A Goodreads user asked Mary L. Tabor:

Lewis Hyde's The Gift is a book important to both of us. Is the laying bare for the reader your search-for-discovery where the "giving" comes in, would you say? What is the transaction between yourself and the reader via the work?

Mary L. Tabor The phrase “laying bare” should not be confused with “catharsis.” Let’s reserve that for the therapist’s couch or for our journals.

When I write, I attempt to make something “other.” That seems to me not a solipsistic—or in the vernacular “navel-gazing”—act that rarely, if ever, gifts another.

I can best explain by how I receive the gift from others. Reading great writing, often difficult, challenging writing is transformational for me. I feel gifted for having received from another the unexpected journey that extends and informs my own experience. The act of reading is transformational when that happens. From the canon: Nabokov, Bishop, Auden, Joyce, Woolf are writers who have given me this gift again and again.

When I write, the gift I wish for the reader is to have been along for the journey with me, to feel the experience as it unfolds. If something happens for the reader, something both emotionally and intellectually significant, the gift has moved forward.

Here’s how Hyde explains more eloquently, “… [M]ost artists are converted to art by art itself. The future artist finds himself or herself moved by a work of art, and, through that experience, comes to labor in the service of art until he can profess his own gifts. Those of us who do not become artists nonetheless attend to art in a similar spirit. We come to painting, to poetry, to the stage, hoping to revive the soul. And any artist whose work touches us earns our gratitude.”

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