In grade two, Miss Lennie handed out slips of paper. On each was written a few words. She instructed the class to write a story about the words on the slips of paper.
My slip said, “My Teacher”.
Of all the topics in the world, Miss Lennie wanted me to write about her? Was this some kind of trick?
I decided to teach Miss Lennie a lesson. Rather than tell her the truth, which she obviously expected, I wrote about her buggy green eyes, her fat knees, and her streaked hair—like a skunk’s is how I described it.
I wrote comments that were partially true, but were not compliments. I wrote, not knowing how a woman in her twenties or thirties might react to remarks about her personal appearance. How they might hurt her feelings. How they might reverberate every time she looked into the mirror for the rest of her life.
I was seven years old, and I had a pencil like a chainsaw.
I gleefully wrote the piece knowing that the last line was going to be the clincher. The last line, after all my insults and jibes, was going to be, “but everybody loves Miss Lennie, because she is so wonderful.” Which was the truth.
I knew that the last line would pardon me from all the sins I’d committed in the rest of the creative writing exercise. I smirked that it would probably be the last time Miss Lennie went fishing for a compliment from her Grade 2 class.
A few days later, Miss Lennie handed back our pages. She’d written in red pencil across the top of my story, “Very interesting” and given me an A. I was accustomed to A’s. But she also said, and she told my mother, that she’d like me to do the exercise again.
So I did. And this time I played it straight. This time I wrote that Miss Lennie was pretty and delightful and taught her students so well that there could never be another Grade 2 teacher as magnificent as she was.
This time I got an A+.
What did I learn?
I learned that I had observational powers that, with only the slightest provocation, could be summoned to record a multitude of details. I was astounded at how quickly and precisely the specifics I needed flooded into my mind when I decided to portray Miss Lennie in her worst light. On the other hand, when I was writing to an expectation, rather than my own mischievous voice, I noticed how phony and inferior the words sounded.
I learned I had the power to rebel. I had the power of words. The power of prose. The power of interpreting the observable world in my own unique way. I was a writer. I was seven years old. I was a writer with a voice.