Who isn't a writer?

In each setting, toward the end of my stay and after much anxious forethought, I "came out" [as a writer] to a few chosen coworkers. The result was always stunningly anticlimactic…. I’ve wondered a lot about why there wasn’t more astonishment or even indignation, and part of the answer probably lies in people’s notion of "writing." Years ago, … my second husband … proudly told his uncle, who was a valet parker at the time, that I was a writer. The uncle’s response: "Who isn’t?" Everyone literate "writes," and some of the low-wage workers I have known or met through this project write journals and poems—even, in one case, a lengthy science fiction novel.

Barbara Ehrenreich, Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America (New York: Metropolitan/Owl, Henry Holt & Co., 2002), p. 9.