The reader

"Fuck the reader, who cares about the reader, the reader is stupid, if your book is popular that means it's bad, readers are stupid, the public is stupid, they only like shit, they wouldn't know a poetry if it bit them in the ass," etc., or so went my thoughts for years, even though I wanted a readership more than anything! A paradoxical and confusing position.

Thank God, my bad attitude has changed, but not without hard work, and the internet. The internet has made me realize what it means to have someone read what I write, and that has changed me. I want to think it has made me a better writer, and I'm inclined to think it has, but the only caveat is that my best work of art was done about 17 years ago, and is a novella called "If So Carried by the Wind," and if that title sounds long, it used to be longer! It was the kindest thing I'd ever written to the readers out there, and I knew it when I wrote it, because up until then it was almost impossible to read anything I wrote, because I wasn't thinking of a reader. I was a poet turned into a story writer, living in a time where even conservative literary fiction from students matriculated at elite universities wasn't being published, and in hindsight I'm sure this affected my writing, but I didn't think so at the time. I saw myself as a 3rd generation beatnik free of my society but this was folly. No one was free of their society, not even the beatniks, because in the end we are the times we live in, whether we want to be or not.