He had hopeless handwriting and they said he'd never read, but Dominic Hoey and words were meant to be.
Listen to the story as it was told at The Watercooler or read on.
Growing up, no one bothered to tell me I was dyslexic. There was a lot going on: Kirsa Jensen had disappeared, Michael Jackson did the moon walk for the first time and Return of the Jedi was on at the movies. On top of that, half my family is dyslexic, so it wasn't like I was special.
I don't want to imply that a diagnosis would've made any difference. I doubt I would have been able to pronounce dyslexia let alone understand what it meant. It seems cruel to have such a complicated word for a learning disability that affects language. So I chalked it all up to laziness and stupidity and got on with things.
When most people think of dyslexia, it's backwards letters and messy handwriting, like a shopping list written by a drunk Russian.
When most people think of dyslexia, it's backwards letters and messy handwriting, like a shopping list written by a drunk Russian.
In reality it's a complex disorder with 37 symptoms, ranging from the predictable (trouble reading and writing) to the bizarre (keen eye sight and building complex fantasy worlds in your mind).
For me as a child it meant a speech impediment, being shit at sports and having potentially the worst handwriting written by anyone with opposable thumbs.
My primary school practiced an experimental form of education that involved beatings and put downs to help students reach their full potential. One of the techniques favoured by my teacher, a fat pig-like man, involved chucking my exercise book in the rubbish while exclaiming loudly that I'd be lucky to get a job in a factory.
When these state-of-the-art educational practices failed I was placed in a special-ed class, a windowless box where we attempted and failed to read books from the 60s. My other classmates seemed to have more pressing worries than bad spelling. One girl who I assume was deaf would bellow incoherently at random intervals, another of my classmates would sit staring at the wall, snot running down his face and pooling on the desk in front of him, while our disinterested teacher repeated the sentence, "Jane runs up the hill".
But my parents, never fans of authority, refused to believe my teacher's prognosis that I would never learn to read. My father's thoughts on the matter, and I'm paraphrasing here, were "Fucking bullshit".
They read to me most nights, everything from Tolkien to Spike Milligan, Beatrix Potter to Edward Lear. The stories swilled around in my head, giving me my first taste for language. I'd sit in special ed, staring at the piece of wall where a window should have been, losing myself in the world of Bad Jelly the Witch while the teacher repeated "Jane runs down the hill".
One day my family packed up and moved us to Warrington, a small village outside Dunedin. I can't remember this being discussed, but there was a lot going on. Nuclear ships had been banned from our waters, the Rainbow Warrior exploded and Back to the Future was on at the movies.
Warrington was overrun with smiling children wearing woolen jumpers and riding bikes through the gravel streets. Instead of fights involving half the school, we went for walks in the hills; instead of throwing rocks at cars, we rode horses along the beach.
The biggest culture shock was that our teacher didn't appear to hate children. She said nice things to us, offered words of encouragement and even taught us things.
Over the two years I spent in Warrington I went from struggling with Hairy Maclary to reading Charlotte's Web without moving my lips. These books were like steroids for my imagination, I would lose myself for hours inventing stories in my head.
Every night the roaches still held meetings in the kitchen, the children played knuckle bones amongst the shadows and the dog choir performed till dawn.
When we returned to Auckland, nothing much had changed. Every night the roaches still held meetings in the kitchen, the children played knuckle bones amongst the shadows and the dog choir performed till dawn.
Back at school I wandered the playground with my friends making up lies about the South Island.
The teachers didn't know what to do with me. I was now reading at an advanced level but I still talked funny, still couldn't catch a ball and my handwriting still looked like a Len Lye experiment. I was put up a year and then back down again before being lost among the chaos of our overcrowded classroom.
One day, while watching a friend demonstrate what happens when you shot a staple gun into a window, I had a brilliant idea: I would take all the nonsense in my head and commit it to paper.
I came home from school that day to find the dog on the garage roof. He liked it up there. The smell of burning offal hung in the air.
My parents were in the kitchen, my father, busy microwaving a cow heart for the dog's dinner, my mother reading a book at the kitchen table.
"I want to be a writer," I told them.
"For fuck's sake," my father said under his breath.
"Dog's on the roof," my mother said, looking up from her book.
It's not that my father was unkind, but I was no child prodigy showing latent signs of promise. I'd only just stopped reading Spot books and when I did start writing, my poetry was rhyming couplets about why no-one liked me. And the less said about my early attempts at prose the better.
Jump forward to high school; Kurt Cobain had just shot himself, the internet was learning to walk, and Once Were Warriors was on at the movies.
By now I had filled countless books with awful poetry and short stories. I became obsessed with stationery (I could do a separate talk on the merits of the Warwick Hardcover 2B8s).
Always looking for validation, I made the mistake of showing my poems to my English teacher. I found her sitting at her desk, watched over by a giant Shakespeare poster.
"Excuse me miss." Her face dropped as she looked up and saw me.
"For fuck's sake," she said under her breath as I handed her my book.
"Poems, you read them please," I muttered.
"You don't have it," she told me after flicking through a few pages filled with misspelt angst and heavy-footed cliches. I wasn't sure what 'it' was, but I assumed it must've been important. Deflated, I left school and walked through the park. If I didn't have 'it' by the age of 15, what hope was there?
Back home, the dog ran up and down the hallway with a tambourine around its neck. I made a sandwich and sat on the couch.
"What's wrong?" my mother asked.
"Apparently I don't have it," I replied.
"You'll get it in the end, it just takes a while."
"You think so?" I asked.
"Who do you think put the tambourine on the dogs neck?" she said.
It took a few years for the nuances of my mother's advice to sink in. But in time I accepted that a learning disability meant everything was going to be difficult and I simply had to choose something and stick with it.
My old English teacher was right; I didn't have it, yet. And I wasn't going to get it by going to school and pretending to understand Wordsworth. So I dropped out and threw myself into my writing.
Years of struggling to do what came naturally to others had trained me well. I continued scribbling in 2B8s and reading them to anyone who would listen. I got out books from the library with titles like So you want to write? and Poetry for losers and scoured them for tips. I thrust scraps of paper covered in my writing into the hands of anyone I thought might be able to offer advice.
Years of struggling to do what came naturally to others had trained me well. I continued scribbling in 2B8s and reading them to anyone who would listen. I got out books from the library with titles like So you want to write?
After a gap decade I enrolled at University and watched my A+ average plunge to a B- when I was forced to write by hand in my exams. I began to win poetry slams and rap battles. I got a record deal and my writing was published in magazines and journals.
Today, if I'm known for anything, it's my words, which still seems crazy to me. It doesn't feel like long ago they were such a source of shame, that speaking out loud was to invite ridicule.
I don't even want to imagine what life would be like if I listened to the people telling me all the things I couldn't do, or if my parents had allowed me to be defined by my disorder. Perhaps that's why they never bothered to tell me I was dyslexic.
Or maybe it's because they understood that no one really knows what they're talking about, not the teachers or the academics or the education specialists. So what does it matter if you don't have a name for why you talk weird or lie compulsively, or whatever it is that makes you an individual.
I'm going to end on a quote from one of my old writing teachers. Again I'm paraphrasing.
"Whatever parts of your work people hate, embrace them, because that's what makes you unique."
This story was originally told at The Watercooler, a monthly storytelling night held at The Basement Theatre. If you have a story to tell, email thewatercoolernz@gmail.com or hit them up on Twitter or Facebook.
Illustration: Mathew Worthington
This content is brought to you with funding support from NZ On Air.
