Writing is a kind of one-way conversation. Writers articulate their thoughts, perhaps even pour their hearts out, and then . . . silence.
This column is starting to sound like a complaint or a plea for responses, but I can assure you it is not. I enjoy writing, and I am pretty sure I would be doing it even if I were alone on a desert island. Still, sending messages into the void is clearly something that has provoked thought, and, I suspect, even anxiety among some far greater writers than I.
This is my letter to the World
That never wrote to Me--
So begins a poem by Emily Dickinson, who composed some 1700 poems and managed to publish only a handful of them. Other writers have made the point less explicitly.
