Write what you know, they say.  I should write about cooking or clothing. Or maybe I should write about the fog and gravel of I-15 before the sun rises and before the sun sets. I could revise the revised version until all I really know is what I’ve written down.

I know clothing, cooking and sunrises well, and I’ve described them on my blog ample times. But the one thing that truly grabs me and capsizes my heart and soul?—here’s what I really know and love, and this is my futile attempt to write until all I know is written down.

I grew up the only, book loving child of a blue-collar family that was not particularly literary. According to the hagiography, I started reading at the age of three, rattling off the names of streets, road signs seen on car trips, and the tangy names on different condiment bottles in the fridge: Ran-ch, Ket-chup, Eye-tal-eye-un. My parent cooed over my precariousness.

I consumed my way through hardcover books, hoarded catalogues, and decimated the two monthly magazine subscriptions—National Geographic and Time—by reading them over and over until they fell into a tattered mess.

One day my father walked into my bedroom after a weekend day’s work in the yard, stretched, groaned and asked, “whatcha reading D?” I held the book up for him to see: The Society of Experimental Biology By The Oxford Press. “I’m reading about Polio.” I told him, not looking up from the book. I was about eight years old.

By fourteen I discovered a handful of adult classics: Austen, Dickens, Malory, Steinbeck, and a handful of Brontës. I’d read in my room for hours until I couldn’t see straight. I would read a novel every weekend.

It wasn’t the story—good or bad—that grasped and pulled me in; it was English itself. The way it felt in my braces-caged mouth and rattled my adolescent head. As I grew older, words became choice weapons: What else does a overly anxious, short teenage girl have? I was a capital-n Nerd and treated accordingly. “Never give them the dignity of a response” was the advice of my grandmother, echoed by my mother’s terser “Just ignore them.” But why play dumb when I could outsmart them, if only for my own satisfaction? “Troglodyte,” I’d mutter when one of the obnoxious guys in the hall would make a rude comment about another girl’s body.

But this was only one of the first itches that occurred over the years. I’ve had the same awe-eyed experience when reading about the German language when I realised Vater and Mutter  looked like the Amish cousins of “father” and “mother”. I had the same mental scratch when attempting to learn Italian on my own in the third grade while listening to tapes and following a Latin dictionary. I mumbled through my amo, amas, amat, when I realised that “amour”—an English word that means loved or to be loved—looked a lot like the Latin verb, amare. “to love”.

I have spent years hoovering up words as quickly and indiscriminately as I can, the linguistic equivalent of a dog snarfing up spilled popcorn; I gobble up “sing” and “singeth” without much thought about why the forms were so different. My only though is: stupid English. But those illogical lunacies of English that we all suffer through and rage against aren’t illogical at all. After years of studying them in school—diagraming sentences, learning the difference of verb, adverb and gerund, and a various amount of vocabulary tests—I can say that I’ve stupidly fallen in love with words. Maybe this is the reason why I enjoy blogging so much?

From that point on though, I have been a woman obsessed: I trace words across the rough sword and buckler of Old English, over the sibilant seesaw of Middle English, through the bawdy wink-wink-nudge-nudge of Shakespeare; I pick and chip at words like “supercilious” until I find the cool, slow-voweled Latin and Greek under them. I have discovered that “nice” used to mean “lewd” and “stew” used to mean “whorehouse.” I haven’t just fallen down this rabbit hole: I see that hole in the distance and run full tilt at it, throwing myself headlong into it. The more I learn, the more I fall in love with this wild, vibrant promiscuous language.

I have followed this white rabbit deeper and deeper until I came to accept, not too long ago: this is what I know. This is what I love. This is what I enjoy. Reading, writing, defining.  Every blog I create, creates me—little by little. I read and write to create myself rather than finding myself. I read books as one breathes air: to fill up and live. I find that words can help you in the most profound ways: words are pale shadows of forgotten names. As names have power, words have power. Words can light fires in the minds of people. Words can wring tears from the hardest hearts, and this is exactly what it has done for me.

I lay in my bed hours on end, divulged in whatever book, encyclopaedia, or dictionary finds my interests. I laugh aloud, I burst out in crying. I get attached to my characters. I yell and scream at them to do what I may think is best even though they end up doing the opposite.

As I sit here, in my usual spot where I write my most illustrious pieces, with my stack of books next to me, sipping my usual cup of tea, I am in awe at what words, written by others, mean to me. I simply do not have the appellations to describe how much I love reading and writing. So I’ll end with this:

Ray Bradbury deemed, “Love. Fall in love and stay in love. Write only what you love, and love what you write. The key word is love. You have to get up in the morning and write something you love, something to live for.” This is what motivates me to get out of bed. This is what I know. I hope I’ve painted a small picture of what I know—and love— in the words that my pen has drafted.

Onto the next chapter, Uptown Maven