I don’t think the concept of “tribes” applies to writers because writing is an innately solitary activity. It becomes social when people read and respond to it, but, valuable as that response is, it exists as something apart from the work itself. There is a great difference between the book as it exists nested in the mind of the writer, the book out in the world without that organic context, and the book as it’s received by the reader and given a home in that reader’s mind.

A pop song must be something very different in the mind of the musician than the sound you hear whipping by you on a car radio or coming out of a restaurant sound system. That sound can be powerful for the listener, and it gets associated with feelings and experiences she’s having around it—which might have to do with the actual music or not. In a similar way, reader responses, while interesting on their own terms, sometimes don’t seem to have much to do with what the writer has actually written. The difference is that responses to music have a tribal feeling because music can be experienced in groups; it penetrates people in such a fluid, emotional way that you can feel everyone is experiencing it as you are. But reading takes place as writing does—alone. It penetrates you less quickly and viscerally than music, and it gets filtered through the brain with more nitty particularity. It’s an intense one-on-one interaction between the creative and the intelligent receptive, which brings the book a very individual life. Readers can translate a beautiful book into something ugly and stupid, or they can blithely accomplish the reverse. For better or worse, they make it theirs in a different way than it belongs to the writer, or to other readers. For that reason, I can’t imagine a tribe of readers, let alone readers existing as a tribe for a writer.

Because of the individual and private nature of the experience, I don’t feel a tribal kinship with any group of writers past or present. I like and admire many writers of all kinds, but I don’t feel that kind of affinity. I feel a certain recognition or emotional/perceptual identification on reading a variety of writers: Nabokov, the early Updike, Emily Brontë, Carson McCullers, Charles Dickens, also newcomers Rebecca Godfrey, J. T. Leroy, and Nani Power. But I don’t think that makes me like them, nor do I think they are like each other, tribally or otherwise. If I think in terms of species, I would say Updike and Nabokov are the most closely related—to each other, not to me—but I don’t think of either as a species that travels in packs!

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