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When I was a child, my father would read out loud to my brother, my mother, and me. Several times in the course of my childhood, he would read 'Alice and Wonderland' and 'Through the Looking Glass' over a few weeks. They were a great favorite with all of us.

Well, unfortunately, my father passed away before my first book was published, so he never lived to see me as an author. But I think my mum was suitably pleased because she was mad about words. If she ever came across a word that she didn't know, she would always look it up in the dictionary.

I grew up in a household where reading was encouraged. My mother believed in the power of words, and my father obviously did too.

The first poems I knew were nursery rhymes, and before I could read them for myself, I had come to love just the words of them, the words alone.

Both my parents loved words. That was the big deal in our house.

When my father spoke, it was to say something meaningful.

I was 15 when I first became deeply touched by the rhythm and structure of words.

My earliest experience was reading Edward Albee's 'Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?' at 8, you know, with a bunch of kids on my steps - on the stoops - and knowing that I wanted to direct them saying the lines. I don't really know how to articulate that 'cause there wasn't someone to show me.

I've always loved words. I ate up all the books I could get my hands on, and when I couldn't get books, I read candy wrappers and labels on cereal and toothpaste boxes.

I both admired my father and his writing, and I saw how much he valued it.