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Look what I found while going through some old papers!
Here, before your eyes, is where my career as a fantasist began. With a drawing by a junior high school student who had just read the Lord of the Rings trilogy and would never be the same again.
I was in high school in Winooski, Vermont when... But I've already told this story, in an essay titled "A Changeling Returns, written for and published in Meditations on Middle-Earth. Here's the pertinent excerpt:
… in my high school days, my sister Patricia sent home from nursing school a box of paperbacks (I can see that box now, freshly opened and full of promise) which she had read and no longer wanted. Among them was The Fellowship of the Ring. I picked it up late one evening, after finishing my homework, meaning to read a chapter or two before sleep. I stayed up all night. It wasn’t easy, but by skipping breakfast in the morning and reading every step of the way to school, I managed to finish the last page just as the bell rang for my first class to begin.
Oh, how that book shook and rattled me! It rang me like a bell. Even today, when I am three times as old as I was then, I can still hold my breath and hear the faint reverberations from that long, eternal night. That reading made me a writer, though it took me forever to then learn my craft. It showed me what literature could do and what it could be.
As an adult, I am painfully aware of the deficiencies of that drawing. But it's a good indication of how enthusiastic I was about Tolkien's great work. And, to be fair to the kid who drew it, I haven't gotten any better as a visual artist in the decades since then.
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