Take That, Mrs. Brown!

Mrs. Brown, exactly as I remember her...

In case you're wondering, Mrs. Brown was my first grade teacher. Sometimes I wonder what she'd say if she knew that I not only have a degree in literary studies, but that I've been teaching English for the better part of twenty-five years. Why you ask? She gave me failing grades in reading across the board and I almost had to repeat the first grade.

The summer school teacher quickly realized that I could not only read, but that I did so at an accelerated rate. So how did my teacher miss this, you ask? Mrs. Brown only graded me by how I read aloud, and at the age of six I had a really bad stutter. That old bat tormented me so much during that year that I'd actually start to shake when I tried to read aloud. It took months of my mother reading with me to get me over it, and given that I'm writing about her almost fifty years later might suggest that I've still got a way to go.

In addition to my stutter, I also had a really bad case of asthma. And no, it's not a coincidence that Bruce Grimble shares the same malady. Believe it or not, those two personal hardships conspired with my mother to shape not only the books I read but also the ones that's I'd eventually write. Back in those days, doctors had only recently realized that asthma wasn't a mental condition. Between the medicine that made my heart beat so hard that the bed squeaked while I slept and the one that made me hallucinate monsters, I often didn't feel up to going to school.

The problem for my mother was that the medication made me feel like running a marathon while simultaneously making me faint if I tried to walk across the room. This resulted in me talking a hundred miles an hour. Throw in my stutter, and I wonder how my poor mother kept her sanity on the days when I stayed home.

The only thing that kept me quiet were books. The first books I remember reading were by Beverly Cleary. From there I went on to The Boxcar Children mysteries. About the time I started running out of those, my best friend suggested that I read The Prydain Chronicles. At his urging I also read Tolkien, Terry Brooks and David Eddings. By junior high, the fantasy genre had fully possessed me.

But at the same time this was going on, my mother was making her own contributions. The problem with me developing into a voracious reader was that I often flew through the books I already had. We were a library family, but I'd already consumed most of the fantasy that ours had, and I couldn't go to the mall bookstore when I was sick. So my mother, likely to save her own sanity from my incessant chatter, started buying me books.

Don't get me wrong, I really appreciated the books she bought for me. The problem was that my mother didn't read fantasy and had a tendency to buy books based on the cover more than what they were about. On more occasions than I can recall, she'd pick up the last book in a fantasy series that I hadn't read before and for which I didn't own any of the previous books. But sometimes she picked up something wonderful that I'd never heard of before. And just like that, she inadvertently introduced me to the world of female fantasy writers like Barbara Hambly, Katherine Kurtz, and Marion Bradley.

It wasn't until years later that I realized that my male friends refused to read stories that were written by women or had female lead protagonists. I seriously thought one guy was kidding when he turned his nose up at a book I was reading at the time. I wish I could remember who the author was for that one. It was a retelling of the Pandora story where she was charged with recapturing all of the demons she'd released from the box with the help of an immortal wolf. I'd look it up if I could, but Google won't give me any suggestions that are more than a few years old.

Fast forward several decades and you find me writing stories with strong female leads. As Nickelville goes, I'd say Megan and Bruce equally share the role, just like they do everything else.

Whatever happened to Mrs. Brown, you ask? I don't know. As I remember, she was pretty old when I had her back then, which probably meant that she was thirty or so. But I still think of her often. You see, I've named the GPS in every vehicle I've owned after her, and sometimes I intentionally ignore her directions just to show her that I don't have to listen to what she says.