The chapters in The Immigrant and the Outlaw are kind of like potluck, and the last one is even more so: Other Stories. It includes one called “She Made a Reader Out of Me,” first published in the Earlham Advocate in 1994.
Yes, Mrs. Knapp, English teacher at Earlham High School, Earlham, Iowa, made a reader out of me and I have been grateful ever since. But she also made me a writer.
Because of a term paper she assigned, I chose the Bronte family. My local library only had the more popular novels of the three sisters and maybe one book about the family. The librarian explained Interlibrary Loan. A week or so later, a dozen books about the Brontes and more obscure novels by the sisters were shipped from Des Moines. I drove the gravel roads to town to pick up the cardboard box of treasures at the Dexter library. It was all free.
We were to write a sentence first about what we planned to accomplish in the paper. The whole Bronte family had become so fascinating to me that I wrote about all three sisters and their brother Branwell.
I wish I still had the term paper it because on the front of it, Mrs. Knapp wrote in red ink that I couldn’t cover as much ground as I’d hoped in such a paper. After reading it though, she erased (as well as she could with an ink eraser) what she’d written, and–in bold black ink–wrote A+!
One year she assigned writing a poem about autumn. It was the first time I’d tried free verse. I was rather taken aback when the teacher made a big deal out of this one gloomy poem out of the passel of cheerful ones.
Lucille Knapp, an English teacher and a farmer’s wife, was a large part in molding me into a reader, and a writer. I am grateful.
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The Immigrant and the Outlaw: A Collection of Stories from America’s Heartland is available in paperback, hardbound, ebook, and audiobook through Amazon.com and Amazon.uk.