Do Your Stories Have Deeper Meanings?

Here's the latest from Jami Gold, Paranormal Author :

A joke about writing, meaning, and interpretation has circulated online for a long time. The idea is that literary analysis often delves far past an author’s intentions into imagining nonexistent meaning, usually in an attempt to establish deeper layers in a piece of writing (and thus justify their reason to analyze).

In the joke, a Venn diagram of two circles—”What the author meant” and “What your English teacher thinks the author meant”—...