7/5/2023 0 Comments The rumpus twitter![]() ![]() And so I kept writing.Įventually I’d be sitting down watching a movie I’d watched countless times before. They exist on shredded notebooks and files on my computer named “Kill it With Fire.” But I kept writing because once upon a time I had read a book that sparked my imagination, and another that taught me to dare to dream. I wrote an awful book, and then several more. I was certainly no wordsmith but I felt like I had read enough to be able to communicate what I was feeling onto the page and maybe just maybe have the reader feel it, too. I looked back on all the books I’d loved and that idea seemed to check out.Īnd for the very first time, I thought, well maybe I could do that. And it was sometime while reading those books, and defending those books, that it occurred to me that the most important job of a storyteller isn’t flowery words or perfect grammar. I had passionate discussions with my future wife about why Team Jacob was Team Settling. I was the typical guy about it, and like so many who bag on it and say it’s beneath them for this reason or that…I ended up reading all four books. And one day a friend I knew handed me Twilight. And when Charlie learned about that golden ticket, he went for it. You are daring to see something else, a different place and circumstance even as your current circumstance laughs in your face. There is a certain audacity that comes with hope, especially in bad times because you are essentially saying to your surroundings that you no longer see them. And in Charlie I found somebody I could wholly relate to because he was a kid who did not have much and yet he still hoped for grandness in his life. ![]() In fact, she had set it aside for me knowing I would come back eager for more. To have my imagination so thoroughly expanded as that.Īnd then that same librarian handed me Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. And I longed to feel that feeling, that “wild rumpus” in my heart and mind. It said to me that I could borrow the imaginations of others and exist in worlds I couldn’t even fathom yet. That moment that said for as hard as I had imagined to that point, I had not come close to conceiving creatures so wild as Maurice Sendak. And then I found a library.įirst my elementary school library where the teacher who noticed that I couldn’t even afford to buy one book at the book fair handed me a copy of Where the Wild Things Are and even though I was older than the target age, much older, I can remember having that “Oh” moment. Because in your head there’s no one looking down on you and there aren’t any limits. When you grow up in situations where you don’t have a whole lot, where every day looks like the one before it and you stop hoping things will change, because they never do, sometimes retreating into yourself is the key to surviving. I lived inside my head so much that often times people would be talking to me and I hadn’t heard a single word. I was the quiet kid with the big imagination. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |