Meet Karen Wehrle

Writer

I got bitten by the writing bug early. When I was a pre-schooler, we lived in cheap housing. Of course I didn't know that until the day my bedroom doorknob punched a hole in the wall. Oops.

Dad was not amused. He stared a long time at the plasterboard hole he claimed he couldn't fix, and the next thing I knew there was a little desk there. He built it out of two by fours and placed it so the door could no longer whack the wall. Huh.

He furnished the desk with a six-inch stack of strange, green and white striped paper with perforated lines that he brought home from work. Mum said I could scribble all I pleased on the blank backs. If I used it all up, Dad would bring me more.

It felt like Christmas to me. I drew picture after picture as if challenged to fill all the paper with miles of crayon lines and shadings. When I got bored with that, a paint set appeared, then fingerpaints. I used them all and still the urge to fill the paper wasn't satisfied. Back then, I didn't know why. Now I know what I wanted was stories.

Before I was ten, I started asking for a typewriter every Christmas and birthday. At first my parents just looked at me and laughed it off, then grew thoughtful over the years. They didn't have money for such a thing, but that didn't stop me wanting one.

One summer day in my early teens, my Uncle Bill came to the door and dropped off a typewriter he said belonged to Aunt June. I never dreamed she had one. I sat looking at the wondrous machine on our kitchen table, my heart pinched that it was mine because Aunt June got cancer and died. The sting faded as my younger siblings and I pushed every key and lever, trying to learn how it worked.

I shooed them away when they got rough with it, so they demanded a story. I said I'd write one--then spent the next couple of hours agonizing over a stupid tale about a lizard, hunting and pecking each letter, fitting it on the only piece of paper Mum could scrounge up. It was pitiful in so many ways. I learned that writing was harder than I thought.

It was years before I tried another story. Writing goes better when I allow the words to be crappy at first. Turns out, my favorite part of writing is rewriting. I appreciate a second chance or three to hit the mark. So did my writing all start with a hole in the wall?

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