A Writing Life (Part 13)

I realize now that I do not want to give a complete list of writers. There were the usual distractions (comic books, cartoon adaptations of folk tales and novel, nursery rhymes, etc.), young adult and adult junk (Stephen King, Sue Townsend), magazines and journals (from Highlights – a youth-centered magazine – to Rolling Stone, The New Yorker), and the important names of literature. “Julius Caesar” was the first work of Shakespeare I read. In class, we had to remember speeches and soliloquies from the play and what seems odd about that experience is that I received an excellent mark for a reading I did not remember giving. That was in my first year of high school. There were also poems that dealt with romance, death and loss. This led to my first attempts at the form and an intense interest was born that has lasted to this day. In between all this school-based reading, I continued to go to the library, discovered secondhand bookstores, and yet managed to enter a science program without any real love for the work or the course involved.