*This post is inspired by a post over at One Good Thing.*
When I was in high school, I'm pretty sure I thought I was going to be a writer. In fact, even then, I was aware that I loved words maybe more than most people, and to that end, I took every English elective my high school offered. Don't be impressed; at my rinky-dink high school there were four electives: World Lit, Speech, Debate and Creative Writing. Consider, for just a minute, that debate and creative writing were taught by the same person. Who idolized Garrison Keilor and never, ever stopped talking about the speed bumps that the city had put in that year on his street. He drove a conversion van and had coke-bottle glasses and he HATED me. I think he hated me because he also taught senior honors English, and I made trouble in that class. I can't remember a day that my friends and I kept quiet; we did the work, we got A's, and we laughed a lot. Not the kind of fake giggling that girls do for boys, but you know, real belly laughs, couple with drooling. Right in the middle of Thosty's class. Right in the middle of Malcolm X, or the Fountainhead, or Death of a Salesman.
Anyway, he hated me and I wrote poems like the tortured teenager I thought I was. I still have them all, and there is only one that is only sort of passable, now. When I wasn't writing poems, I was writing truly horrible short stories and plays (and I knew it). I mean, they were so bad that you wonder now how I thought I could possibly be a writer. (In college, I stopped harboring any delusions and realized I was the only 20 year old in the world buying poetry. Or it sure felt that way. I faced reality and realized poets--they don't make so much money doing poetry. And now I find myself rarely inspired. I've realized I'm a better reader than writer--I could always make someone else's essay better than my own.) But I wrote poems and I felt anguished and I edited the school's literary magazine for three years and I entered the literary festival of my school's conference and when I was a senior, I won the top honor for one of my poems. And my teacher never congratulated me. He announced, in our creative writing class, all the awards that had been won. My good friend K had won the top award for a play. Other people won some ribbons. And I didn't win anything. At least according to him.
But I didn't stop writing, no. And no one told me not to write; no one told me what to write about. I wrote an (awful) short story about a girl who killed herself and NO ONE hauled me into counselling for it. Because I wasn't suicidal; I was using my *gasp* imagination. I wrote another short story about whacky hippie parents, and another one about a boy whose mother killed his sister. Drunk driving. No one came to my door and arrested me for those. No one said that I was deeply troubled for writing those. No one imagined I was doing anything but imagining, which is what kids do. Imagine.
I guess kids should stop now--stop writing, stop imagining, and stop dreaming sci-fi dreams (if you didn't check out that link, please do). I guess we should ban any watching of horror films, or any playing of video games, because those might lead to imagination. Imagine. That boy imagined zombies. In a high school, and imagine, he got arrested. Imagine a high school boy imagining zombies in a high school, which is probably the only place besides his home he spends mass quantities of time in. It's not so hard to imagine, is it? I think that from now on, any writer than henceforth writes a book about aliens, or zombies taking over the US be arrested, because clearly, that is a threat to the US. Clearly, that's the message. Zombies are a threat! I feel sad; I feel sad because I loved to write in high school, and if I had ever thought someone would come and take me away for what I had written I would have stopped writing immediately, and without writing, I don't know where I'd be today. Immeasurably poorer for it, and probably at risk for some of those very things I was writing about.
I'm sad. I'm sad for William Poole, and I'm sad for the people who misunderstood him. I'm sad for all kids today who harbor delusions of being a writer, and I'm sad for all kids who are actually good enough to be writers, because someone might try to stop them.
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