The word ‘novel’ carries, for me, a weight as ominous, all-consuming and unforgiving as any Job encountered.
Category Archive: Philip Schultz
If I get the idea, and I get some clarity on how I feel about that idea, then I can safely assume I’ll find the right words. I do have that confidence.
When a child knows that he or she is dyslexic, that it’s the way their brain is programmed, and it’s not their fault, that makes all the difference in the world.
I found many ways around my dyslexia, but I still have trouble transforming words into sounds. I have to memorize and rehearse before reading anything aloud to avoid embarrassing myself by mispronouncing words.
I not only couldn’t read but often couldn’t hear or understand what was being said to me – by the time I’d processed the beginning of a sentence, the teacher was well on her way through a second or third.
I have to often read the same sentence over and over before I understand it. And I have to convince myself that what I’m reading is so enjoyable and so exciting and so good for me that it’s worth the effort.
I eventually just imagined being a little boy who was quote unquote ‘normal’: who could learn like all the kids around me that I felt excluded from. And I imagined myself into one of these and into someone who could read.
I was well into middle age when one of my children, then in the second grade, was found to be dyslexic. I had never known the name for it, but I recognized immediately that the symptoms were also mine.
There is a gap in my work from ’84 to 2002, 18 years where I stopped writing. I was working at fiction and other things and starting a school and getting married and starting a family, but I wasn’t writing poetry for the better part of 15 years.
I never doubted my talent. If talent was the circus, then I was its ringmaster and audience, applauding its every move.