Why Write? Why Read?

A week ago, I was honored to give the commencement keynote address at the Stonecoast MFA Program. I'd like to share one section of the speech I gave, which I think speaks to the current unease about the state of where we are now as writers and book lovers:

Recently, in the Guardian newspaper of London, novelist Philip Roth predicted that in 25 years, the number of people reading fiction would be similar to the number of people who today read Latin poetry. If you talk to authors, editors, and journalists who cover writing, they'll all say the same thing: The publishing industry is at one of the lowest points that it's ever been.
Then again, the good news, I guess, is that for as long as I can remember, people have been saying the publishing industry is at one of the lowest points that it has ever been. I keep asking myself, when was this supposed golden time in publishing when everything was just hunky dory?

Still, I do think it's fair to say the notion that a work of writing is something you can exchange for money is becoming fairly outmoded. Increasingly, text, or what is currently referred to as "content," is something that readers expect to be delivered for free to their laptops, their PDAs, and now their Kindles. Remember when we used to buy newspapers and magazines? Remember when we used to buy books in bookstores? Remember when books were made out of paper instead of digital blips?

When it come to the economics of publishing, we don't know if we're at the bottom of a valley that in the coming years will slope back upward, or if we've reached a new plateau that will stretch on to the foreseeable future. Maybe writers will once again be able to earn money for their work in the way that they used to. Or maybe they won't.

However, there is one thing I do know for sure: The world needs writers.

I'll say it again. The world needs us. In fact, at the very time that our work seems at its most under-read, undervalued, underappreciated in every way, the world needs us worse than ever, even if the world doesn't quite know it yet.
Facebook is fun. Tweets are witty. Blogs are, well, blogs are blogs. But none of these can inspire us in the same fundamental and important way that a great work of literary fiction and pop fiction, non-fiction, or poetry can. I'm thinking here of E. M. Forster's simple yet desperate plea from his brilliant novel Howards End: "Only connect..." Forster wasn't talking about searching for a WiFi connection to log onto his Gmail account. He was asking us to see and hear each other in the fullness and richness of the individual human experience. And in an age when we're constantly glued to screens, both for work and for pleasure, we as human beings are in desperate need of genuine connection with each other and ourselves.

Now, I don't mean to sound like some Luddite here. I love my laptop too. I watch TV pretty much every day. I check my email almost every five minutes.

Also, I want to make clear that the acts of reading and writing are not the only antidotes to our contemporary illness of being entertained to death. There is a whole host of things we all could do each day to fulfill E. M. Forster's maxim of "Only Connect": We could cook a good meal for a friend, we could listen to someone we love, we could close our eyes and take several deep breaths of air, or simply smile at someone we don't know. All of us, writers or not, can do things like these every day to connect more deeply with the very real world in which we live, at a time when it's so much easier and more tempting to simply connect to the Internet.

The trouble is, that all too often we forget to connect. So we need certain people in our society to remind us to do just that. And that's where writers, you guys, come in. By laboring each day to use black ink-marks to recreate our world, or to imagine worlds that don't exist but just maybe might, you stir us to stop watching passively as our lives go by, to stop whatever we're so busily doing for one moment, and... think. Just think.

So that's why I think it's not only advisable but in fact essential that as writers you keep doing what you're doing, published or unpublished. And if not for us, then do it for yourselves. Even if your work touches just one soul, it's worth it. And maybe that one soul just happens to be your own.