Literate Enough
My earliest ambition was to become a writer. Raised by a reader; my mother, and grandparents who never tired of reading the same books with me, over and over and again. Dr. Suess, Golden Books, and the Good Book, of course, figured largely. Each month when the Scholastic Book Club newsletter arrived in my elementary school classroom, I would pour over it — my choices largely based on personal allowance economics. Beezus and Romana was a bargain at 95 cents, and Dynamite magazine, $1.25. I had the incredible fortune of a librarian, Mrs. Witten, who intrinsically understood I needed the respite of the quiet, carpeted floors and paper-perfumed stacks. Somehow I found myself, again and again, plucked out of class and placed in the cool comfort of that South Louisville library. Mrs. Witten introduced me to Louisa May Alcott, Beverly Cleary, EB White, Laura Ingalls Wilder, and their quietly heroic characters; Charlotte the spider, Louis the swan, and the mouse-like Stuart. And, to the strong and confident voices of Joe March, Ramona, and Laura Ingalls. My high school English teachers, Ms. Dearing, and Brother George brought the works of Harper Lee, S.E. Hinton, Jane Austen, Emily Brontë, Homer, Shakespeare, Arthur Miller, and Mark Twain — too many to note — to life. I recently discovered some of their works on banned lists, for seemingly minor infractions. This painful discovery connected my youthful self to modern children to convey how sorry I am for what they don’t know they will miss.
The authors whose paperbacks lined my mother’s groovy 80’s bookcase heavily informed my adolescence. Sidney Sheldon, Jackie Collins, Judith Krantz, Danielle Steel, George Orwell, and Barbara Gordon. Some that I devoured left indelible marks like Sybil, by Flora Rheta Schreiber, and its early introduction to childhood neglect and mental disorders. And the should have been banned — from my tender, impressionable eyes — Harold Robbin’s The Lonely Lady (Google it, if you dare). Independently I discovered VC Andrews, Judy Blume, Amy Tan, Stephen King, Pat Conroy, Nicholas Sparks, Toni Morrison, John Grisham, Tom Wolf, Jane Smiley, and Maya Angelou alongside countless biographies. Many of these books I consumed over and over again, never tiring of them. It was the 70’s, the 80’s, and our books came from either a bookstore or the library. The Internet, let alone a smartphone and its endless supply of instantly accessible content, was nothing more than a hazy concept of science fiction.
So what stopped me in my storytelling quest? I thought I couldn’t be a writer because I hadn’t gone anywhere — hadn’t seen or experienced anything important. A mental throughline of fear stories throughout the years included: I’m not smart like real writers. I’m not educated enough and didn’t go to the right schools. I believed I wasn’t literate enough. The stories I told myself kept me from sharing my stories with the world. Yet, in the books, the authors, the characters I’ve consumed, I see no pigeonholes or boundaries around what a character should be or where they should live. As I walked down this literary memory lane it became crystal clear that books have taken me around the world, and transported me through time. And, they allow Season 3 me to view my own experiences with childlike wonder, curiosity, and amazement.
It took a handful of decades to discover the spiritual mentorship of writers like Dr. Wayne Dyer, Gabrielle Bernstein, and Esther Hicks. Louise Hay encourages us to let go of self-doubt, of comparing ourselves to others, and the limiting beliefs that hold us back from becoming the fullest expression of ourselves writing, “If you accept a limiting belief, then it will become a truth for you.” Dr. Dyer, elegantly, bluntly, implores us, “Don’t die with your music still in you.”