I write because I’ve wanted to be a writer since high school.  I write because I was praised in high school.  I write because a teacher I admired too much  revered writing and writers.  I write because I want him to admire me, even after all these years.

I write because the writers I like seem to know secrets I don’t.  I write because I want to find out what those secrets are.  I write because I read.  I write because I keep reading writers who say they write to find how what they think, and then I think, “I wonder what I think?”

I write because I think it will cause some people to remember me, even if only for a few more years after I’m gone.  I write because I think that I can leave behind an artifact, but then I think of those 18th and 19th Century writers whom  no one, and I mean NO ONE, reads anymore, their artifacts sitting year after year untouched on library shelves, so good luck with that.

I write because I can’t paint, or really do anything else particularly well.  I write because I think I’ve got some verbal fluidity.  I write because I can.  I write because why shouldn’t I?  I write again because I can’t stop.  I write because I know the alphabet, and I know how to use those letters to make words, and sentences, and paragraphs, and…

BIO: Raymond Soto retired from UCLA after thirty-four years of happily engaged intellectual curiosity as an academic librarian.  One of  his most interesting assignment was to pack up Susan Sontag’s library and papers in her apartment and ship them home to the UCLA Library’s Department of Special Collections.  He has admired her writing since reading her collection of essays, _Against Interpretation_, in 1967.  He lives in San Pedro, CA and he writes because…