Family legend says I learned to read after a bout with spinal meningitis when I was two. It wasn‛t really the bed rest, although that contributed to it. (A child unable to play will entertain herself somehow.) And it wasn‛t really the residual deafness, although that was isolating. What got me started was daily speech therapy sessions, and the flashcards they involved. Each flashcard showed the letters for sounds I couldn‛t pronounce — sh, th, s, l, r, y. My mother says I learned the symbols far faster than I learned the pronunciations, and that it wasn‛t much of a stretch to move from sh to ship, from th to the, and then The Ship. By three, I was reading.
Being sick a lot helped too. I came down with ear infections fairly often, and had tubes in my ears on several occasions. When you‛re a child who is forbidden to go outside and who doesn‛t much feel like moving anyway, books provide a whole world — a world that allows you to forget how crummy you feel. It was then that I developed the ability to concentrate intensely, so intensely that I could easily be unaware of a person entering the room or talking to me. (I would lose this ability as I aged. As a graduate student, I wish I could regain it.)
My mother always read with me, and tells the story of how she brought me home from the hospital at birth and propped me up on her chest to look at a book someone had given me. As I grew, we read bedtime stories together every night — especially the entire Berenstein Bears series. She would read a sentence and I would read a sentence. A year later, she would read a paragraph and I would read a paragraph. It didn‛t matter how late it was or how tired I was or how difficult a word was. The rules were that I would read the paragraph or I would go to sleep. And I hated to go to sleep. Much later, I asked my mother about how I learned to read and was surprised at her answer. I had always been grateful to her and my grandmother for constantly making books accessible to me, and figured that they must have had a Secret Master Plan for Literacy. I thought that they had made a Feminist Choice to raise a Competent Girlchild. Her answer surprised me.
“No, I had decided that I would never push you into anything,” she said. “It was just something you always liked to do, so I encouraged you. It seemed worthwhile.”
I‛m five, and reading all the usuals: Nancy Drews, and all the children‛s stuff Grandma let me haul home from rummage sales. We go every Saturday morning, and I find all kinds of obscure children‛s books — Flying Jim, Pamela Possum, Pete the Builder. I buy ten or so a week, at a quarter apiece. Soon, I get my own bookcases for a dollar or so each.
Weekends are generally good for book-getting If I behave all week, my mother takes me to the bookstore on Friday afternoons and lets me pick out a brand new book. The bookstore is always Publishers, and it will be the only one I go to for years until it closes down in the mid-90s. It is small — so small, compared to the caverns of Barnes & Noble — but it holds all the possibility in the world for me on these afternoons. I take as long as possible to pick out my one book, teetering on the end of a librarian‛s stool and hanging onto the shelf edges for balance as I read the titles and touch the spines. I keep it up until Mom jerks me up from behind and tells me to pick out something right now this instant or we are leaving with nothing. The thought of ‛no new book‛ fills me with horror, and I quickly snatch the last one I had looked at. It is always wonderful.
In the summers, we go to the library once a week. Fletcher Library holds a reading contest every summer. The first summer I read 50 books. The second I read 100. The third I read 200. The branch allows cardholders to check out only a dozen books at a time, and my mother patiently drives me to and fro.
I am eight, and in my first year at an exclusive private school for relatively privileged children. (The Rockefeller and Stephens children are among my schoolmates.) I, being from a solidly middle-class home, am not particularly privileged and am there due to sacrifices made by my family. The other children, after finding my deafness briefly interesting, have moved back into their previously established cliques. During the transition between schools, it has been decided that I will skip the third grade. Having previously participated in “gifted” and “advanced” programs in the Public School System and the university Summer Laureate program, I am now in the remedial math class.
I do not like my teacher, and she has an obvious distaste for me. She calls on me to answer a question in class, then stops me in mid-sentence and announces to the class that I will not be allowed to finish because I had been absent-mindedly chewing on a strand on my hair during her lecture. I stop speaking at school except when called on, and spend most of my time reading. E.B. White, Beverly Cleary, various biographies — I devour them all. I read my first Really Grown Up book, “10 Pieces of Silver,” and tell the school librarian about it since I am very proud that I have read an 800 page book over a weekend. Outside of my reading, though, things aren‛t so good. My mother, always a valiant devotee of education, spends hours helping me with my homework, most of which I have difficulty grasping. We spend our nights in struggle, feeding off each other‛s frustration.
Then, in October, I finally do something right. My teacher has asked us to write an essay on the somewhat trite subject of “Love.” I receive one of my first A‛s at that school for my trouble, and a note at the top of the page saying my writing has potential. I could not now tell you now what I wrote, but I began to look forward to composition assignments.
In the spring, we are informed that we will each write a “book.” There will be a class-wide contest, with a “Newberry” award for the best-written entry, and a “Caldecott” award for the best-illustrated. At this time, I am devoted to mysteries, and am working my way through the Trixie Belden series. (I am firmly convinced that my house — built in 1978 — undoubtedly harbors secret compartments. Possibly skeletons, too.) I spend a month writing my book, maybe 15 pages long, entitled The Mystery of the Mermaid. Its heroine is a girl named Fern, and she eventually becomes a mermaid, and finds her rightful place beneath the waves. (I would not understand the psychological significance of this until many years later.)
The day comes for the awards to be presented, and all of our parents come that afternoon for our readings. I sit and sit and am not called on, and begin to worry that my entry did not place. I think up an apology I will say to my mother; I am sorry I have wasted her time. My name is the last one called, and after I give my reading I receive a loud round of applause. I have won the class Newberry Award. At nine, I first began to call myself a writer.
The next year, my teacher is Amy Maid, who has written a book on encouraging creative writing in students my age and is eager to put it into practice. We write every day before lunch, and I get constant feedback. I tell everyone that I will be a writer when I grow up.
At the end of that school year, my parents assume guardianship of my three cousins much-removed. They cannot afford to send us all to my school, and they do not want the three of them to remain in Arkansas public schools. So we are all moved to another, more affordable private school. It is unaccredited, and exists primarily to make sure the children enrolled become good little Baptists. There are no computers, and, in my sixth grade class, there is no creative writing. There are, however, book reports, and so I continue to read. For the six years I attend that school, I write mostly assigned reports, along with private humorous pieces to amuse myself and a few friends. Most of my inspiration comes from Dave Barry‛s column and the comic strip Bloom County. My teachers, often targets of my vicious and sarcastic sense of humor, worry about the state of my eternal soul.
One of the few teachers I do get along with is Mignon Hatton, the art teacher and journalism advisor. In eighth grade I join the yearbook staff, and proceed to write very little. Instead, I work with page layout and photography, spending hours in the little closet darkroom. Whenever I can leave another class early or skip study hall, I go to the journalism room.
At sixteen, having completed my junior year, I convince UALR to accept me on early admission. My school refuses to award me my diploma on the grounds that to do so would set a precedent. So I become a high-school drop out, and enter college in the fall of 1992. Response to my written work is good, and I continue on as a full time student for two years. At the beginning of the Fall 1994 semester I leave because of health problems. I work in a restaurant, at a newspaper, as a journalist, a photographer. Eventually I start working in Business Development for a Fortune Top 5 corporation. I am sure that I will not write again. It is alternately too painful, too dull, and too lonely a profession, and one I am happy to be through with.
At work, I write a memo for a supervisor, and suddenly everybody in management discovers I can write. I become the de facto ghostwriter of the Business Development division. At first, I dismiss it as corporate writing, not realizing that professional writing is a field all its own. At my manager‛s urging, I return to school. I declare as an English major, since I figure I can finish something that primarily demands reading and thinking about what I read. But as one year and then two passes at my new job, I notice that my language has honed itself, developing a precision it had never had before. I muse that it comes from writing instructions for people who have neither the inclination nor time to read them. I notice that on the days when I don‛t write, I feel listless and misdirected.
I also notice school creeping in more and more. I double my course load, then declare a dual major in English and Rhetoric. I keep writing, I keep going to school, and slowly these things take over my life. My career goes on the backburner, and I move out of sales completely and into professional writing. Then I do a little tech writing on the side. After two years, I quit my job on a Friday and walk for my undergraduate degrees on Saturday.
I have become a full-time graduate student. Reading and writing and talking to people about these things are my job, and hopefully will be for a long time to come. It‛s brought about some odd shifts for me though: previously, reading was often a guilty pleasure, something that was put off until everything else was done. Even the school reading was put off until after work. Now, I must read and write — everything depends on it. I read for eight or twelve hours a day sometimes, and the time not spent on that is often spent writing, or in class, or teaching, or talking about all of those things.
I‛m surprised at how reading is a job now, one that demands prioritization and a certain attitude. Before, if I didn‛t like something I didn‛t read it. That‛s no longer an option. If someone suggested a book to me in my previous life, I read it the next week. Now, my to-read stack has 31 books in it. The to-read list has 110 items. I‛m learning to say that I don‛t have time to read things people suggest. I have multiple magazine subscriptions, but most of them go straight on the floor now, or get given away, and I no longer pick up People at the grocery store. I used to read it in the bathtub, but now I read theory. I never thought there would be theory in my tub.
My entire life has been words on a page — certainly more than it has ever been words in the air. I do this. This is all I do. All I do is this.