Are you a writer?

These words appear toward the end of Charles McGrath's recent NYT profile of Don DeLillo:

Mr. DeLillo is 73 now and considers himself a late bloomer. He didn’t publish his first novel until he was 35, after quitting a job in advertising and after what he calls “a golden age of reading,” in which he would “consume fiction as if it were breakfast cereal.”

Asked why his first book took him so long, he answered: “I don’t have any explanation for that. All I know is that one day I said to myself, ‘I think I’m a writer.’ I started making sentences I didn’t know I was capable of.”

I think I'm a writer.....

I am reminded of a certain correspondence that sprung from a certain 1996 Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, to which I'd gone at the invitation of Jayne Anne Phillips, whom I'd come to know the year before in Prague. I met Brooks Hansen, the extraordinarily imaginative, genre-hopping author of such books as The Brotherhood of Joseph, The Chess Garden, The Monsters of St. Helena, John the Baptizer, and Caesar's Antlers, at Bread Loaf. We exchanged a few notes afterward, and in one, Brooks—perhaps inadvertently—shifted the way I thought of myself, insisting that it wasn't what one had published that rendered one a writer. It was what one could do with words.

Not a writer yet, is what I had thought of myself up until then, for I only had short story and essay publication to my name, no book. Becoming a writer, is what I began to understand—a category that I continue to slot myself into today: still becoming.

For how boring it would be, how anti-climactic, to have already arrived.

NOTE on the photo: I took this photograph in Vicenza in 2005, in Palladio's Teatro Olimpico.