Stony Brook University - SUNY Digital Repository

I.
With no reservations, I call myself a “writer.” And for as
long as I can remember, I have been a writer. My earliest
memory of actually writing is of a little tale I wrote on thick
elementary school paper when I was in the first grade. It was a
story, but a few pages long and which I illustrated myself,
about the “King of the Rocks” and the boy who found him in the
woods. I was only about seven or eight years old and I wrote
it, but I do not know why I wrote it. It was not an assignment
for my first grade teacher, Miss Pennen. It was not for
something my mother told me to write to keep me occupied while
she cooked dinner. If I had to say, I wrote it simply to write
it – for the pleasure of writing: the pleasure of plumbing my
childhood imagination; the pleasure of creation with a yellow
No. 2 pencil and a box of crayons; the pleasure of sheer
exploration with thoughts and words and blank sheets of paper,
embracing that question on every child’s lips … “WHY?” I wrote
it to take Wonder by the hand and follow it wherever it would
lead me. Almost twenty years later, I would return to this
earliest remembered occasion of my writing with my Master’s
thesis, in order to pursue further that very notion of “wonder.”
11