WordWacky

WordWacky is Ruby Kane’s blog on the subject of words.

I’ve had a long relationship with words.

Use Your Words

My first word wasn’t a word, exactly, but a name: Bo, as in Bozo, as in the lab mix that my father brought home while my mother was pregnant and she was forced to keep. There’s a picture of me and the dog turning into the living room of my parents’ apartment on Fordham Road—I must have been under a year old. I am crawling through the doorway, but from the angle the picture is taken, you can only see the top half of my body and the chipped doorway molding. Above me is Bozo, also on all fours, with his head placed above my own, cartoon style. Both of us look into the camera. My eyes are red in the center, and I’m smiling.

That day at the park, Ma had let Bozo off the leash and was calling him back so we could leave. “Bo… Bo… Bo….” At some point, I took up the chant.

Mama, Dada, Nana—no, my first word was the name of my very first best friend, my partner in crawl.

Some of My Best Friends are Books

By the time I was two, the dog had been sent to the pound by a well-meaning relative, who was never quite forgiven. A couple of years later I cracked the code; the squiggles on the page arranged themselves into chunks, clever little chunks filled with meaning.

This is the first page of the first book I ever read on my own, The Littlest Angel:

So I began my love affair with books.

I read everything I could, progressing quickly from chapter books to YA to impressively hefty (to me) mass market fiction I would buy at the luncheonette half a block from my apartment. I read The Stand when it came out in 1980—it had more than 800 pages! That was a coup. I knew I liked some books better than others (especially those that had some kind of psychic or extrasensory storyline without being overly sci fi), but back then the ultimate measure of a book was simply how long it was.

Long books take a lot of time to read. I read on the bus to school. I read in school if I could get away with it. I read while I was cutting class. I read while I was home playing sick for the third time in a week. I read constantly, preferring it to just about anything else. Oh, I watched TV, too, but reading was my one true love.

My reading horizons continued to expand, and though I have a tremendous respect for Stephen King in a couple of areas (prolificacy, for one), I haven’t read a book by him in years. I would describe most of what I read now as contemporary literary fiction, but only if you twisted my arm behind my back and told me I had to or you wouldn’t let go.

Join Goodreads, and I’ll be your friend. You can get e-mails about what I’m reading—if you want, that is. Otherwise, you can just wave to me now and then, and I can see what you’re reading. Yeah!

My Word!

From Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary via Dictionary.com (scroll down):

10. pl. (Med.) The menses.

Long before I was hit with the medieval word, I started monkey-doing, imitating the books I read by writing the beginnings of novels of my own. Usually they were minute descriptions of the members of large families—since I was an only child, I was fascinated by large families. I followed the style of many books I’d read: get all of the descriptions of everyone out there right away. The first chapter was basically a narrative family tree. I rarely got past the first chapter in those days (those days?), but there were enough first chapters to fill a lot of books.

Since then I’ve done a lot of putzing in the writing world, from blogging to poetry to short stories. I even have about 100 pages of a novel hiding away in a virtual drawer. I understand that the hatred I feel for the novel-in-hiding is typical, and that the true measure of your ultimate success in writing is whether or not you hold your nose and dive in. But that’s one of those things I know intellectually and can’t enact emotionally. Yet.

My very first print credit is due to be published in August, 2008. I have two poems, “March” and “April,” which will appear in Women. Period. It’s “An Anthology of Women Writing for and About Menstruation.” If you’re into that kind of thing (or just want to support me), you can pre-order on Barnes and Noble’s website.

In a Word

Work-in-progress.

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Contact: rubesy@[this website].com