Poet

I can't remember a time when I stepped into an airport or train station without wishing I were somewhere else, doing almost anything else. Just thinking about traveling gives me the willies. Traveling and dyslexia don't really get along.

Most people try to avoid cliches. It's my ambition in life to try to get 'em right!

Letter scrambling and trouble reading is just a small part of dyslexia. It is also an auditory processing problem.

With my fiction, I focused on chapters and overall conceptions, while in poetry, I crawled along in the trenches of each sentence, examining every word for a sign of a deeper significance.

As a poet and a teacher, I read all the time. I know I read slowly. I like reading, but I don't read any more than I have to.

I was 17 when I decided to write stories as big as cathedrals, overflowing with the kind of memorable and audacious characters Walker Percy, Ernest Hemingway and Saul Bellow created.

I come from a family of Russian immigrant Jews who were all big storytellers, who would get together, and one would try to top the others' stories, and stories would get bigger and bigger. And the lying aspect, the exaggeration, would get large.

I do think that there is a profound reservoir of creativity and imagination in everyone I've ever met, and sometimes if someone is persistent and perversely obstinate enough to persevere, then they want to be helped. There is a way to help them.

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.

Suddenly, everyone wanted to talk to me, it seemed. And not about my poetry: it was my dyslexia they were most interested in.

I didn't learn how to read until I was at the end of fifth grade and 11 years old and held back.

Art's power of persuasion resides in the small personal details of one's own story, and if it weren't for my struggle with dyslexia, I doubt I'd ever have become a writer or known how to teach others to write.

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.

Suddenly, I was reading these comics. I was looking at those bubbles, those dialogue bubbles, and suddenly there were words... recognizable words.

What I read, I read thoroughly and retain almost all of it.

Dyslexia lends itself to original thinking, not rote formulas, because you can't do the formulas - you think up your own method based on intuition and instincts. Creativity is trial and error, trying to figure out a way to do something emotionally and intuitively.