Welcome, Readers.

I suppose I am used to imagining readers. After all, I’m a novelist. I’ve sat at this very screen, inventing characters and scenes and stories, and inevitably, lodged in that act is the idea that someone, somewhere will read it. I am also an editor, and clients come to me with their own stories–imagined stories and life stories–and they come to me because they want those stories to end up in the hands of other people.

Thaisa Frank talks about this process of your work being read as the necessary destruction of the work. She likens it to Tibetan sand drawings, intricate designs created entirely in colored sand. After people view these, or perhaps as people view them, they are destroyed. Sand, people–no glue, no plexiglass cover screwed down tight–just carefully placed grains of sand. Aaaa-choo.

And so it is with our work. We hand it over to a reader or a small mass of them, and the book is destroyed. It becomes something else. The grains of it scatter.

My sons love to eat sand. Their uncle set them up with a sand box in the front yard, and the first thing Charlie did when he got in there was to start shoveling sand into his mouth as if he were bound and determined to win a sand-eating contest. Little hand, scoop and shove, scoop and shove.

“Charlie!”

He looks up, his wee lips ringed in it.

If you can find no readers, birth them.

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