I grew up with just my mom most of the time, and my mom bought me all of my books at yard sales. It was very important that we have books, but we didn’t have a lot of money, and of course I didn’t care. I was just happy to have these books. And it ended up being fantastic for me, because I ended sort of with the previous generation or two’s picture books, which was like the best time for picture books.
So my childhood for all my clothes were from yard sales, too. You look back at like pictures of me. I look like a child of the mid-century. Like I’ve got pictures of me in sailor suits and saddle shoes. It’s absolutely ridiculous. I grew up in the eighties and early nineties, and due to budgetary constraints, was stuck in the past.
But it was really great. I had the best of kids’ books at my fingertips. And I grew up reading those books. She never took them off the bookshelf. I always returned to them. I always cared about that form. And I love storytelling. In school, any assignment, I would sort of warp into a writing assignment, so if we had to write a sentence for each spelling word, I would, you know, somehow choose to complicate it.
I would try to make all the sentences converge into a story, or I tried to write one complete sentence with all 20 words that was grammatically perfect with dependent clause upon dependent clause. I loved writing, creating stories and creating sentences.
But it wasn’t until seventh grade. I had a teacher, Ms. Knox, who told my parents at a parent-teacher conference that she thought I was going to be a writer and a liberal arts guy, and I had no idea what that even meant, the liberal arts guy part. But the writer part, I did. I had always wanted to be a writer, but my mom was a nurse. My dad was a doctor.
No writers in my family. Not even, really, I would say, a real passion for books in my family. But for me, it was there from the start. And I think confusing to everybody around me. So that was sort of the first time I heard somebody else say this thing, that I had kind of in my brain but buried pretty deep – I think the things you want most are oftentimes the things you are afraid to say.
So hearing somebody else who knew me really well say, I think he’s going to become a writer – you know, I was afraid that wasn’t even a real job, and if it was a real job, I definitely didn’t think I could get there. And I will never forget that. It was the first time that I said, okay, maybe I can work toward making this real.
