The TeachingBooks Blog
Daydreaming becomes a strong muscle if you exercise it often enough. By the time I was ten, I could lasso a daydream and ride the wind. Who wouldn’t want to do that?
I like to say that I began writing before I knew how to write. By that I mean that I made up stories, acting them out with my dolls and stuffed animals, turning them into plays to perform with my neighborhood friends, or dictating them to my father, who would then type them out on the manual typewriter his father gave him when he was a young man. Writing, in my head and on paper, was my way of making sense of the world and my place in it.
I do not consider myself a poet. I do read plenty of poetry but am trained in prose. After all, I started my writing life as a journalist, on the police beat. Very little time was devoted to crafting just the right phrase; mostly I was panicking to make deadline.
