“. . . we are only beginning to see in certain bodies of work not only the words but the process of composing. For Stein and others – one thinks of the poet Susan Howe’s variant readings of the poems of Emily Dickinson – the word text includes that process. The energy of a piece comes in part from the act of writing, which enters it as value that can be read, just as hues and brush strokes can be read in a painting. A text must be transcribed with attention to the evidence of its making. Print, while it cannot always reproduce that process, need not wipe it out. Inside a text are the lines that carry the words, the hand moving on paper, line breaks and spaces dictated by notebook or leaf, size and folds of paper, pen or pencil forming words, the shape of a draft visible in the way it is copied into a notebook, and even the effort to end a work in the space of one notebook.”

(Ulla E. Dydo, p. 7 in the introduction to A Stein Reader.)