This is adapted from a column that ran in the Lenoir News-Topic.
My mother was a newspaper reporter, but she’s not the person who was the biggest catalyst in my decision to become a writer.
For a large chunk of my childhood, I intended to become an artist.
When I entered high school, art was still the only thing I had considered pursuing. My mother encouraged me and, trying to help me find a way to make a living at it, even took me to see what commercial artists do.
I drew all the time — when I wasn’t reading comic books or science fiction novels. (I was a nerd. Shocking, I know.)
During my freshman year of high school, I read a novel by a retired general speculating how World War III would start and be conducted, and I wrote a book review on it and left it with the English teacher who was the faculty adviser for the school paper.
The next time I entered her room, she made a bee line for me. I have a clear memory of her locking eyes with me and crossing straight to me, complimenting my writing and encouraging me to submit more writing for the paper. I did. I started with more book reviews, and over time mostly I wrote humor columns, but I did some feature stories, and eventually I signed up to be the school’s teen correspondent for a monthly citywide special section of high school news that the local newspaper published.
By my senior year, I was the editor of the school paper, and my focus had shifted entirely to studying journalism in college and becoming a reporter.
Believe it or not, my mother wasn’t necessarily happy with this change. She told me, “You will never have any money,” because reporters were not paid well. (Some things never change.) But I couldn’t be dissuaded.
I might have become a writer without that teacher’s encouragement, but she certainly nursed the writer that I didn’t yet know was inside of me.
That teacher’s name was Kathy Kochevar. We called her Miss K.
Writing about it now, I wish someone had prompted me at some point over the years to let her know all of this.
There are many other teachers who stand out in my memories.
There’s Mr. Curran, the geometry teacher, whose lessons were punctuated with a superhero he invented: Bisectorman, the Winged Avenger of Angles.
There’s Mrs. Burgess, who taught Spanish II and III and provided great leeway for my sense of humor in my homework. For instance, for an assignment requiring us to submit a list of sentences that demonstrated the proper conjugation of a variety of verbs, I submitted sentences saying such things as, “The river of hamburgers is yellow,” and, “Put it in my eye!” For another assignment requiring two-person teams to write an entire narrative and read it to the class, a friend and I wrote a “Dick and Jane” story in which Spot eventually went on a rampage, killed Dick and Jane, became radioactive, grew to enormous size and destroyed a city. (We got an A and were asked to recite our story for the advanced class.)
Many students feel deeply affected by particular teachers, and in my newspaper in Lenoir I asked for students, parents, graduates, volunteers or anyone else to write in about great teachers and what they have done.
I also will try to get this column to Miss (probably now Mrs.) K.
Newsroom With A View 