They taught me the alphabet in the first grade, when I was six. One Monday while in the second grade, our teacher asked us to describe our weekend as a writing assignment. Well, I'd had a particularly busy and exciting couple days. My older brother, Terry, had been pushed off the top of a slide and received a concussion. We spent Sunday at my grandparent's. The sheets of paper they gave us to write on were, like, a foot high by two feet wide, made from pulp so cheap the color of the paper was gray, and, I swear, I remember wood chips in the...

     Anyway, there were only two lines at the bottom of these pieces of school paper for writing, leaving the majority of the page for drawing. I went through, I'm pretty sure, twenty of those sheets of cheap, gray school paper, front and back, before my teacher stopped me, and I hadn't even gotten to Sunday.

     The urge to write stayed with me. I did not come from a literary or scholarly family under any circumstances, only one large and without money at all times, so I was constantly in search of things to write with and write on, cheap pens that they gave away at banks, pencils that I myself hadn't broken the end off of, the backs of bills and envelopes to write on.

CONTINUE