I Charged Admission

I have been telling stories for as long as I can remember.

At four years old, I put on elaborate puppet shows for my family.

"Elaborate" may be generous. The cast consisted mostly of barnyard animals, the theater was whatever part of the house I had commandeered, and my material relied heavily on puns.

One joke has somehow survived more than three decades in family lore.

"Mr. Cow, what do you feed your bay-bay?"

I don't remember the punchline.

Apparently, neither does anyone else.

But everybody remembers bay-bay.

I also didn't merely invite my family to these performances.

I charged admission.

So, in retrospect, perhaps the signs were there.

A couple of years later, someone gave me one of those kits that let a child "publish" her first book.

I was six.

I could have written about a princess. Or a puppy. Or a magical adventure.

Instead, like any perfectly normal six-year-old, I decided to write about the history of my hometown.

Not just the history, either. I wanted the stories underneath it. The hidden history. The local lore. The things people said had happened there.

I researched it.

My Granny Louese had books I could use, and she took me to the library to find more. I wrote the story. I illustrated it. I sent it away in the kit and eventually got back my first "published" book.

I wish I knew where it was now.

Around the same time, I was also inexplicably obsessed with drawing the inner ear.

I cannot explain that part.

When I was seven, I got my first sibling. Before I ever met him, I wrote him a book.

It was called Baby, Shhh.

I had written it as a gift for my new baby brother and his mom, and I brought it with me to the hospital the first time I met him.

This one, unlike my first book, hasn't disappeared entirely into family history.

There is a home video.

Newly seven-year-old me, arriving at the hospital to meet my first sibling with a book I'd written for him in my hands that effectively told him to be quiet.

Apparently, even then, when something mattered enough to me, I wrote it down.

I didn't know I wanted to be a writer.

I was just writing.

Then came second grade. Until that point, I had made straight A's.

And then handwriting got me.

I got a B.

This was unacceptable.

So I refused to go to recess and stayed inside to practice my handwriting instead. This drove my teacher insane, but eventually I got the A.

My handwriting is still nearly illegible.

Thank God for keyboards.

The stories kept going, though.

By eighth grade, I landed in Mrs. Edison's class.

One of our first assignments was to analyze a poem. I was assigned Randall Jarrell's The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner.

It is five lines long.

I responded by writing ten pages about the dehumanization of war and researching the history of ball turrets.

This should probably have been another clue.

Mrs. Edison didn't tell me I had done too much. She encouraged me.

Later, she assigned me Emily Dickinson's Because I could not stop for Death. The analysis also required an art piece, so I decoupaged a serving tray.

There was some connection in my mind between waiting on Death, manners, and a serving tray.

Obviously.

I got an A+ on every paper I wrote for her that year.

More importantly, something clicked.

Mrs. Edison treated the way my mind wandered into a piece of writing, turned it over, connected it to history, pulled it apart and went looking for what was underneath as something worth developing.

She told me I should write a book.

She also used some of my papers as examples for her classes for years afterward, much to the chagrin of my younger siblings when they eventually entered her classroom.

Then there was Mrs. Shealy.

During what was technically my junior year of high school, although it would also be my last because I graduated a year early, I took an advanced dual-credit literature class through the community college.

Mrs. Shealy encouraged me too.

She praised not only my writing, but my oral storytelling. She told me I should write books.

There were other storytellers shaping me who weren't teaching English.

Mrs. Willis was my math teacher, but I also remember her telling stories when I was a child, both at school and at church. To this day, she is one of the most talented storytellers I have ever heard. She could take a room somewhere with her.

My dad can do the same thing. He can hook you from the first word.

I was learning, although I didn't know I was learning, that storytelling wasn't confined to a page.

Then books began showing me what could happen on one.

Kafka's The Metamorphosis.

Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar.

Kate Chopin's The Awakening.

Mary Shelley's Frankenstein.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman's The Yellow Wallpaper.

They shook something loose in me.

Stories could be strange. Uncomfortable. Psychological. They could ask questions without answering them. They could crawl inside an idea and live there. They could say something about the world while ostensibly telling you about someone who never existed.

At seventeen, I traveled to Germany, Austria and Poland as part of two courses: Psychology of Death and Dying and History of Hitler and the Third Reich.

Before we left, there was reading. Anne Frank. Hitler. Josef Mengele. The Holocaust.

Then the things I'd read about became places I could stand.

And things I couldn't stand for.

Concentration camps. Nuremberg. Vienna's funeral museum. Freud's house. Salt caves.

History was no longer safely contained between covers.

For a seventeen-year-old, it was profound.

I kept reading.

I kept traveling.

And I kept collecting stories.

Then life got busy becoming a story of its own.

College. Flying. The military. The airlines. Public speaking. Travel. Businesses. Art. People I would never have met if airplanes hadn't carried me into their lives and them into mine.

Storytelling never really went away.

It just kept changing mediums.

And every so often, someone would say it again.

"You should write a book."

A teacher.

A friend.

A coworker.

A stranger.

I always had the same basic answer.

I will.

Someday.

Every year, I would decide this was the year.

This year I would sit down and write the book.

And every year there was another trip to fly, another project, another obligation, another perfectly reasonable reason that tomorrow would be a better day to begin.

Tomorrow seemed endless.

Until it didn't.

I survived something that made me understand, in a way I never had before, that someday is not a date on the calendar.

To this day, I don't know how I survived it.

While it was happening, I didn't think I would.

And for a while afterward, I couldn't stop thinking about all the tomorrows I had assumed belonged to me.

"I'll write it tomorrow" was one of them.

So I started writing.

At first, I thought I was finally keeping a promise I had made to myself.

I didn't realize yet that writing would become part of how I healed.

Somewhere in that process, it became more than something I wanted to do. It became part of how I put myself back together.

Eventually, that would become NBodied Writing House.

But that's another story.

The strange thing is that when I finally sat down to become a writer, I thought I was starting something new.

Looking backward now, I don't think I was.

There was a four-year-old with barnyard puppets and terrible puns.

A six-year-old researching local history and folklore for her first book.

A seven-year-old arriving at the hospital with Baby, Shhh. tucked among the gifts for the brother she hadn't met yet.

There were teachers telling me to keep going.

Books showing me what stories could do.

A father showing me how to hold an audience.

A lifetime of people, places, objects and questions being quietly collected somewhere in the back of my mind.

For years, people told me I should write a book.

I always said I would.

Someday.

Apparently, I'd forgotten that I already had.

I was six.

And I charged admission before that.