My Spy Route

and observations along the Alameda Drain

When I was nine-years-old, I read Louise Fitzhugh’s Harriet the Spy. After I had finished the book, I wanted nothing more than to be Harriet. My recent re-reading of the book, however, left me with a sense of consternation.

How had I missed Harriet’s bad manners?

Harriet’s manners aren’t just a little bit bad, they are so bad that she sometimes puts other people in peril (as when she runs pell mell into the family cook), and somehow, I had missed it completely.

This served to remind me of something that I told my students when I taught writing:

You never know what a reader is going to bring to a text.

The reader

The truth of readers is this: when they read your work, they bring their own baggage and dreams to the text, and my nine-year-old self did exactly that when I first read Harriet the Spy.

Despite what Harriet thought, it wasn’t really all about her, it was all about me, her reader.

When we are taught to write, we are told to “consider our audience,” but writers are seldom told to “think of the reader.” The reader, however, is a critical component of the writing experience. Without a reader, our musings are simply notes — in a notebook, in an electronic file, on a bathroom wall —…