Ryan Avey

I started writing in first grade. Encouraged by my teacher who described me in a parent/teacher conference as a "weaver with words." I don't know how you can say that about a six-year-old, but clearly she saw something in me and encouraged me to continue on. I wrote and wrote and wrote all throughout elementary school until in seventh grade I took a blow to my ego that I'm still not sure I've recovered from. At twelve years old my seventh grade English teacher told me that I should just give up on writing because I "just wasn't good."

I took that to heart, probably a little too much since I hated her anyway because she just wasn't good at teaching.  Having taken this to heart I stopped writing. I flat-out stopped. The only writing I did from seventh grade until my freshman year of college was done begrudgingly in the form of term paper and essays. The only fiction I wrote in that time was a short story for my junior English teacher that blew enough air on the coals to keep them from going out completely.

I don't know what made me start again. Maybe it was some sort of heady brew mixed up by reading too much Harry Potter and Dark Tower over the summer. Or maybe it was a build up of words that reached critical mass. But I started writing again, and writing a story that had nothing but two characters and an absurdly large world. I wrote it in an old black and white composition book. By the time it was filled up I knew that it was a stinker. It now sits on the shelf above my desk with all the other things that I've written since then. All of them serve as a reminder of where I've come from. And you'd better believe that if I had stories from first grade they'd be up there too!

I'm finishing up my Bachelors at the moment, it's actually in psychology, and looking into graduate schools for professional/creative writing.  I don't know if I really want more school, but I like trying to keep my options as open as possible.