Spot Goes to the Park.
Magic Treehouse.
Diary of a Wimpy Kid.
Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone.
A Series of Unfortunate Events.
Live in Infamy.
What happened to Cass Mcbride?
The Book Thief
The Odyssey.
1984
The 3-year-old girl begs her mom to read another book to her before bedtime. Usually, this is a tactic employed by desperate children afraid to close their eyes for the night; this one was different. By different, I mean that she wasn’t scared to fall asleep alone; she simply yearned for the stories contained within her golden-bound book collection. Outgoing brown skin, courageous brown eyes, short arms outstretched. She reaches for
The stars
Her book
Mom
The same 5-year-old girl walks into her first day of kindergarten. Bookbag too big for her body, innocence too big for a world ready to swallow her whole and leave nothing behind but the pink barrettes she picked out the night before. She sets down her book bag and takes the first step of a path she will become incredibly familiar with within the coming years. A comforting one, a place where the cruelness of the world gets shut out, it becomes just her and
Her classrooms library.
Those books are too advanced for you! Sit down!
To a 5-year-old girl, being yelled at for the first time by a teacher is devastating. Teachers are kind and gentle and hold your hand when you fall off the swing and laugh at the knock-knock jokes you tell during recess because you don’t have anyone to play with. She’d only had a few, but she knew that
Teachers aren’t supposed to be sharp and mean and cold.
The 6-year-old girl watches the Titanic with her mom for the first of many times. She watches the boat snap into two pieces that sink to the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean. She is captivated by what she sees in front of her. She reads. Book after book after book. She learns all she can about the fateful ship that sank on April 14, 1912. A date she knows by heart, a fact she recites whenever she gets the chance. The poor unsuspecting cashiers and bus drivers learn that
The Titanic sank nine days before my birthday!
The 6-year-old girl hugs her book tightly in her hand. She walks up the steps to her school building, scans the hall for familiar faces. She doesn’t see any. She doesn’t yet realize she lives in a worse neighborhood than her peers. She doesn’t yet understand that it will take over a decade before she feels like she has real friends to count on. She hasn’t yet noticed that she spends great lengths of time picking herself apart in the bathroom mirror. Its
A habit she has yet to break.
The 9-year-old girl sits in her 4th-grade classroom. Button-down shirt tucked into the khaki skirt that she picked herself. This classroom is decorated with opportunities, illuminated with hope. She hopes that she will like her reading teacher.
She shouldn’t have worried about that.
She hopes that she will make at least one friend.
She shouldn’t have worried about that.
She hopes that she won’t be yelled at for asking questions. She hopes that she won’t be scrutinized for needing help.
She shouldn’t have worried about that.
Her peers didn’t understand, you see, she had no time to learn how to tie her shoes because she had books to read, and she didn’t have the money to buy all of the fancy new clothes the other kids had because mom had bills to pay, and she couldn’t explain why her dad was meaner to her than the other dads. That’s just how dads were, she thought.
They aren’t
She gets assigned her first essay. Until now, people could define her as inquisitive, mature for her age, someone who looks for the answer instead of creating it herself. She never envisioned herself as someone who had the answers. Suddenly she became a writer.
Essay
She was 12 years old when her teacher called her to read her essay aloud in front of the class. She sounded confident and sure of herself. After all, her public speaking experience stretched all the way to the excited fingertips of a girl half her age. Yet still, she sat back in her seat dejected after dutifully reciting her exceptional essay. Her classmates deemed her a “teachers’ pet.”
Whatever that meant.
So she faced insurmountable criticism from her classmates when her teachers gave her work its due praise. Cracks in the shaky foundation of self-esteem she’d formed started to show. They came in the form of snickers when she stumbled over a word and dirty looks in the hallway when she worked up the nerve to approach other members of Ms. Mlots’s 6th-grade class.
Nevertheless, she persisted.
In 8th grade, she scored a 297/300 on the selective enrollment test for Chicago Public Schools. She could have gone to whatever high school in Illinois that she wanted to with that score. In 8th-grade, she wrote a series of essays and answers to high school application forms that earned her a spot at her dream school. A school she had been dreaming about since 4th grade, she was so
Proud
In 9th-grade, she learned what type of writer she truly was. She was cunning in how she plotted ideas to keep her audience engaged. She was shrewd in the way she stole the readers’ next 10-15 minutes of their life. She was a smartass in the way she gave consistent commentary on the quality of the book she was writing about. For one of the first times in her life, she was confident in the way she wrote.
Covid-19
In 10th- grade, she started to understand something that would carry her throughout the year. That no matter how bad life got, you could never take away her intelligence. The way she captivated teachers, the way audiences leaned into her words. They gobbled them up like starving animals, the way she effortlessly led people to believe in what she believed in, the way she could place herself in any argument at any perspective and make you second guess a pedestal you’d dug your heels into your whole life.
She sits at her desk, the desk being the vehicle used to carry her ideas to paper. She picks up her pen, the pen being the instrument used to play the tune she wanted to inscribe onto the paper.
She writes
She writes passionate essays on the BLM movement, and she spins the grandiose story of poorly researched Titanic survivors. She dissects classics such as 1984 and complains about poetry while writing prose. She recognizes this essay was supposed to be about her as a writer, but without understanding where she started, without examining her beginnings as a reader, we would be lost.
There is no writer without first being a reader.
Without “reader,” there is no Caitlyn R. Smith.
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