Do you remember the first story you ever read, and the impact it had on you?
At age 4, I demanded of my mother, "Teach me to read." I was an avid consumer of Sesame Street, and my mother had watched me sound out letters and words, so she said, "You already know how to read." I didn't believe her, so we sat down with a book and she helped me (slowly) read it aloud to her. The book was called, "Ann Likes Red." The impact was tremendous. I ran around the house screaming.
Do you remember the first story you ever wrote?
I used to "make books" when I was very little by drawing a sequence of pictures, sometimes with some words, and stapling them together. I started doing this when I was 4 or 5. One of the earliest "books" I can remember making featured a hungry shark who ate so many fish that he exploded, replete with an illustration of a cartoony BOOM 50 feet under the ocean. Obviously, I was a little fuzzy on the physics.
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