Reader/spies

"Respect the page, it's all you've got," says Margaret Atwood in Negotiating with The Dead. Also: "Where is the writer when the reader is reading?"

In the studio or at the tavern? I say to my students. The page a kind of mystical meeting place for writer and reader--so we would hope. So I say optimistically, facing a fresh stack of essays to mark.

A humbling thought tho, that pulls you up short. That makes us all vulnerable to that act of translation, transcription. What the mind sees and what the hand puts down.

The eternal struggle, yes? To make what is abstract "real."