This table, around which we sit, holds up our vulnerability while we may rest our hands, our brains, our imaginations (both subjective and objective) in this peaceful gathering of unified differences.  I’m pleased by the comfort found where there could be so much egoic aggrandizement.  Writers, like first graders, are a needy bunch, in want of the security of success that seems as the infinite destination of high school graduation… still ahead all those years of reading and writing, pain and puberty, joy and wonder, fear and insecurity.  We bartered with our lives, our livings, saying that we are writers, but stunted by the economy of reality.  “How come I’ve never seen any of your writing?”, someone asked me years ago, not with any sense of wishing to read my thoughts, but rather to suggest that if I were really a writer then my work would be visible to others; ipso facto, I am not a writer.  The hidden, secret, frightened manuscripts that haunt the world, these literary ghosts never to see the light of eye; innumerable, subjectively rotten, and rotting, lost to egoic diminution.  All the writers who are not, because we cannot will ourselves to finish work, to publish work, to tell the world to leave us alone while we do our work, because our work is humble work, though it bangs inside our brains, and twists around our tummies, and shoves us submissive, beyond ourselves, far into the deep, into that place where people who ask “How come I’ve never seen any of your writing?”, are far too afraid to go. This table, around which we sit, holds up our vulnerability.  Together we bring the ghosts to life.