I don’t know how it is for all of you out there, but my childhood was embedded with love for the written word.  Once a week, my mother would drop off the library books from the previous week and bring home a stack of new ones.  After the chores were done, and supper eaten we would sit together in front of the fireplace (which was the main heat in my childhood home), and mother would read to me by the light of the kerosene lamp that was afixed to the wall behind us.  When I was six, we got electricity; but the ritual continued till I was well able to read books on my own.

My grandmother’s eyes were failing, but she still managed to get in a chapter or two of reading of her own favorites.  I remember well how she would say, “Three thirty; I have just enough time to read a chapter before milking time.” And she would sit down and read.  Woe betide the little girl who was naughty enough to interupt her with noisy play!

She found managing a wiggly girl-child, a book, and her magnifying glass too much of a challenge; but she was a good story teller.  I knew all the good, traditional stories; Three pigs, Ginger Bread boy, Little Red Riding Hood and could recite them long before I started school.

Poetry?  I’m not sure where the poetry came from.  Mother didn’t like it.  Maybe it started with first grade.  We were required to do a weekly “recitation”.  My first school had thirteen students and was taught by an elderly man with one arm.  He had lost the other in a threshing accident when he was a young man, and had therefore gone into teaching.  Two of the students were his grandchildren.

I memorized a lot of poetry that year.  Little did I realize what a grounding I was getting in classical literature as a consequence!  I have run into a number of the poems in children’s literature classes as an adult.

The first poetry I wrote was a little later; I think in the spring when I was in second grade.  I had inherited a peice of a shorthand pad from my mother, and I started writing verses in it.  They were based on a traditional rhyme that goes:

I had a dog,
His name was Rover
When he died,
He died all over.

I filled up several pages with this doggerel.  I liked the way the rhythm of the words fit together; I liked the rhymes.  It was an adventure in words to make up dog names and things for them to do.

It was the beginning of a writing habit that has continued to date.   Give me a writing medium, and I will start to string words together.  It eases a lot of tensions for me; painting word pictures makes me happy.  I’ve kept a diary since I was ten.  A diary can be a recipient of all the complaints and unhappinesses that just mark one as a whiner if continually voiced.  It can also record events, happinesses, and be a place to keep story starts and the odd bit of verse.

Why write?  Because it makes me happy, it gives me a world I can control (when there bloody well isn’t much one gets to control in reality), I can disappear into my writing and come up hours later, refreshed and having let go of my main problems–and maybe having found solutions.  I write because I must.  Not writing, not telling stories  does something strange and unpleasant to the inside of my head.

I write because I love it.  If I never got a dime for it, I would still write.  But getting paid–even pennies–is a joy.  I dream of someday living off my writing.  Perhaps it is just a dream; but from such stuff are tales spun; castles and giants, squid and little fishes, birds, beasts and fairy tales, and clouds golden in the sun.