In Miss Fisher’s sixth grade classroom, the tall, tall walls were covered with posters of the Milky Way and Saturn’s rings. We learned of outer space, about Mars and about the water and microorganisms that could maybe be there. We made impressive space stations out of cardboard and tin foil and filled them with miniature showers made from collected bottle caps, paper clips, and carefully cut squares of paper towels that we dyed with washable marker. One day, our teacher told us that she’d been invited to Florida, to the Kennedy Space Center, to watch a shuttle launch with a few other teachers from around the country. We knew all about the shuttles, because she had taught us. We knew about the first ones, and about the new ones, and about the ones that died with people inside. We knew each name of each shuttle (though they all escape me now) and we knew about each of the missions. Miss Fisher went to Cape Canaveral for the launch weekend, and when she came back to school on Monday, she cried in front of all of us and told us that the billows of white smoke pushing those little people up through the atmosphere was just the most beautiful thing she’d ever seen. Some of us felt happy that she was so happy, and some
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of us squirmed in our maroon chairs because we didn’t know about teachers and tears. But we knew that she knew that space was important— that learning about things outside of ourselves is just the most important thing. Halfway through the year Miss Fisher gave each of us, her thirty-two children, a clean notebook and a clicky mechanical pencil and instructed us to write a story about whatever we wanted. It could be true or completely imagined, but we had to write it down. I hemmed and hawed and wrote and edited and wrote and edited. I finally cemented my words in black, inky pen and illustrated my tale with colored pencils. It was a silly story about a girl and a library and a lost $1,000 bill, but I presented it to Miss Fisher with all the hope in my sixth grade world. I sat across the table from her, our knees almost touching underneath. She leaned across the swirls of the faux-wood surface and said, “Brittany, you’re a writer!” The exclamation in her voice didn’t say surprise or shock, it said proud and encouragement. She told me I was a writer, and so I was. And I am. I am a writer because she first said I could be one. Later that year, our class wrote a play