I love talking to kids about the process of writing and they want to know how I learned to write and how I learned English and you know especially children who perhaps they were born in the U.S. but they don’t have strong language facility. And I say first of all when I was a kid I talked like that, okay? And say jas … and they all do the jas, which is lots of fun. So we sort of loosen up.
And I begin by talking about language acquisition, how I learned to acquire English, but inevitably it leads to it was a more difficult process because I’m dyslexic. And I tell them that I see it as the most marvelous gift. That, yes, it is called a disability and changing the name doesn’t make it anything less than that. It is not the norm in other words. It is not the way many people learn. It is the way some people learn. And dyslexics have the strange advantage of seeing the world from the slightly different perspective.
And I sometimes explain to them you know some people go through the wood, A to B, it’s quick, and it’s very efficient. But some of us, dyslexics are among them, we take the scenic route. And the things we discover and the places we see, and the ways we get eventually to the other side, make us very often interesting people. It can also be excruciating. It can be tiring. It can take you longer. It takes me five times longer than anyone else to learn anything.
But when I learn it, I learn it forever. I learn it from the bottom up, from the inside out. I want to know every way it works. I want it to be on a hologram, so I can get it. And I tell kids if a second language dyslexic refugee can grow up to write books, you can do anything, simply anything. Sometimes it’s just one more step. The end of the woods, right there. One more step. Truly.