(Images provided by DWB)

“I live like a poet and I’ll die like a poet.” – Bob Dylan

The person in these pictures is a poet in action.

She’s a poet and she does know it, but she does not show it, at least not in any overt kind of way (or hardly ever).

She’s 18 now, recently graduated from high school (she went to Hemingway’s high school), and she tried the poet clubs and poet readings at the school.

But she couldn’t really stand any of them.

Because she is horrified by any sort of insincerity. She can even feel it approaching before it’s there. For her, insincerity is akin to the proverbial fingernails screeching across a chalkboard. For her, most formal poetry readings and poet gatherings and poet clubs, and so forth, have the same sincerity value as Amber Heard’s testimony at the Johnny Depp trial which she, like her father, could not stand watching because of how blatantly insincere, false, and totally FAKE it obviously was.

(We were watching the trial because we’re Johnny Depp fans, big ones. And even though I couldn’t stand watching Amber make a fool of herself, or maybe because I couldn’t stand watching her make a fool of herself, she reminds me very much (physically included) of someone I once knew (and dated, and almost married), a stage actress and theater professor from Chicago, Illinois, which has more theater than any other place in the country except NYC).

To be a professional academic poet in the USA of today, one has to give professional poetry readings, and attend professional poet gatherings, and join poetry clubs, 99.999% of which have about as much sincerity as the testimony of Amber Heard at the Johnny Depp trial.

Hemingway, as a famous writer, was terrified of formal public speaking, so much so that he rarely, or never, did it.

Bukowski, Hemingway’s most famous direct heir, gave the greatest poetry readings of any poet in American history.

He could hold an audience of hundreds in the palm of his hand for hours. Almost literally.

And yet he hated doing it – hated it unto the death; because he said it made him feel like a fake, a freak, and a fraud.

The person in these pictures is a poet, but she almost never shows it, not in any overt way. (Although if you’re a sensitive human who’s a good judge of character and an artist, or artistically inclined, you may be able to tell it from a single glance.)

(Images provided by DWB)

“You’ll find it when you stop looking.” – D.W. Barrigar

At 18, she doesn’t quite know it yet, but the way she walks, the way she talks, the way she thinks, and the way she acts all indicate one thing: writer.

Just who and what a writer is now is undergoing great flux and change, great challenges and readjustments. It’s been happening very dramatically since around the year 2000. We live in a period of rapid and sudden uncertainty, and we, of course, don’t know how things will pan out.

Edgar Allan Poe, it’s often said, was the first American writer who actually tried to make a living from his pen and nothing but his pen.

He failed miserably, had to work mostly as an editor instead, and died in the gutter because of it.

Before that, it wasn’t as if America didn’t have writers. Most people wrote and read letters, for instance, every day. (If they were “illiterate,” they dictated their letters and had letters from others read aloud to them from someone around them who could read and write.) It was simply the case that making a living as a creative writer was fairly unheard of. There were zero copyright laws at that time, among other reasons, many other reasons.

Geoffrey Chaucer, of England, author of the Canterbury Tales, is considered the first actual, individual author in the English language, in the modern sense. (Rome and other societies had their own versions much earlier than that.)

And making a living as a writer, as nothing more than a writer, never crossed Chaucer’s mind.

He had a million other jobs instead, while also completing the most lasting work in the English language outside of Shakespeare. And we all know how Shakespeare supported himself.

So even if she never publishes a word, and even as she also does other things, too, this is a writer in action – not tomorrow, not in a few years or decades, now.

America thinks everything is about money.

The best-seller mentality has poisoned the well of the minds of so many writers that many, or even most, of them have stopped writing seriously even as they still dream of writing.

I taught in the writing schools of the Midwestern USA for over twenty years, first as a graduate student, later as a professor and lecturer.

It gradually dawned on me that there was a mindset that was killing the creativity of many of my students.

Too many of them believed that if they didn’t become rich and famous writers overnight, then they weren’t writers at all.

And they quit doing it. They stopped writing. Because they thought the lack of instant “success” meant they weren’t good enough. So they bowed out, with embarrassed smiles on their faces. It was sad to see, sad that so many had (and still do) fallen for the lie. The big lie.

Writing, creative writing, is something you do if you’re called to it. Any outward success, or lack of so-called outward success, is never going to stop you if you’re a real writer.

We are all writers today, in many ways, inventing personas for ourselves, using words to text and email each other all the time every single day.

Jesus was a writer, even though he never wrote a word, except one known time, with his finger in the sand.

But who told more lasting, wide-ranging stories than he did? Short stories, usually very, very short stories, so powerful they turned him into the most famous human being who’s ever lived or ever will live – bar none. It was his words that did everything, including bringing back the dead. (“Lazarus, come out!”) And that makes him a writer. He was never paid a pittance for it, not even a single cent, ever, not even one time.

(He was never directly paid, but he was given free food, lodging, and wine from his audiences and hearers.)

The person in these pictures is a writer in action, even if she doesn’t quite know it yet, even if she never “publishes” a word.

“Nothin’ ain’t worth nothin’, but it’s free,” wrote Kris Kristofferson.