My earliest memories about being a creative writer (as opposed to the traditional learning to write your name and the alphabet routines) are all surrounded with frustration. At the age of six I wrote a poem about being fascinated with the moon's beauty. Instead of being noted for actually writing poetry at that age, my grammar in one line was corrected. I tried to explain that I understood that it was incorrect, but the way I wrote it just flowed better; however, I hadn't quite figured out how to convey that artistically advanced concept yet. I knew that my choice worked better, I just didn't know why. This was nothing new to me. While in Kindergarten, my grandparents had given me a book of poems in which one of the poets had typed in all lowercase, including their name. I thought the effect looked interesting, so on a color-by-numbers worksheet handed out in class the next week, I wrote my name in all lowercase. "No no Laura," the teacher scolded, "we make the capital L like this." I silently allowed her to take my hand and retrace over my "wrong" letter because once again, I didn't have the capacity at that age to understand or explain why I had written what I had.

The poem about the moon actually resurfaced later when I was in the sixth grade. We had a class assignment to turn in a poem for a school literary magazine project. I penned a new poem about the anticipation I thought I'd feel in the moment just before I would kiss the boy in the class that I liked. "Laura, this is a little," the teacher paused, "...mature for the book. Please write something else." I sat at my desk for ten minutes staring at a new sheet of blank paper and couldn't think of what else to write. I knew what was honest and what I was really thinking about that morning. So as a joke, I quickly remembered and scribbled down that old moon poem. If she wanted immature, she would get immature. The teacher skimmed it over and smiled. "Thanks Laura, this is more like it." The only difference between turning in that poem in first grade in New Jersey and in sixth grade in North Carolina was that the teacher either didn't notice or didn't care that my grammar was "wrong." By junior high and high school I never bothered to share anything I wrote with anyone in authority anymore, and I certainly felt shunned away from joining any school papers or participating in literary journals.