That following year a boy from the class below me wrote a letter to the county newspaper chastising Mrs. Malchow for teaching a book in her class that had such terrible morals, violence, sexual references...and the list goes on. He compared learning in her classroom to the likes of a prison. I couldn't take that type of negative press for a book and teacher that had changed my life, so I wrote a reply letter to the editor that was also published. I talked about the importance of reading banned books and opening your mind as well as how much I valued my education in Mrs. Malchow's classroom. This experienced helped me grow as a reader and an advocate of banned books. If I hadn't read this piece of literature the previous year, it wouldn't have set off that fire of inspiration inside of me to write the letter.
Right now I'm working on a novella about a widower named Frank who keeps the memory of his wife alive by constantly listening to Frank Sinatra tunes. I also just started working on a piece of young adult fiction (literally this week) about a boy and girl who fall in love in a psychiatric ward at a children's hospital after being brought together by the influence of the work of e.e. cummings. After breaking my writing apart, I can see that a biography on Frank Sinatra and various pieces of adolescent fiction about love that I have read have influenced me to write these two pieces.
Spending the majority of my adult life thus far in English classrooms, I find it very interesting how reading and writing are connected like this. The power of reading leads to the power of writing, and the power of writing leads to the power of reading. How I ever got caught up in these two worlds I will never know, but I am forever grateful that I did.
