In fact, I always assumed that most everything I read was true, to one degree or another. I couldn't articulate this fact until after I read Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried and he discussed Happening Truth, Story Truth, and Emotional Truth. I always understood that the facts of The Sun Also Rises or On the Road were the facts as dictated by a certain narrative structure, but because the experiences of those characters echoed my own feelings about the world. I knew there was a Happening Truth behind them.

Curiously, the balance seems to come when writing is woven into every aspect of my life, like eating or exercising - one flows constantly into the next: I'll wake up and have coffee, read the news, then write a letter or two (always in longhand), then go teach, and after teaching write a bit in a journal - dreams, what I had for breakfast and lunch and why I had it, what's on the iPod, sexual habits, etc. - then read a bit, then work on a real bit of writing...you get the idea.

As I've picked up more responsibilities in life, I've found nearly every one of those extra burdens drains me in a way that makes writing more difficult. That may not be the case for everyone - I know plenty of writers and artists who seem to have energy in abundance for all the facets of life; but are they producing anything worthwhile?

Energy seems to be the more critical of those two variables, because if I'm really feeling the push/pull to write, then I'll make the time.

Of course, I don't mean to imply that all writers are working in the deep waters that border on the divine. Most writers are just trying to pay the bills, like anyone else - Stephanie Meyers is the literary equivalent of a television evangelist. Fork over twenty bucks and she'll help you forget your troubles for a while. I certainly don't fault her for her success, but I hope she has no illusions about the quality of her craft or the longevity of her efforts.

I didn't write poems for a number of years after graduate school because the criticisms of other students in the workshops wouldn't quiet down in my mind when I tried to work.

In some sense that was a blessing, because it forced me to focus on prose. I feel my narrative voice in prose is more authentically me because I developed it without ever soliciting the advice of anyone else.