Author Archives: Sally

Two of the more (emotionally) devastating moments of my childhood involved pain. One situation involved physical pain, and the other situation involved the pain of embarrassment.

The first incident happened during a hospital visit. A nurse had to give me two shots — one in the back of each leg — to get me to calm down enough to have an MRI done. I was only five. Five.

The other situation wasn’t as terrible, but it involved me making a fool of myself. This was in third grade, when we still had a class specifically dedicated to reading. They gave us time to read in class, and I remember enjoying that part of the class. (I loved to read middle-grade books, which are still a marvel to me.)

I feel like middle-grade books are probably harder to write than picture books or YA books, because it’s so hard to write authentically and capture an eight- or nine-year-old’s attention. By the time you’re in middle school, you start to realize what feels fake, what feels real, what feels genuine, and what feels like moralizing. Or pandering.

Even in a time of confusion and growing pains, it seems like most tweens can figure out the difference between a gimmick and a gem. The good middle-grade books are definitely gems.

In spite of my passion for reading, I didn’t always like doing my reading class homework. One of our homework assignments involved preparing a paragraph that used at least two or three of that week’s vocabulary words. I hadn’t done the assignment, just because I’d simply forgotten to – and when it was time to share our paragraphs with the class, I decided to do an impromptu, off-the-cuff story.

This wasn’t like me at all — not having done my homework and giving an impromptu performance. It must’ve been an awful performance, because the teacher called me out and asked why I didn’t do the assignment the right way. I can’t remember what my punishment was, but … I’m sure I didn’t enjoy it.

That teacher was the kind of schoolmarm who made “lesser” students feel bad. But I was already very acutely aware of “my station” in the school’s social strata. By the time I left that elementary school, I was the only girl in my class who didn’t have a doctor for a parent.

My experiences there gave me an aversion to parochial education, too, which I find regressive for reasons that have absolutely nothing to do with religion. (It’s the strict prissiness of it all. I’m fine with the pageantry, but I can’t stand the constant glaring and the constant finger-wagging.)

Anyway, I …

I suppose I had it relatively easy, if those are two of the “meaner” interactions I’ve had with other people. But they left an impression on me — and made me feel more aware of my own shortcomings — so that’s something.

If nothing else, I’ve learned to be less harsh with children. And that really is something.

I recently remembered the time that I wrote – in a feature piece for our high school newspaper – that “no culture is inherently superior to another culture.” 

I was in ninth or tenth grade – I’m thinking that it was the very beginning of tenth grade, when I was still about fifteen. Picture a nerdy-looking, tall, kinda chubby fifteen-year-old, with frizzy hair and tiny little glasses. I was a dork — so picture the dorkiest teen imaginable. Now, picture this teenager sitting down with the newspapers’ editors and the club sponsor, and then picture them telling me to take that line out of the article.

I have to assume they asked me to take it out for one of two reasons. The first reason is that I may have unintentionally done a horrible job of explaining what I meant to say – that no one group of people is inherently better than another group, based solely (or in part) upon their religion, their food, their appearance, their clothing, their customs, etc. No one group is more intelligent than everyone else, or more stylish, or more sexy, or more “correct” in whatever way.

So, you know, I have to assume I did such a terrible job of explaining things that maybe I sounded like a biased American. I’m afraid they thought I could’ve been saying that no culture is superior to the “American way” or some other Tea Party-esque bullshit. I’m afraid that’s what happened, because at fifteen, I had lots of room to grow as a writer — and as a person. But I knew what I was trying to say – and I was trying to argue for a more open-minded … uh, mindset.

A more open-minded mindset, mind you.

The other option is that they understood exactly what I was saying, and that they made me cut it from my piece because they knew it would make some of the older readers in our community upset.

This was almost fifteen years ago, before people started getting riotously mad over the content in student publications. Nowadays, though, you hear stories about student journalists being pressured to take certain articles off their websites.

But in our day, the worst thing that happened to us – as far as pushback – was an angry admonishment from a teacher, or an advertiser wanting to quit paying for ad space. This happened once, to my knowledge. It was after we had two opinion pieces that included scandalous words like “damn” and “suck” – and one of these was simply part of the title of a movie, the ridiculous 2010 comedy Vampires Suck.

Oh, well. I can’t say we didn’t need the advertiser’s money. But we found more accommodating folks, who didn’t mind that kid’s say the suckiest things. We were able to write our opinion pieces in … uh, peace.

As I mentioned earlier, we did have to tone some stuff down. But …

I still get embarrassed when I think about how I often tried to be progressive without fully having the phrasing or the contextual knowledge to know how to express myself properly.

I still had the courage to go forward, to learn, to actually try to do better, without stumbling over myself to try to prove that my intentions outweigh other folks’ feelings and life experiences.

And I’m glad I had that — that willingness to keep listening and growing. I’m glad that I was willing to keep learning, and I’m glad that I’m still willing to learn.