There was. The critical moment for me was in the 11th grade. My biology teacher, Mr. McKenzie, decided that what our school needed was a theater arts program and we didn’t have it. There was wrestling, basketball, football, it was a very jock oriented school and there was no theater program whatsoever. So we started a theater program from scratch. We bootstrapped it. He taught it, and I think he might have done it for nothing. We had to build the props and the scenery and the costumes and do everything ourselves. We had to turn the stage into a proper working stage. It took a year, but we started putting on our own productions. I think that was really a pivotal moment. My biology teacher was our muse at that time. And I think the fact that we were having to do everything, that it wasn’t handed to us, may have created a kind of a work ethic that paid off then in independent film production because it’s the same thing. You know, you’re finding scraps and bits and pieces, and putting it all together and putting on a show. And it’s that sense of being able to create some moment of glory, some showmanship — out of nothing, out of baling wire — that is maybe a lesson that was learned there as a result of this man who just decided to have a theater arts program.

I had the benefit of some very good high school English teachers. One in particular when I was a senior in high school. I was a jock, okay. I was not a student. Although I enjoyed reading, that was about it as far as academics. But she forced us to read good books and good writers, particularly good American writers. We weren’t too thrilled to do it initially, but she taught us how to do it. Through that, I discovered some of my favorite authors, particularly John Steinbeck. Once I had gone through all of Steinbeck’s books, I realized that I had had a wonderful experience.

I can’t remember that anyone in particular did. I think perhaps it was my mother who influenced me the most. She was a housewife. She had no higher education, but had the most common sense of anyone I knew, and she wanted me to have a career. So she was always very supportive, at a time when many women of her generation would not have been.

Donald Crouch in high school said, “Do you like these words?” I was then writing words of my own. He said, “Do you like these words? Do you like the way they sound in your head?” He said, “Well, they sound ten times better when you give ’em out in the air. It’s too bad you can’t say these words.” He began to challenge me, to nudge me toward speaking again, and by using my own poetry — and then other poets because he himself was a compatriot of Robert Frost, he himself was a poet. He himself said he learned a poem a day. In case he went blind, he’d have a whole book of poems in his head. And he nudged me toward that, toward acknowledging and appreciating the beauty of words.