The wordie wonders

As a glutton for words as much as I am for fine foods, I consider myself as much a wordie as I do a foodie. I define a wordie as a person who adores the way words strung together create an alchemical meaning, the whole greater and almost independent of its parts. An alphabet evokes sounds, words meaning, and connected words transform into ideas, emotions and shared experience. Their power can create new worlds beyond what we are able to conjure with our five senses and the immediacy of consensual reality.

The rhythm of my years corresponds to books I've loved, poems whose essence I've tried to absorb into my consciousness, and my own writing practice. I feel wonder toward others' works and my own because it amazes, inspires and activates my curiosity to understand more deeply. Writing, with its capacity to tell stories, to share concepts and to open the inner eye of the reader, strikes me as kindred to magic in Dion Fortune's definition: "magic is the art of changing consciousness at will."
Before I learned to read I remember my parents sharing Green Eggs and Ham, The Monster at the End of This Book and the sloe eyed creatures of Mercer Mayer. In first grade I was placed in a remedial class because I just didn't get the reading thing, or maybe I had mild dyslexia if you can have it in degrees. By third grade I'd caught up to and surpassed most of the kids my age in language skills.

I devoured books, and in fact wandered a little lost in them. They provided an escape into a realm where anything became possible and likely and I've always loved to travel there. I used the bus ride to school, which varied in length from a half hour in autumn and spring to over an hour if snow lay on the ground, to charge through Madeleine L'Engle, Ursula le Guin and Alexander Lloyd. I raided the school library, the public libraries within thirty miles of home, and especially loved the bookmobile.
Around fifth grade, I stepped over the line of young adult (YA) fiction into novels intended for adults when I read The Clan of the Cave Bear the first time. When I got her permission to read it I know my mom had no clue that a girl was raped in the book - we weren't allowed to watch rated R films or TV shows with violent or sexual content - and she almost exploded when she learned this. It was the first thousand plus page book I read, and after that I obsessed over medicinal and edible plant foraging, anthropology and historical fiction.

I know I'm not the first or last kid whose love of reading was partly forged in the fires of social awkwardness. I started out an average child, but I grew weird: tall, frizzy hair, acne, 'spaced out,' contrary and confrontational. So I read on the bus as the ride dragged on, to escape who I had become - other in contrast to my friends - and to ignore a life that was pale and dull compared to those of the characters I met in books.

I became a wordie when reading books lost the sharp edge of escapism and shifted into pleasure. Okay, I still enjoy boarding a book and heading off for parts unknown, but now I'm happy to return to my own self and life. I can still read a two hundred page book in a day, but given my need to make hay (aka a living in an expensive town with seasonal work), I'm lucky if I read more than a chapter in a day.

I can't host a lending library like I've dreamed of doing since I was a voracious reader in a rural part of Ohio's Appalachian foothills, because my Airstream bookshelf is a single milk crate. I can build a virtual shelf to display literature I appreciate, so check out the wordie reading list on Words and other adventures. The first books includes more titles I loved as a kid.

What did you love to have read to you or read on your own as a child, as a tween, as a teen?

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