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Who teaches the storyteller how to read aloud? Nobody sat with them and explained that a full stop means the voice drops and the breath comes. That a question should lift at the end. That a villain should sound different from a hero, and a frightened child should sound different from both. Nobody gave them a worksheet with arrows showing where to pause for dramatic effect. They learned it the way all real learning happens. By being inside something long enough to understand i

Sunday mornings in my childhood home had a sound. My mother would blast the radio. Vintage calypso. Sparrow. Kitchener. Stalin. I did not know then that I was being educated. I know it now. This is what that education built, and what its absence costs in the creative writing classroom.

Every year I ask a class of students if they know Cinderella. Blank stares. Harry Potter. Nothing. Papa Bois. A goat man, one child says. These children do not know stories. Not ours. Not anyone else's. And that absence is not just a cultural gap. It affects how they read, how they write, and how they perform when it matters.