To the class…

            I can still remember learning to read. Back then, my parents weren’t divorced and my brother and I still lived at home. I don’t long for a complete family and I don’t feel like I’ve been cheated out of my life at home since my parents split up, but nonetheless, those memories are refined gold burnished with the warmth of unconditional love. I remember lying on my parents’ bed while they read us the chronicles of the Boxcar Children and asked us to repeat words after them. I remember Mr. Poplar’s Penguins and Yurtle the Turtle on my dad’s lap on the old but beloved green couch in the den.

            After that I never really stopped reading. When we moved out of the house I grew up in, my bookshelves were lined with fantasy books. My parents used to ask me why I didn’t read anything else and often tried to convince me to read books for kids my age that had won some award or another. But when we were taking the books off the shelf and putting them in boxes, The Giver and Roll of Thunder Hear My Cry had perfect spines and not a crease in the cover.

There was something about the fantasy books that I loved so much. Maybe even at that young age I felt a little disillusioned with what real life and the real world were; dragons and elves and trolls and quests that spanned generations opened up my imagination to a whole new universe where I could spend my time. I never realized it at the time, but now I’m able to appreciate one of the most alluring factors of those books: the authors were creating something. The places, creatures, and events of fantasy writing could never, ever exist in the real worlds that we live in. But, as if it were magic, some gift given to the authors via divine intervention, thousands of words strewn together created worlds so believable that they felt just as real as this one.

Eventually I stopped reading fantasy books and moved onto Steven King. I like how he used to say “People tell me I write trash, but at least its good trash.” He, too, created people and societies that couldn’t quite exist, but were closer than elves and dwarves. He also had the gift of story-telling. I always wanted to keep reading to find out what would happen; would The Gunslinger ever avenge his annihilated homeland? At the finish of every book there was a bit of disappointment that the story was over, but there was always another piece of trash to sink my teeth into.

When I got to highschool, I hated English. I thought that literature was more boring than watching water evaporate off of a table (which I did, occasionally, to pass the time). Eventually, though, something happened and all of a sudden English was my favorite class. I started to appreciate it and analyze it and be moved deep inside by it. By the end of senior year, when I finished a worthy novel I felt connected to the invisible and ghostly but no less infallible truths of life that are always flying around next to and through you but are so difficult to grasp.

So my love for reading evolved once more: from far-fetched fantasy, to Stephen King, to “true” literature. Most recently I undertook the ambitious project of reading the complete works of Shakespeare. I never would have thought that I would love reading Shakespeare and feel strongly enough about it to want to read everything he wrote, but strangely I love it.

While all of this appreciation of the written word was going on, I began to think more on more about abstractions of life and philosophical questions. Whenever I tried to speak to people about them, I most often found that I couldn’t communicate my ideas. They were too big for me to wrap my head around and expel rapidly in the brief exhalation of brief conversations. My inability to properly communicate the ideas I had and my ways of thinking about things made me feel isolated at times. This frustration, coupled with my awe for the writer’s gift to create, is why I want to write. I want to express myself, I want to inspire. I want someone to read something that I wrote and be able to touch those ethereal apparitions of wisdom and truth.