Brown Girl Dreaming

Jacqueline Woodson is drawn to stories and to storytelling from a very young age. She must face down certain obstacles, however, in order to fulfill her dream of becoming a writer. One of these obstacles is her difficulty in spelling and sounding out words, which makes her self-conscious about reading out loud in school. It also makes her different from her older sister Odella, a famously successful student. Woodson learns how to compensate for her dyslexia by developing a strong memory. She learns entire songs and stories by heart, and eventually impresses her teacher by reciting Oscar Wilde’s “The Selfish Giant” out loud to the class. Reciting this story gives her the confidence to later recite a poem that she has written to a different class, and she is recognized as a strong writer in her own right. While her learning disability bars her from certain kinds of conventional success, then, it forces her to find alternate paths and to develop other parts of herself; in other words, it forces her to be creative.  

Woodson embraces storytelling in part because it is a way of making sense of her often turbulent life. In this way, too, her struggle fuels her writing.