When my family moved to Maryland, I became a poet-in-the-schools for the Maryland State Arts Council’s Artist-in-Education program. I had always written poetry, but I began to take workshops with some wonderful poets through the Geraldine R. I still use those skills today, especially in my writing. Tuning in, listening to the way people talk and the things that they said – these were skills I learned as a young child, even though I didn’t know I was learning them. When I received my college acceptance letter from New York University’s Dramatic Writing Program, I knew I was on my writing path. Having to sit out sports made me focus on writing even more. I tried other activities (marching band, fencing) until I hurt my knee. I spent a lot of my time at Ramapo High School in Franklin Lakes, NJ writing in my journal, working on the school literary magazine, and dreaming of being a writer. I wanted to be able to take people to far away places and times with my words, the way Emily Bronte did with Jane Eyre. How could my mind be with Jane Eyre on the desolate moors when I was physically in New Jersey, in my own room? I felt like Alice in Wonderland at the moment she is in both worlds, the real one and the one beyond the mirror. I looked up from sad Jane and the gray, windy moors of England and saw - through my window - my younger brothers playing outside. I was reading on my bed on a sunny spring weekend when I was about twelve. But it was reading the novel, Jane Eyre, by Emily Bronte, that made me want to be a writer. A few of my poems and stories were published in PTA newsletters. Imagine the mix of accents my ears had to tune into every day!īy the time I was in second grade, my Thai brothers were gone, and I had two younger brothers in their place. Around the time I was born, the Osathanugrahs’ two teenage boys came to live with us and attend school in the U.S. After they got married, my parents lived in Thailand for a year and became friends with the Osathanugrah family. She was from a small town in Nottingham, England (you’ve heard of Robin Hood). My father, a kid from the Bronx, New York, met my mother at the 1964 World’s Fair. When I was little, I lived with people from three diverse cultures. I am a writer because I grew up listening to the different ways that people talk and use language. That’s probably why I haven’t talked about it much, even as an adult. But I also felt invisible, as former friends disappeared from my life.Īlmost 30 years later, this incident is still painful. I wished I were invisible, below the radar. Every day, I felt the way the speaker in my poem does. The car-bullying stopped, but things did not get easier at school. I didn’t want to admit this was happening.įinally, a dear friend told her parents, who told mine. I began to panic every time I had to stay after school, but I never told my parents. I don’t know how many times he nearly hit me. Whether I stayed at school until 6 PM, or left immediately after the bell, he was there.Īs soon as I started to pull out of the lot, my ex would slam his foot on the accelerator and cut me off, swerving to miss my car and beat me through the lot’s single exit. That’s when the real bullying started. My ex would sit in his car and wait for me in the school parking lot. Midway through junior year, we all started driving. Only a handful of old friends were willing to welcome me back, so I felt isolated at school. It was hard to walk away from some of those friendships, but I wasn’t ready for the drinking–and other things–that were happening when we hung out together.Īfter a year-long relationship with my ex, I had left many other friendships untended. Then I left the tight social circle we shared. We broke up at the end of sophomore year in high school, but stayed friends, sometimes more than that, for a few months. (Admission: I own but have not yet read the Dear Bully anthology, probably because of the memories it’s likely to trigger.) Writing “Dear Bully” brought up memories of my own bully, an ex-boyfriend. Note: The title refers to Dear Bully: 70Authors Tell Their Stories, Edited by Megan Kelley Hall and Carrie Jones.
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