished and turning it in before you’ve given yourself some time to utilize that fatigue. It can be demoralizing, after all that time and effort, to revisit your work and be unsure of what it was all for.

Just know that the feeling will pass and instead let yourself simmer in it for a while. Power through and keep working. You’ll be glad you did later.

Nathan’s post is here.

by Michael

A Prayer For Writers #4

Periodically I write and post a prayer for writers and for others.  These prayers come out of my writing life, out of my hopes for the writers among us, and out of my desire for this blog to sit at the intersections between faith and writing.  Pray them or a line from them, with and for the writers you read, know, and support.  This prayer is about paying attention.  Join me, if you will.

Dear God,

It’s hard to hear, see, and write the stories in us.  It is often harder to attend to the you behind, under, and around those stories.  The temptation to distraction is immeasurable.  Our resolve to try is weak.  Turn us in so we can wonder through the maze of ourselves and find good words.  Turn us out so we can live full lives and feed the bellies from which strengthening words come.  Writing is impractical.  Make it so much a part of our days that we do it without thinking.  Grant that living and writing become synonyms so we can say in truth that we live well or we write well, and so that either statement identifies the other.  Spur us to focus on the important way of life, way of writing, you’ve given us.  Narrow the long, wide fields of our worlds.  Identify our purposes as rooted in this work.  Give us joy in doing less better and in, therefore, doing more.  Capture our minds with something sustainable, a character we can’t forget, an act that returns again and again.  When our attention falters, gently get it back.  When our energy wanes, lure us back.  Help us continue looking, considering, telling, and and doing all these with better language and increasing elegance.  In the name of the One who wrote lost words in the sand, Amen.

by Michael

Eating Dirt: Miwa Messer’s Conversation with Charlotte Gill

I found and am posting a conversation with Charlotte Gill, author of the memoir, Eating Dirt.  I hope you enjoy this quick compelling interview from B&N:

Dear Reader,

I have the best job in the world, and Charlotte Gill’s Eating Dirt made me want to drop everything, ditch NYC, and head out into the wilderness to plant trees — and I’m hardly the only selection committee reader who felt that way.  Eating Dirt is more than a memoir about Gill’s 20-year stint planting trees in Canada; it’s also an exploration of the natural world, and our place in it, written with incredible verve and exuberance.

Charlotte discusses planting trees, writing about natural history, and wanting to be transported by fiction, among other things, with Discover Great New Writers.

You were a professional tree planter for nearly 20 years. You grew up in New York State, thousands of miles from the wilderness you describe in Eating Dirt. How did you get involved in the business?

I moved to Canada to go to college. Tree planting was a very common summer job for undergraduates, but I had never heard of it before. My roommate was a tree planter. She would return from summers spent deep in the woods looking fit, bug-bitten and suntanned. She told me stories about her coworkers—they sounded to me like crazy woodland gypsies. She showed me photos of clearcuts that went on in all directions as far as the eye could see. To me, this strange occupation looked both totally fascinating and deeply intimidating. But I knew I just had to try it myself. Certainly there’d been nothing in my upbringing that had prepared me for hard physical labor. If I had known what I was getting into, I would never have gone in the first place.

Planting trees is hard physical labor. You say that it’s one of the dirtiest jobs left in the modern world. Why would anyone want to make a career of such a thing? 

Planting trees is a sweaty, filthy job. It’s done by hand and on foot, often through very rough, steep terrain. There are heavy loads of seedlings to carry. There is bad weather and heat exhaustion. There are biting insects and sore backs, and all the other repetitive strain injuries that come with doing something a few thousand times a day. Most tree planters are in some kind of discomfort all the time. On the upside, tree planters go places most people would never get to see in the course of their entire lives. Some of these are stunning, wild geographies. We commute to work in boats and helicopters. We cross paths with exotic wildlife. And we make incredible friendships—a kind of soldier love. Writing the book, I wanted to explore what that attraction was all about. What makes anyone take on an adventure like this, even though they know they’ll get dirty, they’ll weep, they’ll wish they’d never said yes? Maybe we suspect we’ll get to the bottom of ourselves and discover some hidden well of courage and fortitude—often enough that’s exactly what happens.
There is also a love story inside the book. Can you say a little bit about that?

There is a character in the book named K.T. He was my boyfriend at the time. We shared our planting experience for several years, and the narrative follows our time together in the woods. I never intended to cover our relationship when I began Eating Dirt. I think it’s incredibly difficult to do justice to a workplace romance, especially when it’s going reasonably well. But as I wrote I discovered that our work and our companionship were intertwined. Together, we’d experienced exhaustion, stress, hunger, competition and danger. These are reasonably normal things to face on the job, but they’re also deeply revealing moments when you’re in a relationship. They distil one’s character traits. After planting trees, I knew he’d make a patient, caring, hardworking husband, which he is even now. We still talk about our old job. It’s a topic of fond nostalgia at our house.

You describe the biology and the planetary evolution of trees and forests in a way that’s easy to understand. Do you enjoy writing about natural history?

I’ve always loved reading natural history, and I find it a wonderful challenge to capture science in a way that’s engaging and easy to read. My research began with burning questions. Is planting trees a cure for climate change? Can it do all the things we hope it might ecologically, aesthetically and economically? I discovered that the answers were more nuanced and variable than I’d expected. Does planting trees work? It depends on what we want it to do. Do we want to renew a timber supply? Or are we attempting to recreate forest ecosystems in all their layered complexity? The answers lie embedded in the history of trees on this planet, which in itself is quite an elegant story.

You’ve planted over a million seedlings in your career. Have you ever revisited some of these places?

We don’t often go back. Ours is a forward-moving business, as is the logging industry. We plant the trees and move along to the next place. On the few occasions when I’ve gone back to see the trees that I’ve planted I’ve been astounded by their resilience as a species. It’s as if survival is part of their in-built design. You can plant a tree in a cupful of dry dirt sandwiched between two rocks and that tree will try to grow. That’s a forest’s only job—to build. The trees that I planted when I was a teenager are over twenty years old now. They’d be the size of exceptionally large Christmas trees. And they’ve still got a lot of growing to do.

Who have you discovered lately?

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot is just the kind of non-fiction I love—a book that begins with a deceptively tiny idea but explores themes as big as immortality. HeLa cells: they’re in practically every biology lab in the world. Their original donor, Henrietta Lacks, is brought back to life in vivid detail—her clothes, her children, even the color of her toenail polish.

In my other life I’m a fiction writer, and lately I’ve been indulging my abiding love of novels. Ever since reading Susan Orlean’s The Orchid Thief I’ve been taken with the geography of Florida swamps. I’ve never visited any of these places, but the heat and the humidity, the lush vegetation—well, it’s the perfect place to set a novel, which is why I knew I’d read Karen Russell’s Swamplandia. I’ve also got Heidi Julavits, The Vanishers on my bookshelf. Who wouldn’t want to read a story set in a school for psychics? When I read fiction, I love to be whisked off to other worlds where different laws of physics apply. I want to be transported.

Cheers, Miwa

by Michael

Dana Kaye on Setting Yourself Apart

The point is, having a quality product (in your case, a good book), isn’t always enough to make it. Neither is good publicity. Ultimately, there has to be a demand for your product and it needs to be set apart from the competition. In our neighborhood, there are tons of fine dining restaurants. But not a lot of wine bars that offer small plates.

As authors, what sets your book apart? Sometimes, it’s the price point (offering a $2.99 sale or discounting the pre-order). It can also be the content, telling a story in a unique way. You can also move to areas of less competition and try to reach a new audience through publicity and marketing.

I’ve been in this business long enough to see that a wonderful book with rave reviews doesn’t necessarily equate to success. It takes creativity, drive, and setting yourself apart from the competition.

by Michael

Bria Brissey’s Interview with Michelle Gagnon

I’m pasting Bria Brissey’s interview with Michelle Gagnon where she discusses her debut YA novel, Don’t Turn Around.  I found the interview here at shelf life:

Michelle Gagnon’s Don’t Turn Around hits shelves today. The first in a planned trilogy, Don’t Turn Around follows 16-year-old Noa, a computer hacker who uses her skills to stay off the grid, safely anonymous. Check out the trailer and first two chapters here. In honor of her YA debut, Gagnon chats about the inspiration for the book and shares what she learned from the hackers she consulted for the book.

ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: Where did you come up with the idea for Don’t Turn Around?
MICHELLE GAGNON: I was really fascinated by some of the things happening with Anonymous, the hackers group. I don’t necessarily agree with everything they’ve done, but I thought it was a really interesting use of technology and the fact that there’s a whole group of people who can take over systems and fight things from behind the scenes. And teenagers are such amazing computer whizzes, they are far better than most of their adult counterparts. I thought it would be interesting to see what a couple of teenage hackers would do if they actually formed their own group that targeted issues that were more their concern. Out of that, I got the idea for Peter’s group, Alliance, which is loosely based on the Anonymous model. And then Noa waking up on the table, that was just something that an editor and I had discussed. I kind of took the idea and ran with it, and I created this fictional illness that was only effecting teenagers.

This is your first young-adult novel. Why make the switch to YA?
I’d never really considered doing young-adult novels, but one of the things that a friend pointed out to me is that I’ve actually had a teenage character in almost every adult novel that I’ve written. He suggested that I work with characters who were just teenagers and tell everything from their perspective. It was fun to go back to that mindset of being young and having everything be so important and critical. Having all the emotions be so much more intense, and having such a very clear sense of right and wrong, which I think tends to get muddier as you get older.

I hear you had your own computer meltdown while you were writing. What happened?
I had such a computer meltdown! I have no idea. That’s the great irony of this book is that I am such a luddite — I spend a lot of time at the Apple store at the Genius help desk. And I had a bunch of hackers who were helping me with this book, and they thought that it was absolutely hilarious. And now, working on book 2, I’ve split my time between San Francisco and L.A. I fly Southwest, and one of the flight attendants on one of the flights a couple of months ago—while I was working on book 2—handed a glass of wine to the person next to me and spilled the entire thing on my keyboard. So that was the demise of my next computer. So apparently with each book in this trilogy I’ll be suffering from horrible computer failures that I’m going to have to claw my way back from.

So you worked with actual hackers for the book? How did you meet those people? 
I have a good friend who runs an IT company called Rocket Science. That’s a real thing. They don’t do exactly what I say they do in the book. They are more of an IT support company. But the place is full of 20-year-olds who know more about computers than any person has a right to. The head of that company is a good friend of mine, and he referred me to some people.

Did you learn anything interesting?
What they really drilled into me is that there’s a difference between hackers and crackers. Hackers there’s not really a malevolent intent behind it. They’re trying to test systems and find doors, but not necessarily do harm. If anything they consider themselves to be White Hatters who are doing this for the good of the companies and the networks that they’re infiltrating. And then there are crackers who are more like the equivalent of a teenager spraying graffiti across a wall. Not a graffiti artist, just trying to deface something. And the hackers very much look down on the crackers. I wasn’t aware at all that there were these two very separate camps, and that was something that they clarified for me.

Anything else you want to add? 
Going through this I really learned a lot about the foster care system, and one of my great sources of frustration was that it was really hard to find groups that were actually helping kids in the system. A lot of the stuff that I put in about Noa’s childhood and her upbringing was based on real stories that I found. Kind of by chance I found out about an organization call Rising Tides that another friend of a friend recently established. [Rising Tides is a] non-profit where you can directly support foster teens who are aging out of the system. You can directly help kids who turn 18 and have absolutely no one to rely on. It’s really amazing idea and an amazing group. So I’ve been working with them a little bit to start supporting them and helping them get off the ground.

by Michael

Michael Bourne on the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference

Michael Bourne writes “Keeping the Faith: Ten Days at Bread Loaf” at The Millions.  Bread Loaf is a, perhaps, the premier writing conference in this country.  I’ve cut to the second half of Michael’s piece here:

What Bread Loaf offers is not just the opportunity to rub shoulders with eminent authors and publishing worthies, but a chance to do so at a time and place when their usually trip-wired bullshit detectors are disarmed. At book signings and public readings, authors are hawking a product; they’ll be nice to you, but only because they want you to buy their book. At Bread Loaf, a certain high-school cliquishness obtains — there are cool kids’ tables in the dining hall, and gossip abounds — but that can only go so far. I have read everything Samantha Chang has published, and like every other writer I know, I’ve lusted after getting into the Iowa MFA program she oversees, but at dinner we didn’t talk about any of that. We talked about mutual friends and our children. Justin Torres, likewise, may get his stories in The New Yorker and receive rave reviews on his first novel, We the Animals, but on one rainy night early in the conference he was just a guy needing to share my umbrella on the way to a reading.

The same applies to the publishing professionals, though the calculus is different. Agents and editors at Bread Loaf are quite explicitly there to do business. Each conference attendee can sign up for two private 15-minute meetings with an agent or editor, and an enterprising attendee can fit in four or five more by choosing the right seat at mealtimes or buttonholing an agent outside a Friday night dance. Most literary conferences offer similar access to publishing folk, but because of Bread Loaf’s reputation, attendees not only gain access to a slightly better cut of agents and editors, they also get the reflected glory of the Bread Loaf name.

This matters. As I wrote in a piece earlier this month, literary agents receive thousands, and in some cases, tens of thousands of query letters pitching unpublished books every year, and can take on only a handful of new writers. A conference like Bread Loaf serves a function much like a selective university does for job recruiters: it culls the untalented and unserious. The selection process is imperfect, of course, but when agents and editors sit down with writers at Bread Loaf they are free from the unspoken dictum of all publishing gatekeepers, which states that they can say no and be right 99 percent of the time. At Bread Loaf, as at other well-regarded conferences like Sewanee, Tin House, and Squaw Valley, publishing professionals can get out of the defensive crouch they typically adopt when talking with anyone trying to sell them a book idea and actually listen.

These are the practical reasons to attend a literary conference like Bread Loaf, and I would be lying if I said I didn’t consider them as I was writing that check for $2,725. (Yup, I applied for aid and didn’t get it.) As businesses go, publishing is a lousy one, but it is a business, and given a choice between sending my work in over the digital transom and spending a few grand on a writers’ conference where I can get the full attention of agents and editors, as well as smart feedback on my manuscript from the workshop, I’d write that check every time.

But writers’ conferences are about more than face-time with agents and sitting down to dinner with the poet laureate. I am a man who, like thousands of my fellow Americans, spends nearly all his free time on a pursuit that doesn’t pay and offers few plausible paths to fame or fortune. I’m 46 years old, sober, and hard-working, with more education than I know what to do with, yet I’ve never made more than $40,000 a year, and most years I make less. I don’t yearn for the return of the gold standard or believe in the divine rapture, but I think I have some insight into how those true-believers feel when their wives and husbands say, “That’s great that you’re going to save us from everlasting hellfire, honey, but right now I could use a little help with the groceries.”

But then I go to a place like Bread Loaf where everyone, even the most successful poets and writers, has sacrificed for his or her art, and I feel a little less crazy. Over the years, I’ve watched dozens of writers more talented than me quit the field. For some, the constant rejection wore them down, while others simply needed to make more money, but most of the time, I think, they quit because they stopped believing in themselves as writers and, absent that belief, writing poems and stories came to seem an indulgence they could no longer afford.

That’s why people like me go to conferences like Bread Loaf. Like most Americans, I live in a world that cannot see the point in work that doesn’t bring in money or instant prestige. I myself can’t see the point in work that doesn’t bring money or prestige, yet I keep doing it, day after day, year after year. At a place like Bread Loaf, I can see up close that people not all that different than me have turned this queer habit of mine into a job that gives them money and prestige. But — and this is the great secret — I also meet hundreds of other people just like me, who will never make money as writers, who will never win a Pulitzer Prize or be the poet laureate, but keep on writing because they love it. And, seeing them, I know I am not alone.

Read the rest of Michael Bourne’s article by clicking here.