Thanks, Mr. Gholson!

When I was in seventh grade, I had a wonderful English teacher who introduced me to the world of writing.  He gave us an assignment to write a short story.  I'm not sure why, but I wrote most of mine with dialogue.  I had no idea that this was particularly unusual.  It just came naturally to me.  We all turned in our stories and a few days later, Mr. Gholson informed me that he was going to read my story to the class.

I was rather surprised but what I remembered most about the whole thing was that he was amazed that I'd written a twenty page story almost entirely in dialogue and even more amazed that I'd done most of it right.  I didn't understand what the big deal was back then but years later I realized that dialogue isn't normally something that comes easy for people to write.

After that, I had a sense that I could write but didn't know I wanted to make it a major part of my life until I met my roommate in high school.  Her name is Joy and she introduced me to poetry and the musical group, America, and Cat Stevens and a few others.  We became the best of friends during our junior year because we shared a suite.  We had both come in as mid-termers and we ended up with our own rooms joined by the bathroom.  Needless to say, we got very spoiled to so much space.  That changed during our senior year when we roomed together.

Anyway, after reading Joy's poetry, I decided to try my hand at it.  The stuff I wrote early on was definitely not very good.  It was very amateurish and very forced.  It wasn't until I started allowing my imagination to run free a little and then later when I began writing story poems that my poetry began to have real impact.

I spent a lot of years fine tuning my talent and working to make it my own.  But I guess the ones I owe the most to for where I am now are the two people who got me started writing and another English teacher named Mrs. Lawrence, who tutored me, as well as my Dad who was determined that I was going to learn vocabulary.

I just thought I'd share this with everyone and thank those who invested in my talent.  It's funny, but Joy later became a teacher herself.  I'm not sure what Mr. Gholson is doing these days.  After all, that was 37 - 38 years ago.  I would love to let him know what an impact he's had on my life.