In the writing classes I teach I give this assignment: write about the best, brightest moment of your life. Then in the next draft tell the real truth about your feelings.
     I did the assignment along with the class once, and to find this best and brightest moment of my own life I had to pass by my first sexual experience, the first time I got it more or less right, that is. Pass by the joy of socking a schoolyard bully in the nose and getting away with it, pass by graduations, a wedding day, even the birth of my son. No, I had to accept the challenge I threw out to my students. I had to tell the real story.
     My happiest, brightest moment was the first time I saw something I had written in print with my by-line. I was living in Amsterdam at the time. I'd saved some money and sublet my Greenwich Village apartment. I was scraping by in a foreign city and it seemed very romantic. I'd seen a couple of young American women performing as clowns on the street one day, and I struck up a conversation that turned into an interview. They performed for tossed coins, they also ran a Clown School, and their lives seemed uncannily like mine as a freelance writer. The money I was making at the time certainly felt like tossed coins.
     I shot a few pictures, wrote 500 words, and sent it off the International Herald Tribune — in Paris, no less. They accepted it, and paid me in francs! I turned my French francs into Dutch guilders and spent them in cafés overlooking Amsterdam canals, sipping dark beer and feeling like Hemingway.
     I didn't know when the piece was to be printed--they told me it was an "evergreen" that might sit in their files for a while. One rainy afternoon I sat in the library pawing through a week-old Trib. And there it was. My article, the photo I had taken, my words, my name. A bouquet of electric flowers opened itself inside my chest, complete with neon swirls and a drum roll.
     I walked out of the library with the newspaper under my coat. My hands were tingling, my face felt numb, in my feet there was no feeling at all. I was (thank God for clichés!) walking on air. The feeling lasted maybe half an hour, too quickly overcome by money worries, beginner's-luck worries, worries about whether the ten pieces I had out to magazines would sell or not (nine of them didn't), and whether I would, in fact, starve on the streets of Amsterdam. In other words, life took over and the electric flowers faded.
     But I had that moment, and I'm here to tell anyone who has not yet published, who has not yet had that feeling, that it is better than sex. I've never done serious drugs, but I've got to believe that it's better than anything available from Big Louie down at the corner. If you've had the experience, too, then you know, we know, we're part of a secret club.
     But why? Why is it so word-defyingly, amazingly powerful? Let's peel the onion of this idea, layer by layer, and see if we can find the center, if there is a center, and try to give it a name.
     For me, the first layer was (and continues to be) that I must make a living. I lived as a freelance writer for twenty years in New York's Greenwich Village, a state of mind as much as a hunk of geography, and I loved it. Then, for some years, I lived the life of an expatriate writer in a small colonial city in the central highlands of Mexico. It's beautiful, it's affordable, the weather is great and the donkeys are friendly. I loved it. Now I've finessed the making-a-living thing a sizable notch or two up from the tossed coins days. I'm back in New York City.
     I can work in my pajamas. Actually I don't wear pajamas, but if I did I could, if you see what I mean. And the commute, from the bedroom to the computer, is a full twenty seconds. I haven't owned a car in years.
     Another glorious part of my freelance writer's work life is that I don't have to put up with a boss. Oh yes, I have to get along with editors, but they are far away at the other end of e-mail or regular mail or, at the worst, the telephone and, in my experience they’re not so bad, really. I don't have to put up with somebody's crazy-making laugh or weird ties (and I rarely have to wear a tie myself). Of course, all those editors are similarly blessed in not having to put up with me and my annoying habits (not that I have any).
     We writers are part of a great and long tradition, like baseball players or actors, and isn't that great? I'm not Hemingway or Woolf but I can aspire to my own little part of the greatness, and so can you. I'm sure there are plumbers and accountants who love their work, but do they ever think about or emulate a plumber or an accountant who lived a hundred years ago and whose work they admire?
     In the midst of the craziness of a freelance writer's life are glorious ways to stay sane. Sometimes, writing an essay or some other piece of nonfiction, I can try my level best to face the reality of our world and of my own personal reality, and tell the truth about them. But then I can pull the slip knot and drift off into the fantasy and delicious what-if of poetry or fiction with intensity and full use of my wit and soul.
     But that's not really it, is it? That doesn't explain the electric bouquet.
     A pat answer, and one I've heard myself giving from time to time, is that as a writer who publishes regularly I gain a sort of immortality. I don't really buy that. I can't imagine anything that I've written, so far at least, outliving me by much if I were to check out this afternoon. Maybe some day I'll write such a thing, and maybe you will too, but we can't count on it.
     Then there's the sheer moment-by-moment pleasure. Writing this sentence, going back later and revising it, playing with these words, is intensely pleasurable to me. Not bad, that. Freud said it, love and work, if we have those things and feel good about them, then we can be happy, or at least not neurotically unhappy. I have love and I have work I love.
     Let's peel another layer. How about this...
     I feel this strong urge to call out. Now I think I'm getting closer to the heart of the onion. I believe we've always felt it, and others have felt it, starting with those early humans who stood at the edge of the campfire's warmth and light, faced out and away and let their voices, words, ideas, their very hearts sing out into the silence where the dangerous creatures lurk. If I sing out my words, these words, into the darkness and the cold, into the loneliness, and someone — you, for example — reads them and, because you are a creative, unique creature like me, you add to them, spin them, find your own meaning in them; then have you and I, dear reader, dear fellow writer, have we made a new campfire out there in the cold and dangerous darkness and in here too in the dark loneliness deep inside us? Yes, I believe the answer is yes.
     Haven't you thought about this on a long night flight — you look down and see the dots of lights, some in city clusters, others that must be ranches or farms way out there on the highway, and you think that just maybe your words are being read by someone sitting in the glow of one of those lights.
     That's why I believe it is so intensely wonderful, words on paper with my name attached or yours, our words flung bravely out. It's what lights the electric bouquet, our ability to make a new spark of light in the darkness, to connect. We first wanted to do this when the world was dark and terrifying from dusk to dawn, and we feel it especially now when so much of the world is dark and terrifying even at high noon.