Letter From First Grade Teacher

Here’s another fun letter I found while going through my files. It is written by the teacher who taught me first grade in Evanston, IL, at Dewey Elementary School. She was writing after I (with my mother’s help, no doubt) sent her some sugar cane for her class in the year after I moved to Mississippi.


Late in the letter, she asks if I still write stories and poems. My reading lately has been full of questions about how our childhood experiences shape us and to what extent we are destined to become who we become. (Far From The Tree by Andrew Solomon and The Philosophical Baby by Alison Gopnik) It does make me wonder how much I was bound to be a writer and how much I became one because I was so encouraged in my writing from so early. Guess, it’s the usual answer. Both.