Getting to know Naomi Shihab Nye

http://www.napsg.org/nye09.htm (Because of Winn Dixie -- Naomi, Florida-The town of Naomi, Florida is the fictional town where a girl and her father move to in the movie Because Of Winn-Dixie. There is not actually a town in Florida with that name.)

I wanted to read this to you, as educators.  "Please describe how you became a writer," and I wrote this to one of those infinite questionnaires students send you over the Internet. "Possibly I began writing as a refuge from our insulting first-grade textbook.  'Come, Jane.  Come. Look, Dick, look.'  Were there ever duller people in the world?  You had to tell them to look at things. Why were they looking to begin with?" 
            Definitely, I became a writer partly because of my mom, who is still, at the age of 81, a retired teacher and a volunteer reading tutor in a Montessori school in Dallas.  She sent me off to school saying, "Use your words."  Our dad, who adored language, story-telling, and descriptive precision, had started out his life as a journalist by reading the evening news for BBC in Jerusalem at the age of 15.  I never beat him in Scrabble once, although it always haunted me.  English was not his first language.  Why couldn't I beat this man? 

******

Nothing was ever above our heads.  When we came to class having memorized a poem by Emily Dickinson, she never said, "That's a little hard for you; let's pick something easier." 
            She listened with reverence.  She was always interested to know what had attracted us to any particular poem.  One of Mrs. Lane's own heroes was William Blake, who said in the 13th century, "The unfolding of the imagination is the only true education."