Who is listening?

So, this is the essential problem for every writer.

I remember when I published my very first story, in the Michigan Daily, in January 1966. That's a long time ago now, over four decades. On the University of Michigan campus, where I was a freshman at the time, the Daily was distributed free all around campus, including a newsstand at the Michigan Union.

So, on that very exciting first day that my very first article appeared, I went over to the Union, and stood around the newsstand, wondering whether anyone reading The Daily knew that the actual author of that piece about wrestling on the back page was standing nearby.

It is so nice to have once been young. However, I also now wish, as Bob Dylan put it, that "I didn't know now what I didn't know then."

That knowledge, of course, is that whatever we write, and no matter how hard we try to get it right, it all ends up in the recycling bin, as if nothing at all had ever been said in the first place.

Thus, every writer's lament: Why even try to speak if no one cares?

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