I never had a teacher encourage me to write. In fact, it was the opposite. I had a teacher who would take my stories away when I turned them in. She would hide them. I never got them back. She said, you’re just weird. I had to start making copies of my stories. Hand written copies. I would take dreams and write them down for homework. They didn’t even make sense, like dreams never do. One time I dreamed I was alone. The house we lived in was two stories tall, out in the countryside, and for some reason there had been a flood. As far as I could see, there was water around every side of the house, all the way out to the horizon. Across the street where three giant trees sticking out of the water. They were there in the dream and they were also real…