I don’t remember what we were told about writing poems or how much time the teacher set aside for us to come up with our verses. It seemed like a long time, and I wasn’t interested; I thought poetry had to be about flowers and trees and nature, and vaguely understood it had to be geared toward girls (or a girl), and love—all things I considered with great ambivalence. Every head in the classroom bent to the task while mine remained up, astonished by how everyone seemed to know immediately, judging by the rapid movement of their hands, what they wanted to say. There was a boy in the class whose name I’ve forgotten, but likely you know him, too—every K–12 classroom in my experience presented some version of him: the strange one with a body that looked put together with mismatched parts, skinny with outsized feet and pants that always revealed the snug white tube socks above his clunky black shoes, an obscurely unclean vibe about his being, his unwashed hair and bits of food in his teeth. When he spoke, saliva gathered and dried in the edges of his mouth. Let’s call him Steve. I noticed Steve had inclined his head toward his desk but, unlike the others, he was only pretending to work, his left hand making motions over the paper without the pencil touching it, the waxy finish reflecting the overhead lights. With his other hand he went about the real action: picking at a scab on his ear.
Steve had a serious compulsion about that ear. Twice already that year he had picked and pinched until it bled, once in copious enough amounts that stopping the bleeding became the classroom’s main concern until the teacher could get him out of there. He had two wounds high on the helix and parallel to one another like fangs had gotten to him, and I could see today he was committed to catching a break from this assignment via bleeding out again.
A poster banner ran three-quarters of the circumference of the room, just below the ceiling, on which we could see the world’s geologic eras depicted from the Precambrian to the Holocene. Like many kids, even in the 1970s, I was fascinated by dinosaurs, to the extent that I’d missed the phase of wanting to be a fireman or police officer when I grew up, and told any adults who inquired that maybe I’d be a “dinosaur man.” I remember asking if there were in fact jobs of this nature out in the world, which is how I learned the meaning and pronunciation of the words archaeology and paleontology probably earlier than most. A lengthy portion of the poster illustrated the Mesozoic and grew interestingly more detailed—at least to my eyes—at the Triassic and Jurassic periods, the best times, when most of the great dinosaurs roamed.
The teacher announced that we were closing in on the time to turn in our poems. She reminded us to write our names and classroom number in the upper right-hand corner of the paper. That classic fear, that surge of panic that came with being called to deliver at a moment of complete and woeful unpreparedness—an alarm with which I would come to grow deeply accustomed over the following years, to the point that it seemed a necessary stage to getting any assignment done—rinsed through me.
I hadn’t written a word yet and already we were near the finish. So I went with what what my mind held, blood and dinosaurs, and tackled the demands of rhyme with a kind of sprung rhythm:
Dinosaurs, Dinosaurs,
they’re what I know. Some
really did grow.
What did they do? They ate you.
Help!
I make no claims that my first literary effort revealed some inchoate genius, or even incipient talent. We all have to start somewhere. But the poem did go on to be selected as the representative poem from Hikes Elementary, grades 1–5, and then somehow won the county-wide contest as well. To the ecstatic thrill of my parents, one of the local papers printed it in the Metro/Neighborhoods section above my misspelled name, along with finalists. The first publication, and thus the initial step of this illustrious career. Here we could claim the young writer was on his way, the pathway forward set—my parents surely would—but in reality this small accomplishment was only something else that happened to a boy easily distracted, unfocused, and interested in so many other things. That the award had been unexpected, even unsought, gave it a unique charm. It brought a good deal of attention and praise from adults, and there was a satisfaction in seeing the newspaper column wafting beneath a single magnet every time I opened and shut the refrigerator door to assuage an addiction to chocolate milk. As a future “dinosaur man” in embryo, however, I had fossils to search out in the wide ditch behind the house. These took precedence.
•
I’ve voiced my belief that writers are more often made rather than born, but believe natural predilections must exist as well; aspects of character that contingency happens to nurture as we begin to take possession of ourselves. A factor common in a writer’s biography is a significant amount of time early in life spent alone, often in convalescence. Which probably accounts for why most people who don’t read picture the typical writer as some friendless pasty-necked geek. My own history contains both, although the stretch of convalescence did not occur until my early twenties when a severe back injury returned me to a floor in my parents home for several weeks, where gifted books piled up beside me. Writing had already captured my interest by then and so the physical suffering was offset by the opportunity to read for hours without interruption. But going farther back—diving deeper into my own navel is how this feels—I find many of my most lasting memories from childhood are steeped in imaginary lives. Every kid plays like this, inventing imaginary friends or reciting storylines for dolls or action figures to enact, and there’s probably some name for this stage of development that my childlessness excuses me for never having had to learn. Anyway, as we age and mature and reality begins to impose its incessant demands we indulge less often in such harmless myth-making, learn to put away childish things, etc.
A fiction writer, though, never gets around to moving on. Rather than being a stage of development, this habit of play settles in as an important facet of who one is. How else to describe the invention of stories populated by imaginary people but as a kind of semi-directed daydreaming? The lure of this kind of the play remains provocative, even compulsive and habitual; it clings to the same rites of fantasy but the focus changes, turns less whimsical and by necessity more coherent, oriented toward adult possibilities and concerns. In some way—and this is neither for good or ill, it simply is, as the nature of the process—one’s character remains deformed from that supposed maturity, reluctant (or unable) to move beyond the detailed imagining of other, vastly foreign selves. We can’t experience firsthand everything available, every interesting possibility, in this world. So through sympathetic imagination we invent other selves.
As Oscar Wilde wrote: “One’s real life is so often the life one does not lead.” Fiction writers try their hands at several different lives and try to get to the truth at the bottom of each of them—lives that often become more “real” than their very own, at least for hours at a time.
What I’m thinking about is different from the convention of, say, transforming into a star athlete while playing basketball with friends, when everyone takes turns mimicking the sports announcer with the game clock ticking down. I would call out, “Griffith picks up the ball and takes it to the hole” (Darrell Griffith being the name every twelve-year-old Kentucky boy had on his tongue the spring and summer of 1980, as he had led the University of Louisville to its first NCAA championship that year) and then move into the slow-motion of highlight films for a down-to-the-wire winning basket. “Doctor Dunkenstein again!” Someone else would be Dr. J, Magic Johnson, or Larry Bird, and for those instants in the game that’s who we were, bearing the glory of exploits seen on TV while knowing no more about the players’ lives than we knew of what our parents lives were like once they left for work. We might switch identities at a whim, just as a new name sprang to mind. Once the games finished, we returned to our regularly-scheduled identities, smiling at the thought of what it must feel like to be so unambiguously great at something as to inspire awe in everyone watching. None of this connects to what Wilde wrote; in fact this was its opposite, the