How does my writing relate to my life? Sometimes when I sit here before my blog, I struggle to find something useful to write about. Other times, I'm overwhelmed by the overabundance of topics. Tonight is an example of the latter case. If I just drew from a running list of stuff I maintain on my wiki, I could write about anything from Studs Terkel to a Taiwanese dance company -- with Bach thrown in. Too many things have been happening to me for me to get all of my life down on paper. Maybe I should shrink my lived experience down to what I can write about. In that case, I would stop reading another book, seeing another film -- or talking to another person. I could then contain my life, bottle up the essence of my life into written words. But what kind of life would that be? A writer's life?