Joining in the start-up effort as an intern for Rocky Mountain Reader was appealing to me for the possibility of experience. Truthfully, I asked to join not with any feeling of obligation to the publication or even with much interest in the fruit it might bear for my hometown of Colorado Springs, which to me has always felt sparsely literate.

Rather, I asked to join in the hope that I might learn something about the mysterious and tedious process of bringing out a publication—an endeavor I have often talked about with other bookish friends but never executed—and with the added benefits that it felt proper for me, a student in a literature Master’s program, to be involved with things like the Reader and that it would bring the easy joy of being a service to someone else’s project. These initial interests, surely, have been fulfilled, but reflection offers the truth that it was silly of me to think the implication of my involvement could be as narrow.

I do not mean to say that my involvement with the Reader is of any real importance. The project was in motion before I joined and would have been completed and carried on without the humble hand I offered. What I mean to say is that the project itself goes beyond any personal motivations that I or anyone else involved has brought to it.

The guiding question at the heart of this project or any other project like it is this: why do we create and engage with great literature? The answers to this question are infinite and well-worn. It has produced lovely sentiments about disturbing the comfortable and comforting the disturbed, elegant metaphors about mirrors, about interior expansion and the lives of others. Each of these are correct, each are insufficient. None provide the reason why we engage with literature, but each provide a reason. Like the best writing, they provide the reader with a gesture or an outline that allows one to feel the truth of the words instead of knowing the truth and leaves the question open absolutely. But that openness leaves opportunity for us to settle ourselves in the answer, to take those sentiments that we feel are right and incorporate our own possibilities within them. So, everyone who has read seriously has an answer to the question of why and each is at once true and inadequate, unique and common.

And since each answer has its truth and its inadequacy, I will not offer what I find to be the answer but rather what I find to be a common thread among them: we create and engage with great literature because we love it. It is something that we have made, have taken care to cultivate, have developed to the point of reverence as an achievement of the human race. Upon discovering the graceful hulk of a grand piano in an empty hotel lobby, one cannot help but press a key and listen for the ringing note it sounds. We do this because the piano is beautiful, and because we know that it has taken generations of thought and vision and patience and skill to make something so beautiful and totemic. Literature, too, begs this attention and we have a compulsion to give in. We love it because it is ours, it is us; to neglect it is to insult the experience of having been alive and to slight those that have yet to be so.

In its modest way, Rocky Mountain Reader is an expression of this love. It is an attempt to make space in which those of us for whom the written word is consumed as bread and water can see it and know that it is still there. And it is a lure for those who have yet to find a home in fiction and poetry, one of the many potential gateways by which they will be able to find their belonging in the world of words. Visible today is the growing threat of literary censorship and the slow abandonment of books in favor of more mercurial entertainment, and while I believe that the literary form will never totally lose relevance, it is easy to see the specter of a lesser but equally sinister obsolescence creeping in. The Reader and projects like it push back against this creep by ensuring a place for the generation and diffusion of storytelling, and therein lies the heft of the Rocky Mountain Reader and the significance of its inception: despite any existential threat to literature in its various forms, there is still inertia for its continuity. And the world is the better for it.