Writers on the Writing Life

How I Became a Writer

My first inklings (ha!) that I might be a writer came very early.

First grade. I had this teacher (so many great stories start that way, don’t they?): Mrs. Asdorf or maybe Alsdorf. I remember thinking she had a weird name.

To my memory, she was very short. She had to be because she didn’t seem tall to me, and I was in first grade! I also thought she was very old. I have no idea if she actually was or not. This is a kid’s eye view after all.

When I try to picture her, her face is all mixed up with my great-grandmother’s face, in the way that many childhood memories are mixed up and distorted. She might have been all of thirty. She might have been eighty. I don’t know.

Mrs. Asdorf loved poetry. We had this project where we copied poems neatly (we were still learning the mechanics of writing after all), and made illustrations for them, then collected them in a folder made out of wallpaper scraps. My first blank book.

I loved this project. I’d always been drawn to poetry. Before I even went to school, I memorized my Mother Goose book and, thanks to my mother and all our hours in the library, had a love for Amelia Bedelia and Dr. Suess, children’s books in love with the sounds of words.

During this project, I fell in love with Emily Dickinson, whom I fully believed was a child, too, because of how young she looked in the portrait in the…