word-crafting: a writer's blog: Dulcy's Story

This posting today has two parts. Please visit both of them!

Part I—Spelling

As an editor who’s spoken to high school students, I’ve heard several say, “I couldn’t edit because I can’t recognize a misspelled word” or “I can’t write because I’m a lousy speller.”

I’m the editor/writer who disproves those theories. Because of an auditory learning disability, I am an extremely poor speller, and yet I both edit and write.

About thirty years ago, I met a professional who tested children experiencing problems with reading. After determining that I had an auditory learning disability, she expressed amazement at my memory. Here’s what she found mindboggling:

From kindergarten through third grade, I missed three months out of the nine of each school year. So I never learned to sound out words. I knew the names of the alphabet letters, but I didn't know that each letter had its own sound. Nor did I ever learn that words had syllables and each syllable had a vowel within it.

In grade school we had spelling books. Each week we learned how to spell twenty new words. Each night—Monday through Thursday—I would memorize five of those words. Mom would point to one, let’s say winter, and say aloud the word those letters represented.

I didn't know that the letter beginning the word represented the sound of w. For me, the word winter could be spelled egtyrhgwt. It wasn’t a series of melded sounds; it was an arrangement of randomly chosen letters someone in the far distant past had put together.

I didn't recognize the sound of individual letters or syllables. Mom had said, “winter” and pointed to the letters. So for me the configuration of the letters w-i-n-t-e-r was said as “winter.” It never occurred to me that in that word are two syllables win- and –ter. Or that win is the sound of a w and an i and an n melded together.

I memorized the configuration of the letters w-i-n-t-e-r and whenever I saw this entity in a sentence or on a Wheaties box or in a headline I knew that I was seeing the letters that represented the word winter.

Throughout grade school, I memorized all the words this way. They were not a combination of melded sounds of the letters of the alphabet. They were simply an arrangement of letters that someone—I didn’t know who—had decided would be said a certain way.

All was well as long as the spelling test each Friday was based on the twenty words in the speller. My memory was good and I could remember the shape of the connected letters when Sister Mary Anne or Sister Corita or Sister Mary McCauley said it. If the pronounced word was winter then my mind saw an arrangement of letters from the alphabet:

1. a small letter toward the end of the alphabet—w

2. another small letter—i—that was the only one with a dot over it

3. a letter from the middle of the alphabet—n

4. a tall letter—t—toward the end of the alphabet

5. another small letter that in the alphabet was to the right of the first letter of my name

6. a final letter that was the first letter of my last name

My mind quickly came up with the shape, arrangement, configuration, structure of the word winter—it was like a landscape covered with snow except for a tall tree in the middle. That, of course, was the letter t.

All this worked well for me for eight years. Then came high school and everything fell apart. I’ll share that with you next Sunday. Between now and then, I’m wondering if any of you had trouble, or have trouble, with spelling.

All photos by Dan from freedigitalphotos.com

Part 2—The Wayman Press Christmas Book Fair

In the spring of this year, Wayman Press offered to publish A Cat’s Legacy, formerly entitled Twelve Habits of Highly Successful Cats and Their Humans. I will be forever grateful that Dulcy’s companion book to A Cat’s Life now has its own life.

And so today I feel privileged to be part of the Wayman Press Three-Day Christmas Book Fair, which offers over eighty e-books, several of them free.

Two of my books are on that list of eighty. Also, I wrote a short story—a cat fantasy—for Open Doors: An Anthology, which is being offered as a free choice. The story is entitled “The Mesmerizing Monk.” It is from a feline fantasy which I am writing.

Below is the information provided by Wayman for this book fair.

A socially conscious press, Wayman is dedicated to helping those in need. Much of the profit from the following anthology will be donated to Primary Children's Hospital in the form of Christmas gifts we'll bring to the long-term patients staying there.