The dynamics of identity. They have shifted in extraordinary ways over the course of what I might loosely (very loosely) refer to as my professional life. In the day, to the degree there was any play in what one might call oneself, or how one might promote oneself, the issues came to a head on things like business cards. What was that one word that described what one did, the word (or at most two words) that went under your name. The word that, when stumbled on the later, will call you to mind as someone cleans out their wallet or purse or jacket pocket, and they say: “Dawn Aberg”? Who the hell is “Dawn Aberg”? Oh, yeah, her, that chick who tried to pitch me at Charlie’s. What was her deal?
These days people talk a lot about branding. But that goes to other-perception. How one is perceived from the outside. What I consider in this space is rooted instead in self-identification. An organizing principle that brings some sort of focus to what I do and even am. In the world, inside looking out.
I am, in fact, a writer. It is not only what I do, it is how I perceive the world. To the degree I have ever had any identity-oriented organizing principle, it has been as a writer. It is a self-identification that makes sense of what many (most?) people might consider professional and personal failures. It is an organizing principle that makes sense of a fairly thin (this is generous) body of work. But it continues to make more sense than just about anything else. “Don’t worry,” Bendrix says in Greene’s The End of the Affair. “I am a writer I see everything.” I do, actually, and have always done. Whether or not I have gotten it all down. Here in this little space, I begin to rock that particular jelly bean.
Dawn Aberg 
You good writer.