Shortly after I retired, I decided I ought to cut down on my reading and begin to write. After all, I was seven and a half decades old. I must have some fodder for a best seller. Right?
Every day, I climbed the stairs to my newly designated writing area with my newly sharpened pencils. I sat down, opened my journal…and…thought about the stack of books (both physical and on Kindle) I wanted to read downstairs. Frustrated, I used my new membership to MasterClass for inspiration and advice from one of my favorite authors, Walter Mosley. Writers write, he shared with me. They’re passionate about writing. They aren’t necessarily voracious readers. They don’t have to graduate from an MFA program. They just possess a need to tell their stories and the work ethic to get those stories down on paper.
This advice provided clarity for me. I don’t think I ever, at any time in my life, felt the need to grab a journal and pen a good yarn. For as long as I can remember, I loved to read, and I must have learned early because I was commandeered by my teachers to lead “reading groups” as early as first grade. At that time, we used what publishers euphemistically referred to as basal “readers,” sitting in a circle and reading aloud one by one about the adventures of two unbelievably boring children named Dick and Jane who looked like almost no one in our classroom and acted like they were taking massive doses of Zoloft, skipping and hopping giddyingly through life. The teaching methodology driving these stories was called sight reading or the “look-say” method. Words were repeated over and over (Look Dick! Look Jane! Look! Look! Look!) so that, fingers crossed, students would remember and begin to recognize them in other text. The requirement of reading aloud was needlessly embarrassing for most of my classmates and the adventures of Dick and Jane were totally uninspiring. Reading about them was the closest I’d yet come to torture. I have never met anyone with a passion for reading whose only experience was school-based, basal-inspired anguish. Fortunately, my first experiences with reading occurred both at home and in the homes of my grandparents. My Nonnie’s attic was filled with books that her daughter, my Aunt Peggy, had brought home from the Harmanus Bleeker Library where she was a career librarian. It was there that I discovered and was inspired by Wanda Gag, Beatrix Potter, E. Nesbit, Kenneth Grahame, Frances Hodgson Burnett, Arthur Ransome, and Agatha Christie, among others.
We’ve come a long way since then and I think that we are living in an incredibly exciting time for readers. Genres are becoming more fluid; publishing houses are making necessary changes to try to make their companies, and the books they acquire, more diverse–racially, ethnically, and geographically. Innovative imprints like Legacy Lit are dedicated to publishing books with social justice themes and focusing on works by writers of color. Libraries and librarians are creating learning circles, book clubs, and community reads that use these newly published books to address topics previously avoided lest someone be offended. Yes, we still have a way to go, but I believe the variety of storytelling and the diversity of storytellers is slowly improving. This motivates me to write, but not in the way I first intended. What am I passionate about? Reading and celebrating books, especially those that offer previously ignored perceptions, interpretations, and narratives of and about our histories, capabilities, traumas, joys, and achievements.
I’ve deferred the dream of finding my writer’s voice. I’ve stopped climbing the stairs and squirreling myself away in the hopes of receiving divine inspiration. Let the writers write. I will read. And in this blog, I share with you, fellow passionate readers, an eclectic group of books that have only one characteristic in common. I loved them!
Happy reading!
