It’s weirdly easy for me to pinpoint the moment I became a science fiction fan: it was when I discovered the paperback spinner rack in the library.  I was in elementary school still, but I was allowed to check out these grown-up books!   I remember “I, Robot” catching my eye because of the title, and “2001” because the cover was all stars.  I dove deep into Andre Norton and Robert A. Heinlein.  By the end of junior high I was working my way through every book Asimov had ever written and picking my reading material based on presence of robots and/or rocket ships on the cover.  I hardly remember all the books I devoured.  If pre-teen me had only had a Goodreads account!  If only Goodreads had existed in 1984!

I digress.  There’s a memory from when I was a little older that has always stuck with me.  I grew up in a house with no central heating.  In the winter we’d staple a blanket over the entrance to the stairs and let the upstairs freeze, but it didn’t really increase the temperature in the living room, where a gas space heater struggled to keep us warm, ticking on and off to its thermostat, which Dad taped to the outside of the heater itself.  (We later put a styrofoam box between heater and thermostat in hope for more frequent turning-on.  It didn’t work.)

I remember depression, and anxiety.  That walking-on-eggshells feeling that an argument could erupt at any second.  The house was a mess.  We were a mess.  We huddled in the same dirty, threadbare patch of carpet, looking at the brown tin slats of the space heater, waiting for its next, too-brief exhale.

It was freezing upstairs, but intolerable downstairs.  So I went upstairs.  For some reason I had a cardboard box big enough to sit in.  We must have gotten some large item in it.  Maybe the shop-vac?  I curled up inside it for warmth and read my most recent library book: The DragonRiders of Pern.  I remember the slippery, fake wetness of the cold sleeping bag, the echo of my movements in my cardboard chamber, and the glorious sunset colors of the novel’s cover.

I realized exactly what I was doing: escaping my life through words.  “So this is why they call it escapism,” I thought, feeling warm.  Transported.  This was when I realized not that I was a science fiction fan, but WHY.

This November, Apple Tree Books invited everyone who took part in their annual “Writer in the Window” promotion to write a poem on the theme of the importance of books.  There would be a contest and prizes.  This memory was the very first thing to come to me, but I pushed it away.  Too small.  Too boring and ordinary.  I played around with a poem about the books that were most important to me.  Maybe the books would be characters, or places.  I made a list.  Dragonriders of Pern kept drawing my eye.

I gave up and wrote on my first instinct, assuming it would be dismissed out of hand. It wasn’t very good.  Just a slice of life.  But to my surprise, it won first place:

Dragonrider

The heat is out,

My family is jagged—

Slivers of sulk and knives of hate,

Cutting each other,

Bowing to the space heater in the living room.

Mom rocks in a flannel cocoon

Spitting words at us like needles.

I go up to the arctic to crawl

Into a cardboard box.  I

Pull my comfort in after–

Flashlight and blanket and I

Fall into words.

My face warm at last

Under an alien sun

I hear the leathery beat of dragon wings.

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