INTRODUCTORY ESSAY
By Harry Polkihorn

"600 WRITERS?"

Let us carefully examine the following statement: There aren't 600
writers worth publishing. If not 600 then how many? 500? 1,000? What if
there were only one writer whose work was worth publishing? Better yet,
what if no writer's work was worth publishing? To complete the picture,
what if all writers' works were worth publishing? Those would be the two
poles of this particular spectrum, none and all. Does the exact, or even
approximate, number matter, if regarded from within the context of a
discourse on aesthetics? No matter how you view it, at some point
considerations of value can no longer be left tacit but must be brought
out into the light of day. Until the Internet develops to its end point,
an editor will always be faced with choices.

How is "worth" to be established? Just to go along with the pragmatic
spirit of our culture, I'm proposing that we start, but not end, with
the quantitative. I believe there are about 260,000,000 people in the
United States of America today. In my imagination I see thousands dying
and thousands more being born each day. Of these 260,000,000 perhaps as
many as half cannot write for one reason or another. Some are too young,
others stricken with illnesses, and so on. We are left with 130,000,000
writers. How many of these 130,000,000 writers' works would be worth
publishing at a given time? Let's discard 99% as being beneath our
notice. That leaves 1%, or 13,000,000. To be conservative, we could
discard a full 99.9% of the 130,000,000, which would leave 130,000
writers whose works are worth publishing. Let's discard another 30,000
just to be safe, leaving 100,000, which becomes a kind of quantitative
horizon of the publishable in the U.S.A. in 2003. Quite a large pool of
writers! In fact, it' s a rushing river of writing, most of which, as we
know, goes definitively and forever unpublished. Thus, without
attempting any form of traditional evaluation of "quality," we can see
very clearly that the chance is quite high that almost all writing of
worth never sees the light of day, a strange state of affairs on the
face of it. (cont)

(read the whole essay at www.muse-apprentice-guild.com)

august highland
worldwide literati mobilization network
culture animal
www.litob.com
www.muse-apprentice-guild.com



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