When I was a kid growing up in the Detroit area, in the 1960s and 1970s, there weren’t many biographies for young readers, especially books about women and people of all races. Today, readers can choose from a large variety of biographies. I loved to read as a kid. Sometimes I used to read as much as a book a day. Okay, you guessed it. I was a nerd. Hey, and guess what? I still am!

When I was a kid, my brothers and sister would visit our grandparents in Detroit. Whenever we drove under the Grand River bridge on 1–10 by the Wonderbread factory, we had a special song we always sang:

Yo–Ho Yo–Ho Yo–Ho Yo–Ho
We are the bakers that bake the dough
We bake the bread that you love so
We are the Wonder Bakers!

(We started singing this verse when we went under the bridge—and had to finish before we came out the other end. This required some fast singing!)

I have come a long way as a writer. I wrote stories and made little picture books when I was a kid. As a teenager I wrote stories and poetry. In college at the University of Michigan, I continued to write poetry and fiction.   I also started to keep a journal. Journaling is pretty much the same as keeping a diary. I kept a diary as a kid, until my brother David found it and read it aloud through a locked door—yikes—very embarrassing at the time—especially the part about my crush victim being “so–ooo cute, with such a wonderful personality.“ Humph! The joy of big brothers!

Do you aspire to write? Do you want to be a writer someday? I think if you are writing—whether it’s an email to your friend or snail mail to your grandma, journal writing, report for school, a poem or a story—you are a writer. And, like the old cliché, the more you write, the better writer you will become. I guess you’ll have to trust me on that one. ;)