The Perfect Gift

Trish just surprised me with a present: a copy of The Writing Life, a collection of short, powerful essays by the Pulitzer-prize-winning Annie Dillard.

You know, one spends so much time focused on the business side of writing — marketing, promoting, networking, curating, monitoring, posting, updating (and yes, blogging) — that it's easy to lose touch with the fundamental, underlying pleasure of the act of wordsmithing, of crafting a story.

It is often observed that going to college is about 10% going to classes and 90% experiencing life outside the nest. Students are doing everything from hearing about new ideas to which they had never been exposed before to doing their own laundry for the first time, everything from discovering new aspects of their own individual, independent identities to meeting people way, WAY outside their previous insulated social circles (if they're lucky). It's all so huge and exciting that it's easy to forget you're here for a reason: to go to your classes, read textbooks, take tests, and hopefully get a degree.

Being a writer is a lot like that. You get so immersed in the fuss and commotion of publishing that you get forcefully disconnected from the central, vital core of it all: sitting down and putting words on paper.

So what I'm trying to say is: thank you to both Trish and Annie. I needed that.