PHIL MALONE

Encouraged by at least one teacher, I kept writing throughout my childhood.  When others might have gotten bored or grown out of it, I persevered.  I can’t really even articulate why I enjoyed writing so much.  It was a way to relax, I suppose.  I’ve always been an introvert, so I’m most at peace when I can get other people the heck out of my life.  Yes, that sounds terribly antisocial.  What do you want from me; I’m only human.

We used to have this huge table, built very low to the ground.  It stood only two to three feet high.  My older brother and I used to crawl around underneath it and scribble messages on the underside.  Once I grew up and found the table out in the garage at my parents’ house, I squeezed beneath it and tried to read some of what we’d written.  Over the years, though, the pencil marks had faded and become illegible.  Plus, the handwriting wasn’t that neat in the first place.

At other times, though, I used to take a thin sheaf of notebook paper, fold it in half, and write my own books.  They’re all long since lost, and I can’t recall any specifics about them.  Mostly, I remember the general subject matter, the tone, the feelings I got from them.

Weirdly, they weren’t fantasies, or action stories, ghost stories, or adventures.  They weren’t the kind of thing you’d expect from an eight year old boy.  The stories I wrote were grounded in reality, and dealt with the concerns I had at that age.  Stuff like bullying, running around with friends playing pinecone wars, the eternal mystery of the opposite sex.  (Still haven’t solved that last one, incidentally.)

They weren’t children’s books, except in the sense that they were written by a child.  But they weren’t quite young adult, either.  New adult is a genre these days.  Perhaps these were new children’s books.

When I was in first grade, my teacher Mrs. Wigger (amazing that I still remember her) gave our class a writing prompt, in which a man wakes to find himself having sprouted an elephant’s trunk, butterfly wings, and probably another one or two bizarre mutations that I’ve forgotten.  Our assignment was to write a conclusion to the story.

Most of my classmates wrote a paragraph or two.  I rambled on for something like four or five pages.  In my version of the story, the man had been cursed by an evil wizard (for, you know, reasons).  He had to track the wizard to his volcano lair, evade a series of traps, and finally destroy the wicked necromancer.  Only then would the man be restored to his fully human form.

It was exactly the kind of stupid, action packed, overwrought story you’d expect from a seven year old boy.  Mrs. Wigger loved it.  She even had me read it into a tape recorder so that she could give the recording to my mother.  Sadly, I have no idea what’s happened to that tape in the intervening twelve decades.

Anyway, when people ask me how long I’ve been writing, or interested in writing, the answer is, as long as I can remember.  Thanks for the encouragement, Mrs. Wigger.