Philip Schultz

“With my fiction, I focused on chapters and overall conceptions, while in poetry, I crawled along in the trenches of each sentence, examining every word for a sign of a deeper significance.”

“I found many ways around my dyslexia, but I still have trouble transforming words into sounds. I have to memorize and rehearse before reading anything aloud to avoid embarrassing myself by mispronouncing words.”

“I'm a painfully slow reader. And to this day, I mean, I love reading, and I'm very careful - very selective about what I read because I don't read very fast and, therefore, not a great deal.”

“I eventually just imagined being a little boy who was quote unquote 'normal': who could learn like all the kids around me that I felt excluded from. And I imagined myself into one of these and into someone who could read.”

“Most people try to avoid cliches. It's my ambition in life to try to get 'em right!”

“I'd grown accustomed to seeing myself as someone who, if fallible and unworthy, had nevertheless managed to do one thing well enough to get recognition for it.”

“What I read, I read thoroughly and retain almost all of it.”

“Being a poet, the advantages of dyslexia are many, affording me sensitivity to the musical nuances of language and the ability to juggle complicated ideas and narratives simultaneously.”

“I was well into middle age when one of my children, then in the second grade, was found to be dyslexic. I had never known the name for it, but I recognized immediately that the symptoms were also mine.”

“As a poet and a teacher, I read all the time. I know I read slowly. I like reading, but I don't read any more than I have to.”

“I can't remember a time when I stepped into an airport or train station without wishing I were somewhere else, doing almost anything else. Just thinking about traveling gives me the willies. Traveling and dyslexia don't really get along.”

“Failure has been the great theme of my life, I think.”

“I not only couldn't read but often couldn't hear or understand what was being said to me - by the time I'd processed the beginning of a sentence, the teacher was well on her way through a second or third.”

“Suddenly, everyone wanted to talk to me, it seemed. And not about my poetry: it was my dyslexia they were most interested in.”

“Am I the I she tried to save, still lopsided with trying to be a little less or more, escaping who I was a minute ago?”

“Dyslexia lends itself to original thinking, not rote formulas, because you can't do the formulas - you think up your own method based on intuition and instincts. Creativity is trial and error, trying to figure out a way to do something emotionally and intuitively.”

“.... Blesstheir believing happiness will make them happy;that the ocean is magical, a kingdomwhere we go to be human, and grateful.”

“Letter scrambling and trouble reading is just a small part of dyslexia. It is also an auditory processing problem.”

“I don't think I've worked with anyone where I haven't seen some progress. Now sometimes you can't take someone where they want to go, not all the way, and sometimes you stop, and they do it or don't do it on their own thereafter.”

“Repeating third grade at a new school, after having been asked to leave my old one for hitting kids who made fun of my perceived stupidity, I was placed in the 'dummy class.'”