Michael J. Vaughn
In His Own Words:
Inside a wooden case that once held a children's-model telescope,
I keep a slip of paper from the second grade. It's
a test result,
revealing that my seven-year-old self had the reading comprehension
skills of a freshman in high school. This was a pattern that would
continue in later years. My sixth-grade teacher stopped giving me
any but the bonus spelling words (the basic words being a waste of
everybody's time). In high school, I hated every English class I
took, and got A's in all of them.
Looking back, it's amazing that I never got into my school's honors
humanities program. I was clearly a natural writer, one who was not
being challenged - and that was why I hated English class. But it
was the '70s, and everybody seemed to be focusing on the other end
of the spectrum, making sure the problem kids would at least make it
to graduation.
Fortunately, my SAT verbal score finally tripped the wire. I was
invited to San Jose State's honors humanities program, where a corps
of professors from different disciplines took us through world
history - from Genesis through Nixon - touching on the music, art,
philosophy, science, history and literature of each era. And boy did
we write! Constantly. At the end of the two-year program, for my
final project, I wrote and performed in a play in which Aristotle,
attempting to tutor Alexander the Great, has his idealized forms
rudely disassembled by Copernicus, Darwin and Freud. It was
hilarious, especially when Craig Carter, playing on Freud's cocaine
addiction, emptied two dozen packets of sugar on a mirror, performed
his part with a wacky German accent, and then managed to
accidentally snort some of the sugar into his nose. I found him in
the hallway, hacking and snorting like a rodeo bull.
Since then, things have worked out well. Craig finally cleared his
sinuses and became a gonzo-style journalist. I went on to write a
dozen novels, seven of them published, to win a few poetry awards
and fellowships, to cover theater and opera for several different
Bay Area magazines, and, recently, to write on poetry and fiction
for Writer's Digest.
So would I have taken this route without that honors humanities
program? To be frank - yes. I ran into my sixth-grade best friend
Maurice a few years ago, and he said, "Oh yeah. You were always
talking about writing novels." Clearly, I'm one of the obsessed.
But I worry that it took so long for my obvious needs to be
noticed - that other talented kids with just as much talent but
perhaps less determination might not have received the kick-start
that their gifts merited. Which is why I'm so glad to see a website
like Diane's. Not that kids with learning disabilities don't deserve
every attention they receive (let's talk about my brother Larry, who
overcame his to win an MBA, and is now a Silicon Valley CFO). But
let's not forget about kids with special abilities, talents that
need to be challenged in special ways.
When
the man who cost him his job offers Jack Teagarden a beachside
house-sitting assignment, he latches on to it like a man overboard. For
a child of Silicon Valley, the counterculture freakiness of Santa Cruz
is hard to deal with, until Jack's life coach takes him to an all-night
drumming party. Under the spell of a thunderous stream of percussion, a
pigeon-raising witch named Audrey LaBrea and a tragically unmarked plate
of brownies, Jack wakes up with grass stains all over his body and
rumors that he initiated a naked light-saber battle. So what's harder,
fighting the freaks? Or realizing that you are one?
