Three weeks back, when I was teaching at a writer’s residency, it was game night. There were parties. Downstairs in the building where I was staying, I heard cheering, on screen and off. I imagined hurrahs from the bar down the street, shouting from the lawn. There was a lot to shout about. Next day, the score was 42 to 14, Alabama over Notre Dame. That night as I lay there, lights off, trying to relax before the next early morning, the next long day of teaching and talking about the writing life, the world was so alive I couldn’t sleep.

What I was thinking about was the nature of competition itself. Words from game world. Goals. Yards earned. Points. Those words circled in my head with similar words and phrases from the previous days at the residency. Earned a position. Books snatched up by so and so. Work meets its goal.

What is the goal of the writing life?

For myself, for years, the goal has been position as much as anything. I’ve lobbied for jobs, grants, fellowships, agents, publishers, publications. And those, I know, are the necessary tools of the trade, the reality of the writing business. I want those tools of the trade as much as anyone else.

But there are parts of the game that have begun to wear me down. One friend says of another. She thinks we’re more talented than she is. Or I walk into a big writer’s conference with my husband and he says, “you can feel the force of the egos in the air,” and I want to shrug this off. But he is right. I feel it as much as he does. Another friend says this. I’m tired of not being invited to the table in the writing world. When am I going to get there? When she says that, I want to take the high road, tell her that there is only one table, artistry, and that we all eat there. But secretly, I have the same fears. The same resentments concerning who is publishing where, how many books so and so has, how fast those books are written and what jobs at which place those books have earned her.

What I want to believe is this. Lewis Hyde quoting Joseph Conrad in his book on writing. ‘The artist appeals…to that in us which is a gift and not an acquisition–and, therefore, more permanently enduring. Art speaks to our capacity for delight and wonder, to the sense of mystery surrounding our lives; to our sense of pity, and beauty, and pain; to the latent feeling of fellowship with all creation–to the subtle but invincible conviction of solidarity that knits together the loneliness of innumerable hearts, to the solidarity…which binds together all humanity–the dead to the living and the living to the unborn.’”

I lay there a long while that night of the big game. I watched the shadows of branches move across the window blinds and listened to the voices downstairs, wishing I knew how to go there and sit, quietly.