The Writing Life as Bildungsroman

Why I Hated Reading

I hated reading as a kid. People are often shocked to learn this about me, but my hatred for reading came from two sources: my dyslexia and my experience growing up in the South. As a kid, I attended a white private school in North Carolina, and I was lucky if there was another person of color in my class, let alone another Black kid. On top of that, it seemed like all of the books we read were about slavery and the Civil Rights Movement—important histories to learn, of course—but as the only Black child in my white, white class, this reading experience made me feel othered, othered by my dyslexia and othered by the traumatic representations of Black people I had to read alongside my white Southern classmates. Apart from the manga I’d read—Fullmetal Alchemist, Naruto, Death Note¹—in the aisles of Barnes & Noble, I’d bend over backwards to avoid reading. But everything changed when I read three books in high school. These books paved the way for me to become the writer I am today.

Now, as a literary fiction writer, I have a small but annoyingly snobby inner voice that tells me I should be ashamed to admit this, but I’m not. Twilight was the first book that I read of my own volition and enjoyed. It proved to my fourteen-year-old self that reading was not an activity that would other me. It showed me that reading could make my inner life feel seen and make me, as a whole, feel less alone. After I read Twilight in ninth grade, my English class had started a new unit and our teacher had assigned us The Catcher in the Rye. I decided to try reading the book in good faith before scouring the Internet for summaries that would help me pass our weekly reading quizzes. To my surprise, I loved the book. Though I honestly shouldn’t have been surprised at all. At the time, I was enrolled at a boarding school myself and feeling stereotypically misanthropic about society, the people around me, and my own coming of age. Regardless, The Catcher in the Rye helped me discover that I did in fact like reading, and this discovery encouraged me to not only read for class but also find books to read in my free time.

The summer before tenth grade, my family moved to Tampa, Florida, and I left boarding school to live with them one last time before setting off to college. That fall, I was enrolled in an online school for the year and inadvertently isolated from anyone outside of my immediate family. Like many lonely fifteen year olds, I found community in the characters of books. One of the first books I read that year was Looking for Alaska. While people are often surprised to learn that I had despised reading as a kid, nobody is surprised to learn that I was a tumblr girlie back in the day. I had seen the rain and hurricane quote from Looking for Alaska reblogged so many times that I had to check the book out.

“I wanted so badly to lie down next to her on the couch, to wrap my arms around her and sleep . . . But I lacked the courage and she had a boyfriend and I was gawky and she was gorgeous and I was hopelessly boring and she was endlessly fascinating. So I walked back to the room and collapsed on the bottom bunk, thinking that if people were rain, I was drizzle and she was a hurricane.”

— John Green, Looking for Alaska

Looking for Alaska follows the misadventures of a group of misfits at a boarding school in rural Alabama. At fifteen years old, I was nearly the same age as the protagonist and missing my boarding school more than I cared to admit. Miles’ story reflected so much of my own coming-of-age experience, and I thought of my own boarding school stories—the toppled bottle of vodka on my roommate’s desk and the burp-worth of vomit on her pillow, the abandoned barn behind campus littered with cigarette butts and mini bottles of Jack, the memorial plaque above my dorm room door and the dead girl’s ghost who followed us around Senior House. For the first time, I thought, maybe I should write this stuff down. Maybe I should write my own book.

While I was in online school, there was no homework. I generally did school work from 7 AM to noon and then had the rest of the day to myself. During these vast swaths of unstructured time, I used online resources to teach myself how to write stories for various media. I researched different types of writers—novelists, playwrights, screenwriters—how they wrote their stories, what formats and softwares they used, how they made money off their work. Most importantly, I researched what degrees they pursued because my parents had five degrees from Johns Hopkins between them and going to college (let’s be real, going to Hopkins) was non-negotiable. In this self-study, I quickly discovered NaNoWriMo, MFA programs, and Hank and John Green’s YouTube channel.

Writing essays like this for Substack is always a funny thing because memory is a whirlpool that sucks me down into tangents. I had originally sat down to write this post with two goals: (1) to share that I’d be traveling for a while and slow to respond to comments and (2) to introduce a new series I want to try out here. This series is inspired by one of my favorite Vlogbrothers segments: Thoughts from Places.

For the next three months, I’ll be traveling in Europe, and once a month I’ll share a Postcard in Prose. These posts will be either a poem, flash fiction, or micro essay inspired by the places on my itinerary. I know the name for this series is a misnomer because the post might be poetry or prose, but my goal is to ease myself back into generating new work. Since I moved back to Korea in 2021, I’ve only worked on my novels, Good People and You Will Survive This. I’m completely out of the habit of writing outside of the context of these books and their characters. To shake things up, I want to work outside of my comfort zone by writing some poetry and flash, and I’m posting here for accountability.

“Fiction is the only way I can begin to twist my lying memories into something true.”

— John Green

To kick off this series, I’m sharing one of the last flash fiction pieces I wrote before novel writing took over my life. This piece was originally published in The Offing in 2021. When I was in eighth grade, my boarding school stranded us on an island in the middle of the Chesapeake Bay. Here’s a Postcard in Prose from Port Isobel Island.

Photo by Sara Cottle on Unsplash

Hip Deep in the Chesapeake

by Kat Lewis

It’s our job to watch the crabs while Scooter kills them. On the dock of Port Isobel, it is late afternoon. Or maybe early evening. We can’t be sure; they took our phones and iPods—anything with a clock—when we got off the boat. Welcome to Port Isobel, they said, leading us to the house where we’re not allowed to flush the toilet. It’s been three days of dock showers and trust fall bullshit. Now, we still don’t know what time it is; all we know is that we are hungry, and there are forty crabs in buckets, their claws morse coding last words to each other. Don’t let them out, Scooter said. We beat the crabs back with yard sticks and sniff our noses at crisp breezes. It is early September, and the bite of autumn is in the air, the temperature like the stale breath of heat—something that won’t linger, something we’ll miss. The other side of the island swallows the sunlight. Beyond the crabs and their buckets, beyond the docks and their showers, beyond the house where we can only flush shit, we see the sun through the trees, staccato like a flip book. The tick-tick of crab legs on plastic brings us back to the algae-tinged dock and the wisps of Spartina grass stretching towards us. Scooter’s hand’s inside a crab now. Light leaves a gilded frame around the writhing legs. Merciful, like a caress, he twists out the gills; its legs rag doll at its side. We are thirteen. It’s our first time seeing something die.

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