Dear Editor

Maria Bustillos pens a love letter:

There is nothing that can soothe such terrors like the calm and reasonable words of an editor, a professional reader, the wise and honest friend who has the wherewithal and the desire to perfect your work, and apprehend any fugitive viewpoint. The writer who doesn’t understand that a good editor’s interests are entirely aligned with his own is a big idiot, and I leave him, with all the pity in the world, to all his entirely unnecessary sufferings. …

The idea of the Creative Person dropping his wisdom down like manna upon the heads of a grateful public is, I venture to say, really dumb. At least, I’ve never met or heard of a writer of any skill at all who wasn’t far more interested in the genius of the reader than in his own. And yet the idea of the literary genius, the lone visionary unencumbered by any imperatives outside those of his own revelations, is still peddled hither and yon. But not by me! I consider it the height of lunacy. No writing can be any good at all unless people are participating in it together, reading it, and enjoying it, and with any luck quarreling with it and being interested in it and talking about it and making new things out of it.