A great story about reading and writing

I have been reading a lot about writing. About how writing is changing, how it is becoming more collaborative, how the read/write web is changing how we read and how we write. Are we more aware of an audience? do we need to be? Does it transform how we interact with others? Does it change how we view ourselves? others? I just enjoyed how Keillor connects the two and how he mentions this need for intimacy in people's lives. It still amazes me how intimate I feel towards people across the internet than people next door to me.

clipped from www.washingtonpost.com The Reading Life A natural storyteller reveals his boyhood salvation -- books. By Garrison Keillor All of storytelling is an opening of the heart, a search for intimacy with strangers. Intimacy is a necessity of life, and we would go insane without it. On planes and trains and long bus trips, in bars, coffee shops, it happens all the time: You sit next to someone you don't know, and a spark is struck and you wind up telling more about yourself than you ever told your parents or your sister. A writer starts out trying to show off, but if you keep going, you learn a thing or two. One, that writing is less like Destiny and more like dentistry: You get up in the morning and go to work. And, second, the great pleasure of stories is to be of one mind with another human being, and to that end, it isn't so important whether I write the story or you write it and I read it, they are two sides of the same pleasure.