Doctors are generally held to be ambitious individuals. Lawyers as well, and scientists. But none of these professionals have anything like the ambition of your average young writer. Many writers have their heart set on best-sellerdom, or at least having their novel stocked on the shelves of the local bookstore. Others fancy themselves the next Hemingway or Dylan Thomas, their works to be anthologized and taught in college classrooms. These grandiose dreams are certainly good motivators—but they fade in time after repeated bashings against the stone wall that is today’s publishing industry. If you don’t know anyone inside the castle who will let down the drawbridge ...

Meanwhile in the here and now there are many ways in which our writing talent can be of service, if we only look for them. I’m not talking about local literary journals (though, you know, the door is always open) but the very intimate audience of our family, friends and neighbors. A small audience to be sure, but a devoted one.

Writing for the family is not stressed in workshops or how-to-get-published books, and certainly not in MFA programs. I stumbled into it quite by accident. When my grandfather died my mother asked me to write an elegy for him. I started composing poems and speeches for friends’ weddings, skits for Halloween. I even wrote a small play for a bachelor party (with the groom acted the part of the bride!). What struck me about these off-the-cuff compositions was how much they were appreciated by everyone around me. Even years later, a friend of mine will bring out a poem I wrote for her wedding, though the marriage itself is long since dissolved. At funerals, in particular, a delicate pen is needed—the hardest thing I’ve ever had to write was a 60 word obituary for a friend killed in an accident. And then there’s the matter of family history. My mother-in-law, who recently died of cancer, had in her last years written a fascinating two-hundred-page memoir about her childhood. This is the greatest legacy she’s left us—part of herself.

Some writers may feel constrained by the specific formats and subject matter of this kind of literature, but isn’t it good, every once in awhile, to write for someone not yourself, to work under pressure for a command performance? As Bob Blaisdell mentions in this issue’s essay on Kafka, writing does a body good, and writing for others does them good as well.

Up until 1800 or so—and more recently in many parts of the world—tribes or communities would each have their own village bard, an artist-historian-entertainer who made a living by words. Isabel Pagan, who Suzanne Nielsen courts in this issue’s Cool Dead People, was one, and the ballads of Robin Hood and King Arthur are the handiwork of others. In a world where news, entertainment, and even houses are mass-produced, we still need our village bards—to add color and originality to our ceremonies and festivals, to set down better than any camcorder who we were and what we did. And to give us back, in the wondrous alchemy of words, something that is entirely our own.

- Joel Van Valin