Perspective

Last week, on the day R.E.M. announced that they were breaking up as a band, I tweeted a comment to one of the cable tv morning news programs, and it in turn retweeted my comment to its 9,000+ followers. That means, though, that my one-off comment, something that had by Twitter's constraints to be no more than 140 characters long, likely reached more people than a majority of my writing has reached.

I do not often have such epiphanies while looking at a smartphone. With my efforts to write essays, edit books, present papers, and offer creative writing, my top three distributed pieces, if I go only by number of people reached, would be a letter to the editor of Entertainment Weekly, where I offer a comment about a misquoted film critic on their staff, a fanboy letter to Detective Comics, where I express appreciation that after the wrenching year following the death of Jason Todd, the second Robin, we got some funny relief in an encounter between Batman and The Demon (obviously, I am letting my geek flag fly today), and that tweet to the morning show, where I quote "Pop Song '89," asking if we "should talk about the weather? Should we talk about the government?" That has been a pretty big realization in just a moment.

Today, I am going to finish grading a stack of essays, and, if I am lucky, I will write a comment on some of them that will help students have a better understanding of the effects of how they express their ideas. I am working on a collaborative project that asserts the place of country music lyricists in the American literary canon, and that project may help others to appreciate those contributions. I will be talking to a graduate student in a couple of days about her thesis; I will offer suggestions to my daughter about a PowerPoint she is creating for elementary school. I have made a mutual challenge with some friends to send some poems out to small magazines in the next few weeks (Friday of last week, such a small literary magazine accepted one of my poems; the poem describes the creative influence of a valued older colleague).

It is time to get back to writing, not being concerned about number of those who read what I write, but concentrating on the benefit I might do those who do read my work.