a twisted tale

Yes, it’s true, my future was heavily influenced by a cookie.  No, I haven’t lost my marbles, not the figurative ones anyway. When I saw that today was National Oreo Day, I couldn’t let it go by without paying homage to one of America’s favorite snacks, a time-honored treat in its one-hundred-fourteenth year of production.  For health reasons, I haven’t indulged in close to thirty years, but I’ve never forgotten the taste or how no other commercial sandwich cookie ever compared.  Oreos are undeniably delicious.  They’re also fun to eat—I’m a twist-them-apart-first-and-savor-the-creamy-center-sort (leaving the chocolatey biscuits for dessert to my dessert), versus your whole-cookie chompers and your drippy-milk-dunkers. But it wasn’t the consumption of them, per se, that set me on my current course.  It was the life of them.

I’ve been a storyteller since I was old enough to hold a pencil or a crayon in my hand.  Making up elaborate tales and humorous characters was something I’d thought everyone did, so, when I was a little girl, it hadn’t occurred to me that there could be a future in writing, that it was a skill to be honed and treasured.  Then one day in grade school, my teacher strolled between the rows of student desks, offering each of us an Oreo cookie with explicit instructions that we were not to eat it.  This was not some new-fangled torment local bureaucrats had concocted and added to the school’s curriculum for their own fiendish pleasure.  It was, instead, one instructor’s rather clever means of inspiring creativity (and potentially a little drool) among a largely apathetic student body.  Our assignment was this: write a story about an Oreo cookie.  Only once it was completed and handed in at the teacher’s desk, were we allowed to eat our protagonists.  He didn’t word it that way, of course.  I would have.  Like a half-eaten Oreo, I’m a little twisted.

Most of my peers had composed a paragraph or two and had long since consumed their cookies while I’d continued to scribble away.  Finally, I’d turned in a paper several pages long that had included descriptive scenes, plot twists, witty dialogue, and an ending with a bit of punch.  My teacher had kept me back after class the following day.  I thought I’d done something terrible, though I couldn’t fathom what. Instead of admonishment for a crime I hadn’t known I’d committed, he’d returned my A+ paper, along with a list of regional writing competitions he’d advised me to enter.  I did.  One encouraging educator and an Oreo cookie, you see, had shifted my focus to where it was always meant to be—creating the sweet story centers sandwiched between rich and intricate covers.

Now I have another novel in the works to which I must return.  But, dear readers, fear not.  I promise not to devour the protagonist.