Javier Trujillo-Bencomo

I was a boy wonder, and I loved to hate the guts of whoever was a killjoy, especially those poorly paid authority figures known as teachers, which is why I was bound to be largely self-taught. However, I had one instructor who taught me to sidestep all that hate by reading aloud about any historical character of my choosing.

Before long, I also became a performer aboard the school bus, which came equipped with a microphone and speakers. I learned to pause when reading a comma, a semicolon, or a period without missing a beat. The bus driver cut a deal with me. I could read aloud on the bus, but only if I indulged him by reading his favorite book, The Bermuda Triangle by Charles Berlitz.

Years later, when I began to write fiction, all those bloody caesuras made a lot of sense. It probably helped that I didn't know that I was dyslexic when I was young, and simply thought I was slow as a reader. But being slow made me pore over sentences and be receptive to those qualities in sentences that were not just the cognitive aspect of sentences but were, in fact, the "poetical" aspects of language–how many syllables a word had, whether it had a long "e" sound or short "i" sound, all those sensuous qualities of language, how it looked on the page. And it seems to me that those qualities in language are as likely to carry weight and hold meaning and give pleasure as the purely cognitive, though of course, we can't fundamentally separate those things–although the information age does its best.

When language is thought of just as a mode of communication, it is dying.

That must explain why I find myself delving into the skills I have learned through my decades of narration.