Traci Ashbe Dark Fantasy Author

When I was a freshman in high school, one of our English assignments was to write a poem about whatever we wanted. So I wrote one about (as far as I can remember) how important it was to appreciate our teachers.

We read our poems aloud to the class. And when I read mine, my English teacher had a hard time composing himself for a second after I had finished.

It wasn’t at all my intention to make a grown man weep. I swear it wasn’t. I wasn’t thinking at all about how he would react to the words on that page. I just had an idea for a poem and wrote it and shared it with the room.

But maybe that was the problem — that I wrote something emotionally charged (in this case, in a positive way) and didn’t consider how my audience might respond to it.

Apparently…