Criticism that is worth engaging with is not praise or dismissal but reading — a sustained attempt to understand what the work is doing and whether it is doing it well, by someone who cares enough about the form to have standards and the wit to articulate them. The creative person's relationship to criticism is one of the more difficult disciplines of a creative life: how to receive it without either defensive dismissal or excessive deference, how to find what is true in it without losing confidence in what the critic could not see. Not all criticism deserves engagement; the skill is in knowing which.
Mura