Is Writing Elitist? Yes. But It Shouldn't Be

If you live to write, you deserve to be in the room. Period. End of sentence.

I’ve been writing for as long as I could remember. My first publication was in second grade—a haiku in which I likened my mother’s voice to thunder. Before I was 10, I’d seen junkies overdosing in parks, bodies carried out on stretchers; cocaine on glass tables and heroin shot into abscessed arms; The Shining in a movie theater; my neighbor Sylvia, who …