1. Someone asked me, how do you become a writer. I wasn’t sure how to answer. I felt her question invested me with an authority I didn’t believe in. Was this my own fear of calling myself A Writer? Was it my reluctance to be pigeonholed, or, equally, to speak in general for something I believe is best spoken for in the specific?

2. I began to think about what ‘being a writer’ meant, even though I didn’t know how to answer the question about becoming, which in any case I could only answer in my terms which are, be born, then start paying attention.

3. Some time later, a group was discussing a novel and one woman mentioned that the author, in an interview, said that she “always dreamt of writing a novel”, and that even as a child she “wanted to write a novel”. I asked myself, what does it mean to want to write?

4. Writing as a sort of biological process that goes on without my volition? I have never said “I want to write a novel” or “I want to write poems”. These things have simply gone on without my consent, although of course with my complicity and even my active involvement.

5. Wanting to write being, to me, something very different from writing. ‘Wanting to write’: the spoken-of, public face of what is, in my experience, an often lonely, often unglamorous, often irritating or frustrating or depressing way of spending one’s time. It sounds nice, to want to write a novel. But my writing as it happens (though it’s sometimes exhilarating) is a lot of the time just a slog without much idea of where I’m going or when I’ll get there. Or how. Or if.

6. In the past year, officially ineligible for employment, I have begun to say “I’m a writer” when people ask me “What do you do?”. It holds the place that ‘real work’ would take and explains the empty space where ‘Profession’ should be filled in in small talk. Before that I rarely replied that way. More likely to say “I’m a teacher”. Writing, for me, something like religion—private, cultivated privately.

7. Adopting the title, I think about what comes with it. It’s telling to me that only after becoming more involved in literary communities in general—after starting a journal and a press, getting to know other editors, running a readings series, organizing writers’ conferences, and teaching many workshops—that I feel comfortable saying “writer” in response to “What are you?”.

8. After thinking, and in my roundabout way, I replied to the woman who had asked me how to become a writer. I said I didn’t know how to become one, but that I could identify three things in my life that felt like my duties as a writer. They could be divided, if she wanted, into two areas of work: the work (writing) itself, and the professional or community-oriented complement to the work.

9. Woolf’s diary, 13 April, 1918:
“Last night Desmond [MacCarthy] rang us up. I’m afraid our friends’ motives won’t stand scrutiny. His book comes out on Monday; he, though forgetting everything, yet remembers a vague joking promise of mine, utterest at least a year ago, to review it in the Times. He is sending me a copy. He wants to stay here. I’m now debating how to deal with these damned authors—”

10. The three things I wrote were

1. Writing (see number 5, above, for the difference between wanting to write and being a writer for me. I also wrote about that as pertains to certain recent upheavals in the poetry world). The first thing has to be dedication to the work desire for the work in an immediate and attentive sense—a committed, present-tense sense—rather than in an aspirational sense.
2. Finding people who like your writing enough to publish it—not for the glory (oh there is so little glory), but as a way of entering and participating in the arena. A kind of coming-of-age or début. “I’m here! With you!” the book cries for the writer.
3. Finding and making opportunities for other writers. Beating a dead horse, but if every poet who hoped to publish a chapbook started (in collective or alone) a press to publish chapbooks, every chapbook would find a home. Extrapolate that example as far as you like, and not only to publishing. Enjoy reading? Set up readings for others. Benefitted from time at a retreat? Help fund retreats for others. Got an advance that saved you from a crappy job or the sharp teeth of credit-card debt? Find ways to support other writers financially. Wish there were literary journals that publish the writers you like? Start one. Or something smaller: read someone’s unpublished story; let a writer friend know how much you care about their work. My feeling is that my work happens in community—has been supported in community—and that my good fortune means I am now responsible for helping provide that to others.

11. I truly believe it is this last part that made me a writer—to myself, which is the only thing I think matters. I feel I can call myself a writer, with integrity, because I have involved myself with the world of other writers around me. Your mileage may vary. It’s possible this is not how you will go about being a writer. I don’t know how you will do that.

12. ‘Being a writer’ very involved, for me, with things like reading, walking, using Twitter, binding books, seeing movies, talking to interesting people, doing research, traveling (near or far), attending to what is in front of me. Accompanied by a strong desire to make what I have had in terms of good luck (a pair of books and a string of publications, some grants, some travel, a lot of really great company) available to others.

13. I suppose you could say “accompanied by a sense of justice”, which is to do with attention to the world, and attachment to it—

14. Attachment also to pleasure, to what feels good. A different logic from the logic of capitalism (and this is also, I think, where the difference between wanting to write a novel—connected as that desire is to an outcome, a product, and certain kinds of potential results—and writing itself on the daily, material level). Woolf’s diary,16 July, 1918: “[W]e glued 50 copies of Prelude. So far our present supply is ample. It seems doubtful whether we shall sell more than a hundred.” But the books are beautiful. (This leaves the problem of making them available—especially to people outside the rarified air of one’s own literary circle, who may or may not be interested in what one is making, or to people with limited financial means, who may or may not as above.)

15. I believe that if you are able to speak or communicate with language you are already able to write. That writing is the birthright of anyone who wants it. After birth and language acquisition it is only a matter of practice. This is why we call it work. I don’t believe a talent for writing is inborn. I believe writing comes about as a practice of attention to the world, attention to one’s senses and to things that pass by. I believe writing is also a matter of humility, but that could just be because it’s hard enough to humble me again and again.