As a little kid, my parents used to read to me at bedtime every night. I would listen with eager ears as they regaled me with tales of Sam I Am’s enthusiasm for oddly colored foodstuffs and the Goodnight Moon bunny’s adorable bedtime rituals. I memorized every part of the books I was read and would recite them aloud over and over again.
Fast forward a couple of years, and my young imagination was dancing with so many ideas that I just had to write them down. My handwriting was barely legible chicken-scratch so I enlisted the help of my mom, who has beautiful penmanship, and I would dictate to her the contents of my mind. Owing to my obsession with collecting discarded found objects, I built a universe around an anthropomorphic string named Talula that eventually stretched over five very short books.
Next, I discovered poetry. My mom would take me to poetry readings hosted by her many interesting friends and they took me in and mentored me as I tried to write poems for myself. Occasionally, I would read them myself in front of crowded rooms of adults.
I would write as much as I could, about the real and the imaginary and sometimes both blended in very interesting ways. A lot of what ended up on paper was inspired by situations I found myself in. I was ambitious enough to start writing whole books, but none ever got beyond four or five chapters. Most died after one page and were buried in the back of my mind somewhere hidden.
Nowadays, I am trying to master being brief. Gone is the ambition of writing a novel; now is the time for poems and short stories.
Ursula, I loved how you included direct references to books that meant a lot to you as a child and that cemented your love of reading. I, too, was a Goodnight Moon kid! One thing I noticed throughout a lot of these blog posts, yours included, is that many of us mentioned or thought of our parents reading to us. I think there’s definitely a strong familial role in setting a child on track to be interested in literature, and I liked hearing about it in everyone’s posts. I also really liked hearing about your writing and poetry adventures as a kid (I would really like to read the story of Talula). I can relate to the feeling of being a kid, elated after writing your first “big piece” – I published a bunch of mine on a website called Young Writers Society – and I think that sense of pride drove me to keep writing and writing, and here I am today. I like the linear style of your post as well; you took readers on a memory journey from being a very small child hearing bedtime stories in bed to writing your own stories and reading them aloud to now setting goals for yourself in your writing career.
Hi Ursula! I can totally relate to this. When I was little, my parents would always read me bedtime stories. Goodnight Moon was always something my dad read to me, now he likes to rap the words of the book as a joke! Also, I think it’s so cool how you created your own universe and everything, that’s something I want to do as well. I haven’t really published any of my own work or even finished a whole book, but I can relate to that drive to keep going and keep writing.