A Place to Call Home (2011)
“That must be true. I was desperate to console Roanie during the month he spent away, and the springs beneath my mattress were lined with letters, poems, and stories I’d scrawled since Christmas. I’d spent more time inside my room than out.
“Why, sure, you can send some of your writings to Roanie,” Mama said carefully, when I asked her. “But I’d have to check your letters for, hmmm, spelling and grammar first.”
I hadn’t fallen off the turnip truck yesterday. I knew what Mama really meant. My letters would end up looking like some of the ones Josh had written home when he was in Vietnam. Full of blacked-out lines and pruned thoughts. “I’ll think about it,” I told her.
I got the idea for my disastrous Roanie Sullivan poem by reading books that were bad for me.
Our house was filled with books. The ones that were good for me were downstairs in the living-room bookcases, the shelves crammed with encyclopedias, agricultural textbooks, and leather-bound classics like Shakespeare and Dickens.
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