That was the name of the class I got stuck in back in 7th grade—a punishment for not paying attention in my (indefensibly boring) English courses.

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I never had a problem with reading; I still remember the first time I tore through ‘Fellowship of the Ring’. (Alright—I don’t remember remember, but I remember the way it made me feel.) See, my problem wasn’t books; it was people telling me to read. I loved stories—movies, games, myths. Anything that let me slip into another world.

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But reading sucked. At least, until I met Dana.

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She was our school’s Shakespeare professor, head of the aforementioned ‘Reading Sucks’ class. A dainty blessing of a woman who, under any other circumstances, would’ve seemed like the last person you’d want teaching a room of stubborn delinquents. (We weren’t delinquents,  just annoyed by the whole ‘authority’ thing.) Dana was kind and soft-spoken, and she carried a deep, unrelenting love for the written word. She was the type of teacher who wanted to dig into every line, every symbol, really dissect why the curtains were blue and not red.

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We all hated it; until we didn’t.

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Being in her class felt like a smack on the wrist. But something happened there, on the old couches in Dana’s office, as we all sat around for our weekly discussions. We started to love it. Dana’s smile. Her passion. Her pushing us to find meaning in the mess. From 'The Hunger Games' to 'Othello', reading didn’t seem to suck anymore.

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I took her class again the next year. And the year after that. And again, and again, until I started seeing books the way Dana did: filled with magic and beautiful, hidden detail.

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I started writing. At first, it was just scraps of lore for my weekly D&D games. But slowly it grew. I wanted to write myths, tales, things that mattered… The small projects became larger ones, and the world I was building started to find a life of its own. Brick by brick, line by line, I was becoming a writer.

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When Dana passed away, my senior year, I still wasn’t sure what I wanted to do. But I’d learned just how much a story could mean. Just how much words on a page could matter. So, I kept with it. I built my world. I wrote new stories. I filled them with fantasy, and tragedy, and wretchedly compromised people; all the things I know Dana would’ve loved.

 

And now I’m here, hoping someone might stumble across one of my stories right at the moment when it matters most. Right when they think reading sucks.