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Barbara Shoup
I wrote my first novel when I was in the fifth grade. It was called Slave Girl, and it was about a black girl escaping by Underground Railroad to New York City. When it was finished, I rewrote it very neatly (40 pages!) and sent it to a publisher in New York whose address I’d found in the front of a library book. Soon I got my first rejection.
But it was worse than that. When we got to the unit on the Civil War in social studies, I found out that the Underground Railroad was not a subway, as I had imagined. I was so mortified I didn’t write again for twenty years. Then...
One of my high school students asked if I’d ever wanted to be anything other than a teacher. Reluctantly, I admitted that I once wanted to be a writer.
“Well, why aren’t you?” he asked
I threw out some lame excuses. A job, a family. Stuff like that.
“So,” he said. “What you’re saying is, you expect us to follow our dreams, but you don’t have to do it yourself?”
Thank God for teenagers, with their fabulous crap detectors.
I began.
