Dear Mytili and Elisabeth,

I suppose the reward is remaining true to oneself, not landscaping or abridging one's journey toward meaning and audience to suit a received form, a status quo, the Suits as it were (one's own demons). (The reward is remaining interested!)

• The risk–well, we know the risks. Not being understood; being dismissed, ignored, teased, insulted, quickly forgotten, suppressed even (here I think of historical figures not myself); and perhaps–but not definitely–most importantly, staying poor–no decent (-paying) job to put your love of reading to —
• I'm negotiating it right now. I sent off a job application today; I am (at least on bad days) a desperate adjunct (and fearful of having to leave the place where I grew up in order to get a "good job") as are many folks I know. Some of my students work entry level in Silicon Valley and make more money than I do. Some of my students got through high school without reading a novel. Some of my students are promising poets. One said recently, "I LOVE TO WRITE!"
• There are lots of different models. And I suppose the innovators (or for that matter people working in traditions or cultures made marginal–to put it politely) have usually if not always had to wait (to be heard/valued, etc). Unless they lucked into some sudden fashionability somehow.
• Do I feel pressure to conform to certain styles in order to survive in this profession? Yes, but then I wonder, what is my profession? Poet? Genre-slammer? Freak? I mean I teach and I think I do it rather well–and I write critical work published in "innovative" forums–the penning of which holds me–can consume me–writing toward whatever it is I'm focused on, and toward audience–perhaps the audience I imagine and want is not the same as that of academics. Do academics just write toward search committees? How does anyone have any fun? Or style, for that matter.
• This is important actually. I left the English Department at Reed College for the Native American Studies Department at UC Berkeley. This had partly to do with style. How writers structure the world; how the culture feels falling on one's intellect and embodiment. If it works (i.e., makes sense to one). (Not to mention, who "makes" the culture.) (I want to add quotation marks around who, the, and culture.) (One of my passions as an English teacher is getting people to quit using quotation marks when they're unnecessary though I tend to expect to see them on stop signs soon.)
• I do feel pressure and the pressure does something to the work I write, as does the pressure of my own momentum and interest. I was going to say I ignore the pressure, but that would be a touch utopian of me.
• I love my (envisioned–do I have one?) audience and treat them as I would like to be treated.
• Is inclusion of the personal a taboo, an innovation, or has it been worn out by overuse? All of the above.
• How has the proliferation of online publications changed assumptions about public intellectual exchange, and transformed the parameters for critical dialogue? It's made things a little easier, a touch less hierarchical, a bit more anarchic. (And I want to say that I see pretty much everything as public intellectual discourse–even some ad with chicks in bikinis–this has an effect on the intellect. I know this is not an original thought.)
• I told Cydney Chadwick the other day that I thought I might just give up trying at these critical forums–it can be so stressful–but here I am answering this call–I enjoy reviewing books, I can't help but try to sort through poetics issues, difficult as it may really be, alternately dulling and exciting–and just be a writer. Which is all I ever wanted to be in the first place.

                                              Yrs true, Elizabeth