It started in 1996 with a Rugrats episode titled “The Reject.” I was inspired to write my own version, so I got a brand new, royal blue notebook, the 3-subject spiral kind, and spent the next several days writing a complete story by hand. It was the longest thing I’d ever written, and I was impressed I actually finished it.
That stoked my hunger to write more. My next inspiration came from my school bus driver who told us about witnessing a house fire. I wanted to retell her story on the page with as much drama and suspense as she’d conveyed on the ride to school. I then had two finished stories and began to write others based on my own imagination, filling many pages.
One day I went to grab the notebook from my backpack and realized it was gone. Panic set in as I looked everywhere I could think of at home and at school. After a few days, panic turned into grief at the thought of losing all my stories.
Sitting in my 6th grade social studies class one morning, my teacher Ms. Cherry sat in a student desk at the front of the room, her toes barely hitting the floor. Ms. Cherry was a petite Black woman with short, bronze-colored hair. She placed a blue notebook on the desk in front of her and confirmed if it was mine. She’d found it! My heart lifted at the sight of it. But Ms. Cherry hadn’t just found my notebook, she’d also read it.
Ms. Cherry told me in front of the class, “I showed it to Ms.-, and said, That girl can write!”
No one had read any of my stories before that. And here I was one random school day at 11-years-old, with a tiny seed dropped into my psyche - maybe I could write.
Sincerely,
