Can one be a writer and not read?

“How can you become what you don’t know?” Asked Dani Shapiro in her essay On reading while writing. “I don’t understand when my students don’t read. I don’t understand when they want to be writers and they don’t read. It baffles me and it pisses me off. How can you not have the kind of passionate curiosity of what came before you?"

I heartily agreed with her until a 2017 conversation. How the topic of some writers and reading came up, I don’t remember, but at the Saturday Organic Market, my friend’s viewpoint on the issue, caused me to rethink my point of view.

“Perhaps,” said Christine, “these writers have a reading disability.” She went on to explain that she came to understand her own reading problems when her school-aged son received therapy for the same issue.

She explained how she successfully complete courses of study by perfecting memory techniques, paying close attention to what her lecturers and fellow students said. But can someone who takes writing seriously, can they possibly have debilitating problems with reading and still be a successful writer?  Surprisingly, yes and a Canadian author proved it.

A visit in Toronto with my sister, brought about a chat over tea with her neighbor,  author Howard Engle, A prolific mystery writer, he is best known for his Benny Cooperman series. In 2000 Howard suffered a stroke that left him with alexia sine agraphia, a condition which resulted in an inability to read, while retaining the ability to write.

 That afternoon he was happy to answer my questions on the subject. I asked if he was able to read a paragraph he had just written? He said early on in his recovery, not at all. The words were an utter mystery, however some years after the stroke, he could read such a paragraph with difficulty. Certainly without the facility in which he had written it.

Since the stroke he wrote Memory Book (2005), in which his character Benny Cooperman suffers a blow to the head and is similarly affected. Later he published The Man Who Forgot How To Read (2007), a memoir of the time he spent recovering from the stroke. The afterword  for this was written by neurologist Oliver Sacks, known for his case histories about brain disorders. He wrote about Engel's reading problems in his book The Mind’s eye.

The inventiveness and ingenious nature of our brains never ceases to amaze. Yes indeed you can be a writer if you don't read. Surprising, eh?

New Year backwards

As 2018 begins so does the discussion on resolutions. In Hope for the New Year Ellen Peterson talks about words of intention, their success and failure. And then she mentioned (tongue in cheek) her success. The year she chose perseverance.


“I succeeded to make it into the following year because all I really needed to do was KEEP BREATHING.”


In this blog snippet, Ellen encapsulates my thinking at this time of year. Instead of looking forward, it has come to make more sense for me to look back.


Buz and I, like many Canadian seniors, winter in Mexico and I joke that we all come here to meet life lessons we cannot seem to learn back home in our comfortable cocoons. I joke but there’s truth in the fact we sometimes need our equilibrium unraveled, our ordered lives upended, in order to confront something we’ve been avoiding. Like we find ways to avoid, rather than learn, how to really get along with the old codger/old crone with whom we’ve cohabited for fifty-some years. We can give all the advice we like to our squabbling grand kids, but how do the two of us fare when confined to one room – for four months.


Looking back, what lessons have I learned, or recognized that I need to learn? The latter perhaps a lesson in itself…










We walked this morning along a malecön in a state of reconstruction AKA bedlam and traffic mayhem, laced with a level of garbage promiscuity that sent both our dogs into orgies of sniffing. Cappuccino, our geriatric Cairn, is slow at the best of times, but so lured was she by the prolific enticements so freely available, a snail would have coasted to the finish ahead of us. Patience. Our patience has grown in 2017.


There was ample time during this dawdling ambulation, to ponder the nature of our conversation and how it has subtly changed over the last year or so. It lacks the familiar tension that impatience once brought, but there is an addition. It is as if alter-egos with our worst habits and behaviors had taken to skipping through our conversations like goons, making faces and having fun with any residual earnestness.


This humorous lightness was present earlier in the morning, when I noticed the freezer door had been ajar all night, its contents sweating benignly in the warmth of a tropical winter. That once would have brought a meltdown of another kind, but not at the demise of 2017. And the joyful celebrations Mexicans do so noisily in the courtyard of our winter home, no longer sends a pajama-clad banshee raging from our door.


We laugh about those selves that had to come to Mexico to learn the lesson to lighten up. Launching into rant-mode can be the default, but this can be reconfigured. Life-long learning. One year at a time. If I have a resolution for 2018 it is to look backwards at achievements, and forwards, realizing there’s a jagged peak up ahead I didn’t see from lower down. I can just make out where I need to set my steps. I'll tell you how I’ve done on my journey, this time next year.Inshallah.