A Lifelong Obsession with Edgar Allan Poe

Most people I’m close to know that I love Poe. His writing. His intriguing life. The mystery surrounding his death. The fact that so many people think they know the basics about him but they really don’t.

I’m a little obsessive. Okay, maybe a lot. But it’s not to an unhealthy degree, which is always good, of course.

When did this all start?
It’s time for a brief story.

When I was in third grade, I was said to have what the school termed an “issue with reading.” This, of course, wasn’t true, but the folks at this school weren’t the brightest.

Anyway, as a result of this, I was placed in a “special” reading group with a few classmates. Twice a week, we’d meet in the school library with one of the school’s teaching aides and we’d all take turns reading aloud from whatever book they had assigned us.

Now, this school was a parochial Lutheran school. I didn’t mind it there at all, really. I liked my teachers and most of my classmates. I loved reading, I did. And as I mentioned, they were wrong about my “issue with reading.”

The very first book they assigned us was a small collection of stories by none other than Edgar Allan Poe. A collection of horror stories in a church school — oh, the irony.

We read The Raven. I memorized it in two weeks. We read The Tell-Tale Heart. I was fascinated over how it made me feel. We read The Fall of the House of Usher, and I was haunted, but in a good way.

One of the last stories we read was The Cask of Amontillado. By the end of it, I was hopelessly addicted to Poe’s writing. That might seem like an interesting thing to say for a third grader, but it was true. I checked out everything I could get from the library, which at that time, was one meager collection of Poe’s best works.

From then on, the infatuation only grew. And the growth felt almost constant.

In high school, I joined the Forensics team. For every competition, I chose a Poe story. I won state competitions with my performances of The Tell-Tale Heart, Annabel Lee, and The Raven. During my senior year, I wrote a re-telling of The Masque of the Red Death for my final competition. I came in second for performance, and first for writing. My time with the Forensics team deepened my appreciation for Poe’s writing style.

College and grad school gave me the opportunity to explore his work even further. My favorite class from my time at UW-Milwaukee was one simply titled “The Works of Edgar Allan Poe,” and it was taught by a Poe scholar from England. I remember that, in a semester filled with turmoil and boring classes, this was the one I looked forward to constantly. We met twice a week, and for that hour, it was pure bliss. I learned so much and took copious notes in my Norton edition of Poe’s works. I still have that book, and I treasure it.

During my MFA program, I was lucky enough to be able to have an interdisciplinary studies course on Poe’s work and writing style. This was, and still is, an invaluable semester of information. I use a lot of what I learned in my own writing, and while I don’t write horror or gothic tales too often these days, Poe’s work is still a rather large influence on the things I do write.

So, thanks to my well-meaning but incorrect third grade teacher, I’ve had a years-long love affair with the writing of Edgar Allan Poe. Are there better writers out there? Probably, depending on who you ask, but he’s my favorite. I find everything about him, his life, and his writing to be absolutely fascinating. I hope everyone can find that same fascination in a writer.

Oh, and The Cask of Amontillado remains my favorite story to this day.