Call yourself a writer?

Dean Biron jointly won this year's Australian Book Review's  Calibre Prize for and Outstanding Essay with a rather jaded, if not bitter, piece called The Death of the Writer. In moving to the academy from a life in the police force he seems to have taken on its world-weariness, skepticism and elitism with a neophyte's enthusiasm. While worshipping at the altars of the classics, Kafka, Malouf, Conrad, he disdains and dismisses the writing course and festival attendees who aspire to be writers and who, heaven forbid, actually call themselves writers with what he deems insufficient cause.
Biron agonises over the worthiness of his writing in the"face of the standards set by antecedents such as Conrad." He battles with self doubt (no wonder!) but believes that to call oneself a writer is to pretend to conquer these doubts. Calling oneself a writer is not supposed to be an easy thing, it should be a battle. He does not want to be classed with those who pass themselves off as writers: the journalists, reviewers, soap opera writers, ghost writers, biographers, memoirists and - gasp - bloggers who fill "cyberspace with cliched gossip." The "appellation of writer ... should perhaps remain exclusive to that rare living being who has transcended anonymity and written himself or herself into the greater culture".  And who decides who may be called a writer? Are we back to the glorious days of the canon of literature and the gatekeepers pontificating in their ivory towers? Did this guy not take a unit in popular literature or cultural studies in his entire university career?
I agree with him on one matter: the main trait of writers is "the necessity to write, the requirement to live much of one's life through the prism of writing. To need to write, that is the vital thing." I write to sort out matters in my own mind, to truly understand my life and ideas. My life is not real until I have written it down. Writing nails the day, my thoughts, my reading to paper and is the only way I can  pursue and capture knowledge and understanding.
When Biron gets back to the point of his essay after taking pot shots at all who have ever attended a writing course or festival, he expands on Barthes' death of the author in a convincing and profound way. He examines the paradox that those who want to write well write in order to live but must "figuratively die at the end of each day." The words they have written change them and make them more self aware and self critical than they were before. The person they were at the beginning of the writing has gone, never to return.
His final advice while sound smacks of the fragile male ego: "give up worrying about whether or not you are already a writer. Reject the notion that by classing yourself a as writer you might one day induce others to do the same. Just go ahead and write, damn it." A person who plays cricket is a cricketer, one who paints walls is a painter, one who sings is a singer. Their talent and ability don't come into it. I have written this blog, surely I am a writer.