Tomorrow I teach my short story class at Hubbard Hall for the third year. The class is full, it was full the day it was announced, and there is a wonderful group of at least nine people who will write a short story along with me and the other class members.

I was thinking of the class when I looked up at the “Books” antique sign I bought nearly a decade ago. I hung it up because the “worms” sign I put up kept attracting fishermen who wanted to buy worms, and nobody ever stopped to buy books. I love the sign, it speaks to me another time, when being a writer was something very different, and books meant something quite different than they do now.

Books still exist, and they are still important, but their place in the universe of story telling and language is very different, one form of reading, there are so many others. Being a writer is different also, I can’t help but feeling like a ghost from another world sometimes, but here I am, on my blog, writing more than ever and loving it just as much. Every time I look at the books sign, it seems older and more historic.

I will try and explain this to my students tomorrow, I want to help them write their stories, and learn how to do it well, I also want to help them understand the new world of writing. One of my students keeps telling me she wants to write a book, and I guess a part of me shakes my head, and says, “oh, boy,” you need to understand what this means today.

I can’t say I don’t miss it, I do. Before Facebook. When book tours were special, exciting, crowded. Book lovers, like animal lovers, are a very special breed, I have no issues with a Kindle, people need to do what it best for them, but I am grateful to have been a best-selling author in the time of the book. Kids growing up now will not know what that means, really, or care. But there was something quite special about creativity in solitude, in contemplation, before the world of instant messaging.

People often ask me if I think of myself as a farmer, and I laugh. I have wanted to be a book writer since I was eight years old, and next to Maria, being a book writer still is the luckiest and most wonderful thing in my life. I touch my sign every time I come into the farmhouse.

But you know what? Being an author who has a blog is not half-bad. Maybe one day someone in the future who lives in this farmhouse will have a sign on his porch that says “blog.” And the book sign will be stored in the barn.