Literary Memoir
Olsen, Kimerly

KIMERLY: I grew up in the 70's and had a rather eccentric family. My mother was an artist and my father was an inventor and we had a library in our house that went from the ceiling to the floor. My father had salvaged some books from I guess it was the old school library and so he always based an importance on learning. Anytime we children had a question we would go to him and he would explain things in several textbooks. I started writing when I was six or seven and I would write stories, make up stories and comic strips and I kept them all in a little curio in my room and I had compiled quite a few of them growing up. I think I was in the sixth grade I published a bookmark; the school had a bookmark fair and I was one of the winners of that. So that was my first publication. When I was about eleven or twelve I had, my father had come into my room and read some of my work and that was the first time I had ever thought of myself as a writer. He had said this was something you should think about doing because you are a very good writer. And that was the first time I had really thought of myself as writer. I did of course feel invaded and ended up burning up all my work along with the curio. But I have recovered a lot of that work, still working on it. So that's my story.