Is writing a dying art? Sometimes I wonder.
Years ago, I taught expository writing to freshmen at a college where many of the students were intensely ambitious. The ones who were most focused on dreams of wealth and power resented having to take a writing class. In their future careers, they figured, they wouldn’t have to do any writing; that would be done for them by underlings.
These days, of course, it’s AI that will take care of all those pesky writing assignments. As AI becomes ubiquitous, no one will ever have to write anything again, the argument goes. That’s a frightening prospect because, as every good writer knows, writing is how we discover what we think.
“Writing is stressful,” wrote UCLA Professor Lynn Hunt in an essay titled “How Writing Leads to Thinking” in Perspectives on History.
“Writing means many different things to me,” she said, “but one thing it is not: writing is not the transcription of thoughts already consciously present in my mind. Writing is a magical and mysterious process that makes it possible to think differently.”
We are lucky to live in a corner of the world where writers have thrived. They were drawn to this place and inspired by its nature, its drama, and its history. That’s one reason we thought it might work to start a newspaper here. And it has worked — so far, at least.
Last weekend we celebrated some great writers who have lived and worked in Wellfleet with an afternoon of readings at the restored Lawrence Kohlberg house, built in 1961 by Luther Crowell on the dunes above Newcomb Hollow. (Our thanks to Peter McMahon and the Cape Cod Modern House Trust.) The simple magnificence of the setting added to the pleasure of hearing great writing read by people with deep connections here.
Andrea Pluhar read a 1995 essay from the New Yorker by her step-grandfather, Philip Hamburger, about arriving for the season in Wellfleet. Longtime summer policeman Marc Spigel read from Alec Wilkinson’s Midnights, his memoir about being a rookie Wellfleet cop in the 1970s. And Kai Potter, who grew up here and writes our “On the Landscape” column, read from Annie Dillard’s “A Writer in the World,” which includes the following passage:
“A well-known writer got collared by a university student who asked, ‘Do you think I could be a writer?’
“ ‘Well,’ the writer said, ‘I don’t know…. Do you like sentences?’
“The writer could see the student’s amazement. Sentences? Do I like sentences? I am twenty years old, and do I like sentences?”
In a few weeks, our four summer journalism fellows will arrive, and we will need to introduce them to this place, help them find stories to write, and teach them something they can take back to their colleges and future lives. One part of that is digging deep to know a place, its characters, and its past. Another part is pondering words and sentences and caring enough to get them exactly right.
