There were three of us, separated from our classmates at a table in the corner of the room. One day, the teacher, who seldom spoke to us since it was understood that most of what she taught was beyond the reach of our intelligence, placed books in our hands and whispered that we should sit there quietly “pretending to read.” The principal was coming.
--With Dyslexia, Words Failed Me
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This was my experience in grammar school.
Except that I am not dyslexic. No. 9.
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And suddenly I was reading. I didn’t know then that I was beginning a lifelong love affair with the first-person voice and that I would spend most of my life inventing characters to say all the things I wanted to say. I didn’t know that I was to become a poet, that in many ways the very thing that caused me so much confusion and frustration, my belabored relationship with words, had created in me a deep appreciation of language and its music, that the same mind that prevented me from reading had invented a new way of reading, a method that I now use to teach others how to overcome their own difficulties in order to write fiction and poetry.
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