One and the Same
By Jamie Venezia
I never read without a pencil.
I discovered my passion for writing in the fourth grade in Houston, Texas. We had just moved from El Paso, and we were only scheduled to be in Houston for one year according to the Army. Needless to say, I was not in the mood to make new friends nor was I in the mood to learn a new school. I was friendly and cordial to my classmates, of course, but I was not in the mood to get to know people if I was going to move in a year.
Nevertheless, my teacher was lovely and the classmates were so nice that I fell into the same trap that I had with every other move; I made friends and came to love my school. My teacher, Mrs. Brown, was something else entirely, though. One of the things that made it so hard to leave was her amazing teaching style.
She was our school’s head of writing; she always had new techniques to teach students and new ways to make each day the best that it could be. Now, I loved reading. From a very young age I always had a book with some sort of adventurous rebel ready to change the world. That being said, I was not a writer.
All of my writing always sounded so average and unexciting. For a while, I gave up reading for months so I could practice my writing. I learned every grammar rule in my disposal, but for some reason, I could not write the magic I was accustomed to reading. I tried to write like J.K. Rowling, R.L. Stine, and Lemony Snicket, which were my favorite writers at the time. Part of my ill fortune with writing had to do with the fact that I was only ten, but it also had to do with my thinking writing and reading were two separate things.
My teacher made something called writing boot camp. She brought in tiny camouflage jackets and made small name tags for each of us. We had to do push-ups if we ended on a preposition and run laps if we didn’t properly cite our sources. It was so much fun! Something else that we did was read for an hour every day; thirty minutes together as a class, thirty minutes apart as individuals. She read us The Westing Game, Grimm’s Fairy Tales, and The Witches. Something that struck me odd, though; she had us read with a pencil and a pad of paper in hand. She bought twenty adorable little pads of paper and twenty cute little golf pencils. She gave me a petite looking light pink one. She had us write our names on them and our grade so they would not be lost. She told us that these notebooks were ours and that we had to take care of them as much as we would anything else. I doodled in mine a lot. We were to write in them during group reading and during our individual reading. I never understood the point.
During this writing boot camp, she also had us try to create the perfect story for the young kindergarteners. Our goal was to amuse them, and if we succeeded, we would get an A. It was a long process, but it was tons of fun. I tried to create the perfect adventure story out of everything we had learned so far. It took up a lot of my time, but I wanted to make it perfect. The problem was, I was still ten, and every time I saw something shiny, my work would suffer. Recess would distract me, toys would distract me, and my friends would distract me.
One day, because I had so little done on my book, I asked if I could write a little bit during reading time. She told me no. The thing you have to understand about this teacher is that she was a southern belle type; she could insult you, your family, and your dog and still make it sound like a compliment. I was never mad when she told me no, mostly because she always explained to me why she made her decision. She told me that writing and reading were not two different topics, that they were actually the very same thing. She said we always had to write down things that we read, because it taught us to think about the words and recognize the flow, rather than get stuck on the same sentence over and over again. She also said that that when we were writing, we had to read over our work several times to get a sense of the world we were creating. She said that was why we received the pad and paper; so that our writing and reading were never separate and we could constantly live in the fictional world we made for ourselves. She told me that for that day’s lesson, to write anything I think about in the almost blank journal I was holding. Anything at all! My thoughts about the book, which character I liked the most, or what I wanted for dinner that night. I reluctantly agreed and then the class gathered for the boring session of reading.
That particular day, the class was still fresh into the mystery book we were reading; The Westing Game. It was a good book with fairly easy words so as to be understood by children. I wrote three things down in that notebook before something phenomenal happened.
I like writing in cursive
I wish my nickname was Turtle
Purple waves, red blood = purple martin, red maple
I was amazed. I identified my first rhetorical device; repetition. The man in the book said that the child who ‘found Westing’s body’ -as I said, this was early on in the book- kept mumbling purple waves while staring at his blood red hands. In the next chapter, a young boy sees a purple martin fly into a red maple. This hit me like absolute magic. I could not figure out exactly how the author could have planned so far ahead into the story, even though, in retrospect, it does not seem like such and incapable thing to do.
From that moment on I carried my notebook with me wherever I went. I wrote down everything from the color of the sky that day to who I thought the killer was in The Westing Game. I found that writing and reading are fun apart, but they are magical together, and they gave me a way to express how I felt in an art form that came naturally to me.
I guess one could say that that is the moment that I fell in love with writing and vowed to make it my life’s work until the end of time. I make notes in every book I read, and I write everything I feel no matter what portion of the day it is.
To this day I never read without my pencil.
