“I had, and have, no visual ability to remember how words are put together. I can recognise them when I see them. But unless they’re in front of me, I can’t recall the vowels they contain. I have no command over whether they contain single or double letters. The closest metaphor I can come up with is that it is like being able to recognise hundreds of different faces but being incapable of producing any sort of likeness of any of them with a pencil and paper….The dyslexia didn’t much hamper my reading. What it affected was my writing. I couldn’t spell anything! In an early short story I wrote, a woman who works in a five-and-ten at one point exclaims, ‘Customers! Customers! Customers!’ All three were spelled differently – and all three were wrong. I could not spell the word paper three times right in a row!”
a Fremantle writer's blog
the chook house 