Experiencing Words by Maddison

Experiencing Words by Maddison - April 2014 Scholarship Essay

I love running my index finger against the spines of books neatly stuffed into shelves that can barely hold their worlds. The smell of the years stuck between the pages pleases my nose, which is always dangerously close to the text. The desire to flick words upon my tongue makes my fingers itch for more. The character that made me see books in this way is Meggie Folchart, from Cornelia Funke's Inkheart.

Before I read Inkheart, I would say I read books in the same way Meggie did before she learned how to taste the words on her tongue: by devouring them. Throughout the book, however, Meggie discovers exactly what power both words and the readers of them have when they slowly feast upon books. She soon finds that she has the ability to transport readers to the fantasy world and make the fantasy world come into the real world like her father just by reading the words aloud, except that she can also do it with her own words. She appreciated the art of authors and then moved on to make her own.
Meggie inspired me to bounce words on my palette and to truly enjoy the world the author paints around me. Like her, I began to savor the sentences and paragraphs of my favorite books. Once I began to get the feeling of having someone else's words in my mouth I put my mind to the test and inked some words of my own across a page.

With every word I write now, I try to make it so my audience's senses experience the words. I try to get them to taste the crisp snap of mint and feel the weight of raindrops on eyelashes and see the valleys in the lines of their knuckles and smell the bright citrus and hear the undertones and overtones of a symphony. I want my sentences to act as samples, my paragraphs to act as meals, my installments to act as feasts and my finished works to act as whole cultures of foods.
Meggie Folchart further instilled within me the desire to read and write masterful works of literature. I carefully take apart the metaphors and figurative language within the books I read to enjoy them more than I ever could, had I not slowed down. I mindfully craft stories with mediums and words of my own, hoping that one day they’ll end up on pages between two beaten covers neatly stuffed into a shelf that someone loves to take it off of.