Author Daryl Sedore

I wanted to share a small story about my foray into reading and writing. When I was around nine or ten years old, I had a friend whose name was also Darryl. (Although he spelt his name differently). He was always reading books with no pictures, novels lined with text only. Whereas, I was still reading picture books. My family wasn’t a great influence when it came to the written word. My mother was always proud that she hadn’t read a single book from cover to cover and she would advertise this to anyone. (Embarrassing to say the least). My sister Deanna was the only reader out of seven brother’s and sister’s in my family that I can recall, so books weren’t abundant in my home.

One day, sitting beside Darryl in class, I was browsing a picture book while he was reading a novel. I looked over and said, “Where’re all the pictures?”

“They’re right here,” he said, and pointed at the page.

I angled closer but couldn’t see anything. So I lifted my book and showed him the pictures with the writing in and around them on my book.

“No, I mean, where are the pictures, like this,” I waved my hand in front of the proffered page I was holding up.

He pointed at a page lined with only text and said, “They’re inside the page. The words form pictures. Once you read the page, pictures show up in here,” he said as he pointed at his temple.

I was fascinated. I asked to borrow the book for a moment and read two pages of his novel to see what he meant. I don’t recall what I read now, but I do remember the images forming in my head of the action being described on the page.

I was hooked. I haven’t stopped reading since that day. I started writing short stories about six months later. There’s a certain kind of magic happening when you take an idea, a picture, and you paint it into words through the keyboard.

To this day, I still read fun pictures books. Only it’s the kind with text, hiding the images from me, while I try to unravel the story word by word.