Ten Talents: Beginnings
The first clue was during my elementary school years. My first relevant memory—not a moving one, but a mental photograph—sees me standing in the kitchen of our tiny Troutman apartment in Brooklyn. The TV is on in the living room behind me. If I turn around, I’ll see my Tio Julio sitting on the floor with his back against the couch, watching whatever program responsible for the background noise of the memory, a Budweiser in his hand. In time he’ll become the only person I’ll ever know to drink Budweiser. The red and white design of those particular beer cans and my uncle are synonymous in my mind.
He’s dead now. Gone to complications with COVID. I can’t say how grateful I am that he makes up at least a peripheral part of this flashbulb memory. Undergirding my time in New York like support beams is his effort and sacrifice which made it possible—possible for the boy standing at the kitchen table that night, stapling together a small stack of printer paper. It’s my first ever attempt at making a book. The crude storyline involved something to do with Space, had plans for illustration, and never saw anything substantial made beyond the first page.
In hindsight, I think this was the earliest sign of a budding dream to come.
The next clue came in the sixth grade, when I was paired with a friend for an assignment to create a comic strip. Highly stimulated, I quickly took charge of the assignment and put together a plot now forgotten to memory. I instructed my friend to cut sheets of paper into squares onto which we’d draw the scenes, which we’d then staple together to form a small booklet. Apart from the enthusiasm with which I approached the assignment, and my now twice-shown desire to create narrative—this memory stands out as the earliest instance of me showing an interest in verse; in one of the scenes, I wrote a rhyming couplet to put on the lips of one of the characters.
Except for small, isolated blips on a radar, the next substantial clue came in a writing class at Forsyth Tech Community College. I would’ve been about seventeen. Students were to write a creative nonfiction story about a personal experience. I was recently married and decided to write about the dramatic sequence of events that inexplicably culminated in marriage between two teenagers. It was the best example I knew of the butterfly effect. I titled it Smoking Lies (a pun playing on a detail in the story) and read it before the class. I received an A.
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Until this point I never made anything of these anecdotes. They weren’t anecdotes yet, only instances—too random, too sporadic to mean anything. I still had no inkling that I enjoyed writing or telling stories. That passion was still tucked under the covers of my subconscious and remained that way as I entered Bible college at the age of nineteen—though this is where things would begin to stir.
I discovered my love for study in Bible college, and due to all of the end-of-term papers—my professors loved papers—it wasn’t long before I realized I was pretty good at writing them. Unlike many of my classmates, I could put off multiple papers—each of them ten to twelve pages long—to the night of and still manage A’s. Aside from the comments left at the top of my graded papers, I made note of being pulled aside by one of my professors one day. I was an intern at the college as well, and at the time, I was interning in the audio/video department. My end-of-term project was to help write, shoot, and edit a promotional video for the college. My professor knew about the project and the role I played. After handing me my paper, I’ll never forget the inflection in his voice when he said, why aren’t you on the script team?
Eventually, I met another student who became a good friend—and a catalyst. Ed enjoyed writing as a hobby, and he’d do this thing where he’d post a random stock image to Instagram, and add a block of prose in the caption. The posts were thought-provoking and well written. He told me a time or two to begin writing these abstract pieces of prose—but then one day, he randomly sent me a stock image and asked me to collaborate with him on creating one of these posts. I wrote my piece and sent it to him.
This is when the seal was broken. I’d discovered I had a knack to write papers and essays before, but now I discovered I could also write for fun and personal enjoyment. But though the seal was broken indeed, it was only a small stream that got through; for the next two years, while I dabbled in prose, I barely wrote anything at all. That would all change some time in 2016, when I decided to make a trip to a Barnes and Noble bookstore.
