The Pressure of Young Promise

SUCCESS to my kid cohort in rural Minnesota during the seventies was getting into The Guinness Book of World Records. It was all about being the first or best at something—or doing the most of something else. I planned a head start on Guinness-type fame because I already knew I wanted to be a writer at age nine. Having received a hand-me-down typewriter from my older brothers, I was astonished by how immediately professional my “novels” looked coming off the platen. I quickly sold that first typewritten novel to my parents for a quarter. How hard could achieving the moniker of “nation’s youngest author” be? By twelve I had a pile of pages that I began sending to publishers, and I was getting nice notes back from a variety of…

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Poets & Writers (Digital) - 1 Issue, September/October 2023

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