Edgar Allan Poe
In sixth grade I decided I'd had enough with being a geek. I purposely dropped out of all of my honors classes - or tried to at least. I let my grades slip as far as I could. I started stealing cigarettes (and hiding those, ironically in the same place Amityville had hidden so many years before). I was really trying all around to be cool.
So very jr. high of me.
I finally got out of the honors program and ironically it was then that I discovered what I loved. My non-honors seventh grade English class studied Poe. I was hooked. Okay, maybe a little obsessed. I read everything that I could get my hands on by him. I asked for his books for Christmas. I even went so far as to memorize the first two pages of "The Tell Tale Heart".
I finally was given a choice and room to think beyond the boundaries of my world (I'd been with the same kids in the honors program since first grade - we were even bussed to one another's schools once a week in elementary school). Letting go of those boundaries I felt were holding me in I found something I loved - something I still love.
In 9th grade (back in the honors program - once I felt I had a choice in the matter, I chose to go back) I was given this assignment to make a poetry book and chose pictures from popular media to help illustrate the poems meaning. Of course I did a lot of Poe poems and many others. In doing this assignment that many of my friends thought was stupid, I had an epiphany moment. I knew as I pasted the poems on the page that this was what I wanted to do - somehow. I didn't know how exactly, I just knew for sure at that moment that the written word was my craft. No more veterinarian or astronomer dreams - this was it, and what it had been all along.
In fighting my world and expanding my horizons I found a little bit of myself.
The thing that first hooked me though was mysteries. Like Amityville Horror I had this curiosity about hidden knowledge that was being kept from me - stories that I needed to somehow unfold.
Ulmer says of mystery, "The grammatologist Walter Ong observed that narrative is transformed in literacy from the epic form of oral cultures to the detective story. Semioticians such as Roland Barthes have shown that every literate narrative is structured as a mystery, regardless of the themes or contents of the particular story...Information is release over the course of the tale in terms of 'enigmas' that must be resolved....That so many of our narratives are framed as crime stories, including journalism as well as fictional stories, is an expression of the literate frame of mind, whose analytic stance addresses experience in terms of problem solving." (Ulmer, 183)
My mood growing up was lost. I was lost and searching because that is what I was surrounded with -my parents, my friends parents, everyone who was a transplant to the desert was there alone - swaying in the theoretical wind in the desert searching to be free of what they left, or trying to find something new in this land. I wanted to know what it was they were all looking for.