TT Profile #1: Lis Bass

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This is the first of a new series of interviews profiling my fellow writers from Taos Toolbox. First up, fellow teacher Lis Bass.

Tamago: When did you first know you wanted to be a writer?

Lis: In 6th grade, my teacher allowed us to choose our own topic for an essay. This was a first and I took it seriously. I was a fugue reader—disappearing into books, preferring long ones so that I could live in them. I was amazed by the power of writers to create reality—their worlds seemed truer that daily life to me because they allowed me intimate access to people’s lives and minds. After being given this writing task, I woke having had a complex dream-story. I rendered it to the best of my ability, and then wrote the last line, “And it was all a dream.”

I received an A for the essay, but the teacher had crossed out the last line, telling me that it diminished the essay. But I told her it really had been a dream. She said, “no matter.”

I walked home that day and slowly tore the essay to tiny bits, littering as I walked, saving the big red A for the final destruction. I was not a litterer and so knew that I was doing something quite wrong, but it was my response to what I felt was wrong—I wanted writing to be true. I stopped writing, but I knew at some level that this was something I always would want to do more than anything else. I focused on studying literature and politics, and kept my writing private until I turned 50.

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Mirrored from Writer Tamago.