I started writing and making up my own little stories when I was in second and third grade, and I had a teacher in third grade, Sister De Maria, who praised my writing. Every day I would go home and write a poem, and I can tell you one of the poems, if you’d like to hear it. It’s: “The sun, the sun, the sun; must run, must run, must run; for it is like a hot, hot bun; and inside that bun there is a big, big nun.”
Because all my teachers were nuns, I wrote a lot of poems about nuns, and you can rhyme “nun” with a lot of things. It’s kind of fun. I’m not saying these were great poems, but I was learning how to play around with words on the page, and that was something that was really helpful for me, and I found it to be very pleasurable. I wanted to keep doing it.
