Earliest Evidence
Someone asked about my earliest memory of wanting to be a writer--
when did you first know, etc., etc...
and instead of thinking about some conscious acknowledgment of writing
as either activity or vocation,
before I had any inclination of learning how to write fiction,
or effective, efficient non-fiction--
I remembered an event from first grade,
when I was literally learning how to write,
as in read and write,
printing block letters in pencil on lined paper.
Our teacher, Mrs. Deaton, asked the class what happened on the weekend.
I couldn't think of anything interesting that happened,
but I immediately thought of something interesting that didn't happen,
so I raised my hand and explained how,
on the weekend,
our kitchen stove caught fire.
The other kids were amazed, no one pressed me for details,
and I wrote the sentence in nice block letters
with a picture of my stick figure mother
running away from out avocado green stove as it burned.
Mrs. Deaton gave me a check mark,
wrote "Good picture!" in the corner,
and we all hung our work in the hallway so everyone could see
what a great job we were doing learning how to write.
A few weeks later our family went to church,
and after the service was over,
my mom brought me back into the empty sanctuary.
She told me how another mom had seen my sentence in the school hallway,
and how that mom had asked my mom if we had replaced our burnt stove yet.
And mom explained how lying is wrong,
I guess hoping that the message would have extra force
if she said it to me in church.
It hadn't occurred to me when I wrote the whole stove thing that it was a lie.
To me, a lie was when someone asks you a question and you give a wrong answer,
like,
did you carve up the furniture with your boy scout knife?
No, not me.
As far as I knew,
the stove thing wasn't a lie.
I was just making something up to entertain others.
So if the question is,
when did you become a writer,
I guess it was around the moment
I learned how to write.
