SHIRT OF FLAME: THE WRITING LIFE, PART II: I'D RATHER BE WRITING: Updated

SHIRT OF FLAME: THE WRITING LIFE, PART II: I'D RATHER BE WRITING
One night, Bernard handed back our essays and in one of the margins I found scribbled in black pen: “You’re a terrific writer.” I stopped breathing. I wasn’t sure that was true,....
I’m a total ham, and don’t at all mind talking in front of groups of people, and actually enjoy being on panels but I tend to get all overwrought and trembly about the nobility of writing, and the calling of being a writer, and how writing for me is a religious vocation, which is fine except that nobody seems to have the slightest idea what I’m talking about and by the end, I need to get out of there and take a really long, solitary walk.
Updated:
Till then, I had actually thought that writers operated by some moral code that was loftier than the rest of the world’s. I dropped out of the group, have never felt moved to join another, and to this day, for better or worse, rarely show anyone my work before it goes out to my agent, or a magazine, or an editor.

Another way I've been blessed from the beginning is that I have an almost violently protective urge toward my writing. I had wanted to write since I was six. I couldn't get to it for thirty-five years because of my drinking, and fear, and sloth, and spiritual bankruptcy. I had given so much of myself away--body, mind, soul--out there in the bars that when I finally began to write I felt toward it as St. Maria Goretti did about her virginity which was that she would rather be stabbed to death (at the age of twelve, no less), than yield it. I just thought: NOBODY is going to undermine me. NOBODY is going to tell me this is not the calling of my heart. Nobody is going to lay their repulsive, monstrous, cowardly, lemming-like political correctness or Phariseeism or pretentious literary blowhardism or shallow commercialistic (is that a word?) lies on my writing and wreck it for me.