A Portrait of the Artist from a Young Sentence

The first artful words I ever wrote, the first artful sentence -- I remember it still, I was 15 years old -- was "I died in a fire." You see my narrative conceit right there. I had done "creative" writing before that, to fulfill school assignments. One of them I recall, in the 8th grade, led me to describe the flow of water over its whole natural course of recursive exchange between atmosphere and ocean, into human systems of carriage, to its destined stream from some faucet into a glass. Of all the student submissions, the teacher chose, with praise, mine to read aloud to the class: the self-affirming pride I felt, sorely needed amid my early-adolescent, melancholic insecurities, when I realized that the words our teacher had begun to read were mine.

And then the class began openly to scoff.

It was too good some called out. It was fake. No eighth grader writes like that, a voice came from the seats around me. The writer had plagiarized the passage, taken it from somewhere. They dismiss…