This is for you.

I teach high school Creative Writing. The class is an elective - a voluntary English credit students take on top of their mandatory core English class, so most of my students are kids who love to write - kids who have always been passionate readers and who grew up filling journals with ideas, characters, and entire worlds they've dreamed up (it is an incredible privilege to be in the presence of their creative energy each day!). In one of my recent classes, I gathered everyone on the carpet and we just sat and talked about the joys and frustrations of writing. The students took turns sharing their writerly obsessions, challenges, and vulnerabilities, to which peers would validate with nods and an emphatic chorus of "That's so real." It was not unlike the way I regularly commiserate with my adult writing groups. I could portal into the future and envision my students writing with their cohorts on a sunny patch of grass on their college quads, or in a quiet nook of a neighborhood cafe. These young writers were already so aware of their sensitivities, their sincerity about being human in this world.

A minority of the students who take Creative Writing would not readily admit to being writers (even though they are, they are!!) - for a few, English was not their mother tongue and having a space to write creatively frees them from the pressures of "correctness," and for the others, their relationship to creativity is nascent and shy, as though they still aren't able to make eye contact with their creativity and often act aloof and cool, like they're not even sure how they ended up in this class in the first place. One of these students is a boy who loves basketball and often makes it the topic of his writing, using game and court lingo I'm not familiar with. When I asked him what kind of writing brought him joy, his answer illuminated something for me.

He said, "I like writing when I know there's someone at the other end, like when I text a crush. Or when I write something with a friend in mind, tell them what I'm thinking." In our carpet circle, he was sitting next to such a friend and he nudged him with his elbow.

How poignant and honest and unpretentious! As a writer, I live in my head, at my desk, in the margins of the books I am reading and so much of the contentment I experience is derived from this practice that is solitary, personal, and ultimately, purposeless. But when, on those rare and magical occasions, writing emerges from the privacy of my mind and nudges the attention of a reader - a friend - this contentment transforms into joy. This young boy - this young writer! - has taught me something about writing with an intended audience. It's different from writing letters (which I love and do regularly) and it's different from writing a novel with your target audience in mind (which reeks of the commercialism of writing). It's writing to connect - the heart and the mind, of course, as in the famous E. M. Forster quote, but also to connect all of us tiny beings - the individual knots we too often forget belong to the wider, larger knit of humanity.

So, this is for you.

Thank you for being on the other end.