My earliest memories of becoming a reader was watching my mother read. She inspired reading in me because I would often see her reading her Bible, and she would often highlight scripture. I would see her writing in a journal as she was reading, and sometimes I would hear her reading out loud or memorizing the scripture. And so I learned very early that the reading is sacred and that there’s something intimate that’s happening with you and the page and that you can interact with it. It wasn’t, books were not so precious in our household that we couldn’t actually hold it and be with it. And so I wrote in my books, I highlighted if they were mine, I wrote in them, highlighted them, earmarked them, all of that, and really was in conversation with the text. And so I became an avid reader and a reader that read deeply.
So I read very slow because I really want to take the story in. Sometimes I’ll go back and reread a chapter if I get to the end and I’m like, wait, wait, what’s happening here? I will go back and reread it. And I was that way as a child too. So by middle school though, I think I just was frustrated. I didn’t know how to articulate that frustration, but my teachers were not giving me a lot of books that I related to. And so though I loved reading, I didn’t enjoy what we were reading as a class, so I read a lot on my own. I would go to the library, especially in the summer and spend the day at the library reading books on my own that I would just find. But it was rare that I was excited about what we were learning in school from the book that the teacher had given the whole class to kind of read and do a book report on.
But high school was when I think my reading went to another level of, I started reading Zelle Hurston and Tony Morrison, Bebe Moore Campbell. I am forever grateful for the teachers who brought those writers into my life. And I remember reading a Raisin in the Sun, a play, and with one of my favorite plays, and we read plays by August Wilson. So in high school I read so widely, we read poetry, novels, short stories and plays. And so all of that kind of opened my world into not just what I could read, but what I could write. I always was reading in order to tell my own story that those two things were always kind of in conversation with each other. For me, reading was only so that I could respond. It was always something to make me want to create. So I would read something and try to write maybe something like it, or I would read and write what I felt was missing. And that is how I kind of learned how to write plays and poetry and fiction and non-fiction was by reading all this great literature.