some thoughts on audiences

thank you all very much for your kind attention yesterday.

i feel like im hosting my first dinner party (except that i can’t offer you a little wine ((or anything 🌬️🌿)) to smooth over any awkwardness)

i’m thinking about a couple of other occasions that are like this—times when i’ve started putting my words in front of new audiences, new shapes of audiences

i used to tell my siblings stories—which almost always meant retelling existing stories—different stories retold differently depending on the siblings and combinations of siblings listening (or very occasionally, reading). i felt so confident in my ability to entertain them that i would never have even thought of it as confidence. during that same period i was also trying to “become a writer,” doing what i thought writers did, which was to privately in notebooks attempt to write original stories. i think the casual storytelling did more for me than the selfconscious writing

at a certain point i joined a writing workshop, where i was so dazzled by the seriousness of the proceedings that i believed myself to be learning things about writing that i was actually learning about workshop. many such cases. i took workshop so seriously that about half an hour ago i described workshop as my first audience. only seeing it written down made me realize it wasn’t true

& twitter—of course most of you right now are here from twitter—either because you know me from there, or on the recommendation of a few of my kind mutuals (to whom im especially grateful). so you might know how twitter teaches you how to tweet. how the text restrictions & the audience (which is to say, not just the people who see your tweets, but the way they use the app) & also what you want out of the app, conspire to nudge you to create a style or even a persona. twitter is especially reinforcing but feeling how fast it happened—or twitter did this to me—or i did this—helped me recognize the quieter slower way that every other medium and audience does the same thing

i don’t know yet what you will be as an audience or what this will be as a medium. i know that i feel more of a sense of responsibility. sending something to your inbox feels like a bigger deal than posting it on twitter where you might happen to see it when you feel like logging on. there is also more of a sense of responsibility here than in workshop—where everyone submitting writing was in a sense “even”—where someone else was in charge—where i knew that ppl were “supposed” to read my work & if they did not i could believe it said more about them than me. i also know that my sense of responsibility is probably more than a little funny to you, it’s just an email after all. thank goodness for that

in any case, i look forward to changing for you