Laurel Mills Author

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Laurel's Musings

I Will Never Give Up Reading!

My first memory of reading is when I deciphered the words on the pages of Dick and Jane for my first grade teacher. Before that, I remember my mother's husky voice reciting to us childhood poems and ditties: "Fuzzy Wuzzy was a bear..." For her own enjoyment, my mother curled up in her upholstered rocker in the living room and read Reader's Digest Condensed books, from Somerset Maugham's Cakes and Ale to Steinbeck's East of Eden. And she wrote too. Poems that were funny or serious, poems that she jotted on scraps of paper or the backs of envelopes. My father read, also. Mostly paperback mysteries or westerns. I can picture him at the kitchen table, a cup of milky tea in his white mug, a paperback open before him, the Boston Red Sox on the radio.

As a girl, I devoured the Bobbsey Twins and Grimm's Fairy Tales, huddling under my blanket with a flashlight when I was supposed to be asleep in my room at night. To this day, I cannot go to sleep at night without reading in bed before I turn off the light. To get books, I visited that magic place called the library in my hometown of Wilton, Maine. The sturdy library filled me with awe and reverence. The musty smell of the stacks in the lower level where children's books were kept still wafts in my nostrils when I think of wandering the aisles in that library on the hill. Nothing felt better than to come out of the oak door to the concrete steps leading down and across the river with an armful of books. The feel of them, the heft and weight, the hard covers that held stories and adventures within-that to me was pure joy.

When I was eleven, I followed my mother's lead and began writing poems. In the sixth grade, a teacher helped a few of us girls start a poetry club, and we met after school to read Carl Sandburg and Edgar Lee Robinson. The written word took on even more importance for me, and I began to write short stories as well. None of these early scribblings survive (which is for the best!), but they were part of an apprenticeship that led to a lifetime of writing.

English classes were always my favorite; as I sat at my school desk at Wilton Academy discussing the Merchant of Venice, I could sense a passion developing in me. On the day that Robert Frost died, my high school English teacher wept, and I saw how deeply reading affected her and how personal it was to her. My growing fascination with literature took me all the way through graduate school at the University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh. I found that the study of literature informed and expanded my reading and helped me to become a better writer.

One of the joys of reading is to discover new worlds, different ways of thinking, and the myriad ways of relating to one another as humans. When I finally came to the realization that I was gay, I was able to see this lifestyle reflected in the literature of Rita Mae Brown. Reading about lesbians validated my own experience and made me feel part of a wider community and not so isolated. That is why today I write novels with lesbian protagonists: I want to explore the fictional livers of women who happen to love women and how they fit into the larger world around them.

I will never give up reading. My bedside stand is piled with books, and I always travel with books in my suitcase and my backpack. One of the joys of reading is to discover new worlds, different ways of living, and the myriad ways of relating to one another as humans. For me, reading for me is not an escape; it is an entry into other lives, other experiences. Reading enriches my life. To open the pages of a book is even better than peeling back the wrapper of a Godiva bar?and that's saying a lot because chocolate ranks very high on my list of life's pleasures.