Why I do what I do
Creativity = Happiness
In a small trailer park that was hardly a park at all, my father would sit in the panelboard hallway between bedrooms, spinning tales for four wide-eyed boys. His stories of Melvin the Ghost Catcher – complete with ghost-catching nets, a time-traveling T-Rex, and a six-foot talking rabbit named Hoppy – had us gripping our covers with tension one moment and giggling the next.
When I was eight, he read us “The Hobbit.” We begged him to read “The Lord of the Rings” next.
“No,” he said, “it’s much too long. If you want to know how the story goes, you’ll have to read it yourselves.”
That’s how he tricked us into becoming readers. By thirteen, I’d read Tolkien’s trilogy seven times.
Years later, I kept the tradition alive, telling my young daughter stories about her adventures with her cousins in Fairyland, solving mysteries like “Who Really Ate the Queen of Hearts’ Tarts?” (Spoiler: probably the butler, although you’d have to ask her).
My creative writing professor, Richard Stevenson, used to say, “Writers don’t write because they want to, they write because they have to.”
Devin Cahoon
Author, Artist, Storyteller
