A is for Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

I love all things Alice, and probably own half a dozen copies of this book.

I identify with Alice, maybe because she’s lost in a strange world  where nothing makes sense, as I’ve so often felt in the real world.

I get by, but sometimes I feel like I’m playacting, not understanding why everyone is painting the white roses red.

I know exactly how it must have felt when Alice fell down the rabbit hole.

Through this book, Lewis Carroll introduced me to the idea that it’s okay to play with language.  I knew that reading was fun, but most books follow a set of rules.  English teachers expound on those rules, and in school writing, I dared not break them.

But here was a published author whose book contains nonsense words!

Excerpt from Jabberwocky, by Lewis Carroll:

’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.

It opened up a whole world of language.  Suddenly, language was more than it had been before.

In school, I continued to write the way I’d been told.  But on my own time, I experimented and played with language.  Because now I knew I could.

Alice may have been lost when she first got to Wonderland, but she figured it all out eventually.  And what she didn’t figure out, she still managed to deal with.  Eventually, she got home, but the world was never the same.  Because once she knew about Wonderland, she could never un-know it.