I haven't kept track of the number of books I've read in my lifetime. In 36 years I'd say it's well into the thousands. My earliest memory of reading was in kindergarten, watching my little index finger glide across the page, the syllables forming like pearls in my mouth. Each word, each line building up momentum; it felt like learning to ride a bike. "The little brown cat jumped. It was fast." Look at me go! I imagine that sensation is akin to what Egyptologists feel when they translate hieroglyphs on the fly. Reading is its own kind of archaeology. A special kind of magic that belongs in the everyday.
I started reading in kindergarten, and never stopped. My parents chalk up my general poor sense of direction to the fact that I never watched where they were driving. I was always in the back seat, my face buried in my latest temporary acquisition from the library. To this day I mostly never have a clue where I am, and my audiobooks are often rudely interrupted by Google maps telling me in her politest tone that I missed the last turn. Again. In two hundred feet, make a U-turn. I would have fared poorly on the Oregon Trail.
My love-affair with words could just as easily have ended there, with the occasional trip to the library. An intimate knowledge of every Nancy Drew book ever published. A tall stack of secondhand books on the table by my favorite reading chair. Something pivotal happened, though, when I was in the eleventh grade.
My aversion to numbers in high school (subjects like algebra, physics, and accounting made me feel rashy) was only equaled by my love for words. In my eleventh grade creative writing class, I turned in a short story about a girl named Evangeline. My character's name choice was an obvious nod to the fact that I'd finished reading H.B. Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin a week earlier. I cannot recall the storyline exactly, except that, in my mind's eye, was set in a high school that looked suspiciously like my own, and involved a love-interest that I don't remember. I'm certain that if I could excavate a copy from a box of other relics from my teenage years, the reading of it would produce a cringeworthy visceral response much like you'd get from re-reading your adolescent diary, but that's not the point. I turned in my short story about Evangeline, and a few days later the teacher pulled it from the top of her stack, held it up for the class to see, and said "This. This is good writing". She read it to the class, not mentioning who had written it, and I sat there in the second desk from the back, glowing. I felt incandescent. I didn't just love to read stories, I loved to write them, too.
Years went by. I moved to another country, lived another life, and was with my toddler son at a playdate when another mom, a writer herself, mentioned she was starting up a small group for other mothers who wanted to try to write a book. I cannot write a book, I thought. I don't have time to write a book. I don't even know where to get started. The truth is, though, that the idea of writing a book wouldn't go away. It wasn't necessarily a pleasant thing - the thought stuck in my brain like a popcorn kernel would lodge itself between two molars. I joined the writers group, and thought why am I doing this? I cannot write a book. And then I wrote a novel.
It took me months; small increments of 30 minutes here, an hour there. Staying up too late or waking up too early. Losing myself at my desk during my son's preschool mornings, weaving characters in my imagination while folding loads of laundry. When I wrote the last line it felt like I'd birthed another baby, and the cursor on the screen just kept on blinking at me, waiting hungrily for more. I wrote an entire second novel during the pandemic, and it came out much better than the first. Second pancakes are often superior in quality to first pancakes, I've found. Before I had finished the second book, a third started to creep into the periphery of my brain, another stubborn popcorn kernel.
And now here we are, dear reader. In short, this is a space I've created for myself. A spot to come and share my writing. Maybe some excerpts from projects I'm working on. Snippets of books already written. I hope lots of short stories will live here, too. The belated offspring of the tale of Evangeline that I wrote in the eleventh grade.
One big thing has stayed the same since that eleventh grade creative writing class. The writing makes me feel incandescent, lit up with possibilities, and I hope what I write here in this space throws a little light into your life, too.
Happy Reading,
DCK
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