Then I got lucky: I was pulled out of first grade and put in Special Ed. They told me I was a Special Needs kid. Even though I was aware I was a fuckup and could tell everyone was disappointed in me, I was too young to feel major shame about it. It was all just school to me.

Then an even luckier thing happened to me: I was sent to a teacher who had just started working at the school, and she basically saved me from slipping through the cracks. Ms. Pennington, the Special Ed teacher, was a gentle woman with truly incredible reserves of patience. Her voice had a hint of a Southern accent and she always seemed to be laughing, not with malice but with sympathy, as she coached me on the secret of making a recognizable letter "A.” I remember her hands twisting as she showed me how to arrange my fingers into the incomprehensible sigil that would equip me to hold a pencil.

Much later, my mother told me how proud I was when I finally managed to write a real, "exact A" — so pleased with myself, long after all the other kids were writing crisp sentences. This was part of the magic of Ms. Pennington: She somehow made me feel excited about mastering the arcane secrets of lettercraft, rather than ashamed that I was so far behind.

My difficulty with writing was both physical and perceptual. I had zero coordination: I constantly stumbled over my own feet as if I'd forgotten where I had left them. When Ms. Pennington took me to the local children's hospital to be tested, I was diagnosed with Sensory Integration Disorder, meaning that I couldn't quite turn sight, sound, or touch into awareness. She spent hours teaching me how to throw a frisbee: how to stand, how to hold my arms. On the weekends, my parents took me to special phys-ed classes, where I learned to swim alongside other developmentally disabled kids.

Ms. Pennington was the constant voice in my ear as I wrestled with the pencil, even with other kids in the room who were also struggling with their own problems. She found a way to turn my tendency to daydream into a tool for getting me to learn, and in the process, made me into a lifelong storytelling addict.

She’d give me gold stars and praise every time I got a letter right, but one day she offered me an even better, bigger bribe: If I mastered all my writing skills and got up to speed on my classwork, I could write a play, which would be performed at school.

The reward was irresistible, given the kind of kid I was — a mumbling oddity, slouching around the schoolyard making up weird stories in my head and living in a dream world that was as real as the red brick schoolhouse, the games of dodgeball and keepaway that went over my head. I had imaginary friends, and imaginary adventures, and a whole imaginary life.