When I was very little, I named my fingers. They were nonsense-sort names: Sarsy, Choo-la, things like that. I studied them closely and imagined their personalities, and made them chat with one another.
    This was the beginning of storytelling for me. While I knew it was a kind of pretending, it also felt as though it were in some way real, as though the characters and stories had a life of their own that did not spring solely from my head. In this way, storytelling was like being in communication with something larger than just my solitary self.
    I was born into an environment in which mixture was the principal identifying feature. My paternal grandfather was a Russian Jewish immigrant; my paternal grandmother was born in America shortly after her family arrived from the Ukraine; both of them were deaf. My father, who is hearing, grew up with them in a three-room basement apartment in the Bronx. My mother’s family was Protestant, and had lived in this country a long time; one of her ancestors had actually come over on the Mayflower. She grew up in Rochester, New York, in a big white house with a gully out back. My parents met in graduate school, where they were studying to become teachers of the deaf, and when I was born I was brought home from the hospital to our family’s apartment – which was in the Lexington School for the Deaf, in Manhattan. My earliest home, then, sat literally within the deaf community. When I was nearly five, and my sister six, our family adopted my younger brother, who is black; he was born in Brooklyn to a Guyanian mother. So our family was Jewish and Protestant, deaf and hearing, black and white.
    All of this essential mixed-up-ness connected in important ways with storytelling and language. There was so much to be explained or translated in ways both literal and figurative. Spoken English and American Sign Language were used by various people in our lives, and we were often in a state of having information interpreted to us, or else of interpreting and relaying information to others. But also, the cultures of our mother’s and father’s families were so different, we children learned to code switch, to communicate and relate with people according to very different customs. Then there were all the questions to field about how my sister and I could possibly be related to my brother. Early on I learned to explain, and re-explain, and try again; to figure out different avenues toward understanding, toward getting disparate people and communities to see and grasp the same truths.
    My mother supported me as a writer from early on – from before I could even write. She would take down stories that I made up and dictated to her. Somehow, she saw me for a writer from this very young age.
    When I was seven, our family moved to Nyack, New York, a town with a reputation for both an artistic community and a well-integrated and evenly balanced black and white population. We had a wonderful children’s librarian there. Her name was Betty Brock, and she had a reddish face and a somewhat raspy voice; I now think she must have had chronic allergies, and maybe psoriasis, but at the time it was simply the way she looked and sounded, and these features were as beloved by us as was her heart. She was very kind to us and as we grew older let us help alphabetize and shelve the returns. In the summer we’d pass practically whole days in the library, buying our lunches at the deli across the street, stamping the date-due cards, and either gorging indolently on old Nancy Drews and Agatha Christies or venturing to find new treasures on the shelves - volumes of unforetold, possibly life-altering value - depending on our moods.
    During all the years of my childhood I wrote and wrote, lots of poems and endless beginning of stories, of which I never finished a single one. Sometimes this inability to see a narrative through to completion worried me, but most of the time I did not trouble about it; the act was too simply pleasurable to cause much anxiety. Later, in college, when I began to fancy myself a serious aspiring writer, a friend made a comment that at first devastated and ultimately inspired me. We were both nineteen at the time, as old as we’d ever been, and I, at least, felt nineteen was quite something. I also felt my writing might be becoming ‘quite something,’ and so it came as a kind of blow to my ego when he remarked, with his customary bluntness, “You know, we’re too young now to write anything good.” I immediately began to summon words of protest, but he cut me off. “What I mean is, all we can do, all we really should be doing now, is practice, so that later, when we have something to say, we’ll be able to write it.”
    I love that he said this (and marvel that he had the perspicacity to see it then). His statement comprised, first, a call for discipline, for good hard work without the expectation of immediate reward; second, a release from thoughts of success or failure, from worries about production or proving oneself; and finally, the thread of a promise: that someday we would have stories of value to craft and share, and that this was a goal worth cherishing.