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The head above the sheet metal. Will I stop ascribing. Can I get rid of the I without hatred. Do I need to go outside writing--since it is so relentlessly self referential. Reluctant Beijing

I have wondered about this desire/identity I have as a writer. I think in words, comfortably and deeply, saturatedly in words, but I wrestle so much with the activity of reading, of ignoring the waking world. Thalia Field said to me when I said I don't have a very good attention span, Your whole generation has no attention span, and then you write these long long long things. It remains to be seen whether I am a good editor--I do a lot here, but I always could be doing more.


Maybe I do look for the cracks and dissatisfaction and unhappiness, because that is, as Pearl S Buck said, what drives an artist to create, create, create, because everything is felt a thousand times more. I lie awake worrying about how the PEN letter referenced something not every writer reading the newspaper would know about. I lie awake thinking about him and how when I meet someone with fair curls like his my chest still hurts. I wonder if I will ache about it for the rest of my life, with no regard to reason, to what should be.

I don't think I go so far as to create them--most of the time.

"Get rid of the whiny I"