Phil Jackson

I woke up a few minutes ago thinking about the writer and the reader, about the difference between them, if there is a difference that is, about what makes a writer a writer and a reader a reader.

Kafka had that thing about a real book being able to break up the ice within you, but I wonder if he wasn't writing as a writer? And E. Dickinson that a poem should make the hairs on the back of your head stand up is writerly as well. James Wright, poet, when asked by The Paris Review, said he wrote for the intelligent reader, which makes him the intelligent writer that he was and still is.

Maybe writer and reader are truly inseparable, and always will be , beyond the Duchampian conceit that the reader is as much a creator as the writer or the deconstructionists that followed, most of them French, who said yes to that, adding to the obligation of writer and reader the real work of tearing down what's been created to create a new text altogether.

Every writer has one good reader or at least two. In some cases these two are one and the same.