L-O-O-K

Illustration by: Calamity Meg

Some memories are like mile markers on the road.

I remember the moment distinctly. Sitting at my desk as my teacher ran her finger under four white letters. Until that moment, the letters were separate and unremarkable. Each had a sound of course. We’d even learned an alphabet song to memorize the letters. We’d traced the shapes again and again, repeating each consonant and vowel. But now, as my first grade teacher spoke aloud, my world shook to its very core.

L-O-O-K, she said­, tapping the L, two O’s and the K with her chalk. Look.

The familiar word I’d heard a thousand times had a form, a way to be communicated on the blackboard or on paper. The mangle of markings that filled the books in my father’s library were suddenly accessible, it was only a matter of time.

I was about to learn to read.

The word look still haunts me. It was a portent, a command. Be a watcher. See the world as it is. Look deeper, past the tricks and illusions, past the lies and distortions. Look and see the truth of things. After that, I loved writing and I loved writers. Writers were the masters of this new world. They knew the rules and could create something out of nothing. Writers could conjure the needed words to bend perception, to create worlds.

Even though the class started with Dick and Jane, I was impatient. All those books stacked around the house and filling the attic, I wanted to see the words for myself. I started with Dr. Seuss and drove my parents crazy reading The Cat in the Hat aloud. Each word was a revelation, a gateway to a thousand objects and thoughts. I grew an appetite for reading and my eyes sought out the words on signs, advertisements, cereal boxes, magazines and the dense topography of books.

As I got older, I came across shocking revelations.

I remember reading a newspaper article of what I now know was the murder of Sharon Tate. The killers chased their victims into the yard. The police found words written in blood on the walls. The raw power of words was clear. Words could cut you, damage you or even destroy you. The bloody word “Pig” on the wall of the crime scene stabbed me deeply and irrevocably. Part of my innocence died the day I read that word.

Maybe because people are a mystery, unknowable—I looked harder. My Dad was a voracious reader. The attic was filled with science fiction and pulp novels mixed together with the classics. I read about monsters and heroes, Martians, plagues, artificial realities, kings and pawns, telepathy and possession. Each book held a piece of the puzzle; good vs evil, power, humility, self-sacrifice, betrayal, desire, loss, triumph and the meaning of love. These were the secrets of adulthood, filtered through the prism of a thousand minds. And as my appetite for the written word grew, everything became clear.

Writers were magicians of words and I wanted to be one. I wanted to spend my life learning how the trick was done.

So here I am, committed in every sense to being a writer, to the magic of creation.  Like every writer I spend a lot of time in secret worlds and other dimensions where my characters and stories live.  Now and then that first word comes back to me, that seed of wonder that started it all.

Look.