That's the beauty of it all.

It's still so vivid. I was a perfect student, in regards to behaving. It was almost sickening, or so I gather from the way my sister talks about it. I never pulled a card or disobeyed a teacher, but that changed in high school. 

I was in 10th grade and believed, still do, that I knew everything. In English we had to do a poet study. Choose a poet from a list, tell their biography, pick a poem, and discuss the meaning. I chose "Heart! We will forget him" by Emily Dickinson. It is about a heart broken woman who is trying to forget about this great love of hers, but her heart isn't helping her any. Well I gave my synopsis of the poem, and my teacher told me I was wrong... 

WRONG?!? 

How could I be wrong about what I believed the poem was about. She was a stickler for abiding by what the book or those great people who write what Emily truly meant. 

Her poems weren't published until she died. They were her personal diary. She wanted them burned, but her relative published them, which I am still thankful for. 

-well that is when I knew I wanted to be an English teacher. I want people to understand their opinion matters. They can take away an emotion or truth away from a text someone else may never see or get. That is the beauty of literature and poetry. 

People can see or feel what they feel, and it doesn't have to be what the author wanted their readers to get from their writings. The writer already had a chance to put their thoughts and feelings into the words they wanted. It is the readers ten to grasp onto whatever they find. 

I just read "The Sky is Everywhere" by Jandy Nelson. It is beautifully written. It is definitely YA and focuses on a somewhat love triangle. It also is focused on a family, mainly a girl, who just lost someone and how you keep going while knowing the loved one never will. Nelson constructs  a beautiful version of that through Lennie. I believe my favorite part is the fact that Lennie leaves poems or conversations that did or didn't happen on scraps of paper, walls, anything she can write on through out town. It is as if she is so full of words and can't contain them. She writes them and discards them as if she feels that is the only way she can make sure they really happened. 

While I loved the book and will recommend it my favorite part is Q&a with the author. They ask her normal, run of the mill questions, but one question showed me the beauty of Jandy Nelsons's soul. They asked "What do you want readers to take from this story?" She replies with a beautiful response about one paragraph towards the end summing up the whole book to her. - but then she siad the magic words. ---"Every time I come across this paragraph, I think to myself, well there it is, the whole book crammed into one paragraph! So for me the ideas in that paragraph kind of ring out, but every reader will take something different from the novel and that's what I want, that's the magic of it all. Reading is such a wonderfully personal and private affair." 

She gets it! She gets me!! While I loved the book, and fell in love with the characters and their humanness. My favorite part of the book was that Jandy Nelson gets it. She understands that her work will be read by many different people in just as many different places in life, and it's their choice to take away what they want from this book. 

It's yours to take.