Max Reif's Blog - Posts Tagged "reader"

I'm starting to get feedback from people who "have read my book, Toward an Interior Sun: Awakening by a Master and the Difficult Road Toward Discipleship. Last night we were at a dinner party and a friend came up and whispered to me that she had just finished it. And she had some kind words for it.

I felt...well, thrilled.

I also felt terrified, in a certain way. I realized anew how utterly intimate is the bond between author and reader.

MEETING IN THE PAGES

Years ago I had my seminal experience in this recognition. I had just finished putting together a chapbook of poems. I'll let a passage from an essay written a few years ago tell the story.

***

I rode home on the bus cradling fifty copies of my baby in my lap. The first copies had gold covers. They felt like pure gold. I brought the books back to the office (a little room I'd rented in an activist-coop building for $35 a month). The late November evening was cold, windy, and delicious. Deep snow lay on the ground. As I entered the building, a man about my age was walking in the hall.

“What have you got there?” he asked.

“A book of poetry I just finished writing,” I said proudly, holding up my beautiful cover.

“Wow,” he said. “May I read it? “

“Sure, I told him. “Here, you can have a copy.”

“That’s so kind of you,” he said. “Will you autograph it?”

Soon I was walking toward my own little space on the second floor, eager to make a cup of tea and go over the poems in the book one more time. I pulled my key chain from my pocket. It was heavy with keys to several churches I opened each week for self-help meetings. Closing the door behind me and putting the books down on the desk, I suddenly felt completely naked, as if my entire psyche was being x-rayed.

What’s going on, I wondered? As far as I knew, I was completely alone, and had been filled with nothing but expansive feelings.

Then I knew. The young man downstairs had opened his book and was reading. He was reading my soul. That was what poetry was: the book of one’s soul, shared.

[from Becoming a Poetin The Mindful Word, 2012]

***

One of the things that surprised me that day was that I felt I had only gone a little ways under the surface in that little book. There was much, much more to say.

TRUTH TO A HIGHER POWER

The eleven stories in Toward An Interior Sun are all about life-changing events. They are by no means "spiritual boy-scout tales." They are rather the truth of my life, insofar as I'm able to share it.

Much of this truth is not pretty. Much of it is about failure, and getting up again, and being grateful to be in one piece in my sixties. But what choice does one have, attempting to write with integrity? Either one tells the actual truth, or one remains silent.

Several people had read all the stories in The Mindful Word, over the several-year period during which they were written and published. Now, readers get them all between two covers, to absorb in a week or two.

The events dramatized in the stories took place over the span of five or six decades, so I've had quite awhile to assimilate their content. I realized last night, as my friend mentioned her news, that I have absolutely no idea what it would be like to read them so quickly!

A SACRED BOND

All I do know is that the reader/author bond is indeed deep and intimate. It is one of the many miracles of human life. An author who has labored long and hard to produce something worthwhile is naturally bowed in gratitude that the universe is what it is: a place where we each create gifts made from our precious energy, substance, and exploration, and share them with one another.


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