One Word Two Words Three Words More--by N Otis Richerson

Just after high school but before college, I laid in bed with the sheets pulled up to the crook of my arms. I hunched over large books as poor bedside light washed over thin pages. I labored over Dostoevsky and Hesse. I bit my nails over Nabokov and Tolstoy. I took small morning coffee sips over Hemingway and Salinger. I took lunch with Kafka. I read the greats. I read only the greats. I said to myself, “ I’m getting smarter-greater by their words.” I wouldn’t own a television. I believed in the image.



Ten years later, with two drawers full of term papers and a small country’s debt, I ask myself, “What are the books that really changed your life?” I’m not irrecoverably changed because of Hemingway, Tolstoy, or Joyce. It was the book Hey, Dummy, that really effed my shit—if you’ll excuse the cliché—that rocked my reading world.

Hey, Dummy is little book about a boy that befriends a retard. The retard is later killed in a dumpster. I remember big wet sloppy tears cascading down my swollen juvenile cheeks, as the book showed me how my little slow buddy got his face pushed in by rocks—how he just stopped moving. I remember how my mother petted my hair as I sobbed into my pillow. I remember chocking the words, “Why, Mom, why did they do it?”
“It’s just a book, Dear, It didn’t really happen.” I knew better. She knew better.
If you want your writing to change lives—change the world, don’t write another essay on Joyce’s judgment of the Irish in The Dead, write something on par with Where the Red Fern Grows or Charlotte’s Web. There are some good blogs dedicated to kid’s literature: http://kidslit.menashalibrary.org/ and http://kidliterary.blogspot.com/ . Kidliterary goes a little more into publishing—so does http://www.underdown.org/. There are many good web pages dedicated to crafting and publishing children’s literature.
If you’re thinking, “I’m a serious artist, I don’t write for kids.” Remember Twain, you know—The American Author— he wrote kids books. Tolkin’s Hobbit –Ya, kid’s book. Hesse wrote one too, he died with a big fat Nobel Prize on his mantel. Most readers begin their romance with books young, why not take advantage of them/it?

The ideals you acquire in youth have a tendency to stick close, right in the rib cage, pressed against your soon-to-be-soured beating heart. After years of college lit, as my mother lay in hospital whites with tubes coming out like branches, me petting her thin, slick, black wet hair this time, I didn’t think of Kafka’s Starvation Artist. I didn’t draw parallels to Ovid’s golden fleece tragedy. I thought of The Giving Tree.

--Nathaniel Otis Richerson