One of the things I love about teaching literature is the way its central questions push my thinking. Usually teacher-Jimmy and writer-Jimmy inhabit distinct mental spaces, but sometimes the two dovetail alongside. With the start of the new school year, meeting new students, lesson planning, checking how advisees are settling in, I got to have an exciting conversation with my new English literature class about interpretive authority: who gets to decide what a text means?
The conventional wisdom of earlier days might say that writers have that interpretive authority, and when we read a text, we are trying to discover what the author intended to say. Others, following Reader Response Theory, hold that each reader creates their own meaning, and that the text in and of itself is without meaning. Paraphrasing Barthes’s seminal essay, they might go so far as to declare, “The author is dead!”
As a writer, the idea that I am dead is worrying. And a couple of students asked me, Jimmy, what do you think as a writer about this? Who gets to decide what your stories mean?
Sometimes I write with a horror of the reader. Are they going to interpret this the way I want? Are they going to bring it in a direction I haven’t anticipated? Is that going to leave them dead-ended and blind and throw my story away?
I pity the reader, who stumbles through a story blind. I know my duty then is to lay out the clearest path I can for them, with billboard signs directing where that poor reader should turn next, dropping breadcrumbs to explain the meaning (but not too obvious ones, lest the reader feel patronized), that if I have some “meaning” to express I should box out every other possibility for interpretation so that the reader’s infinite power to decide on meaning will fall, ultimately, into the very interpretation that I hope–is that what it means to be a writer? Is it like a constructivist-education lesson plan? Is it a painstakingly-designed experiential process that tricks a reader into discovering for themselves the idea that I have packaged up?
Leaving the reader free to interpret is frightening, because in our society that both exults the interpretive authority of the reader and also holds an author accountable for the meanings present in their work, what if it is agreed that my story means something I did not intend and in fact find repellant? Leaving the reader free to interpret, though, is not a choice but a fundamental truth of writing that we must accept if we are ever to show our writing to people outside of our immediate social contacts, to whom we can afterward make conciliatory, mitigating explanations.
The first time a story of mine was published, when I was flush with that disbelief and my family read the short piece and literally everyone I talked to interpreted that story in ways I had not intended, I saw the other side–the beautiful creativity of readers to find meaning. Assembled words take on a life that is separate from my own. Their genesis in my own intentions must not, as Barthes says, “impose a limit on that text,” for the story is larger than my mind. That’s beautiful.
Words like trees 
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