Poe.

The first writer I ever loved was Edgar Allan Poe.

Not in the way adults talk about writers. Not the way you discover them in a classroom or through some syllabus that tells you this one matters and that one doesn’t. I found Poe before I really knew what a writer even was. Before I understood that a person could live a life and leave something behind that people would still read a hundred years later.

Back then I was barely able to read.

My mother had a ritual. We’d leave the welfare office and head down the square. That’s what everyone called it, though really it was just a strip mall like a thousand others. First stop was McDonald’s. Fries, maybe a burger if it was a good day. Then we’d walk over to Woolworth’s.

And that’s where the magic happened.

They had a rack of these books called Great Classics Illustrated. They were the kid versions of the big books adults talked about. Shorter sentences. Pictures sometimes. The stories rewritten so a kid like me could actually follow them.

Today people wrinkle their noses at that sort of thing. They say the real literature gets watered down. Maybe it does. But for me those books were a doorway.

The first one I picked was Poe.

I didn’t know anything about Gothic literature or symbolism or American Romanticism. I just knew the stories felt different from everything else. Dark rooms. Strange voices. People losing their grip on reality one page at a time. Even in the simplified version, you could feel the atmosphere crawling around the edges of the story.

Years later, as a teenager, I found the originals.

That was when the lightning really struck.

The language was stranger. The rhythm of it. The way the sentences seemed to spiral down into the narrator’s mind. But the feeling was the same feeling I’d had sitting in that Woolworth’s aisle with the kid version in my hands.

That’s when I realized something important.

A writer was a real thing. A job. A life. A person who could create a world out of words and somehow keep living inside people’s heads long after they were gone.

Poe was the first time I understood that.

And when people say things like “I liked Poe before Hot Topic discovered him,” it always makes me laugh a little. Because if you know Poe’s story, you know how strange that complaint really is.

The man died broke.

His obituary was written by a rival who hated him and spent years making sure the world thought he was a drunken madman. For a long time America barely knew what to do with him. It took the French to look at his work and say, hold on a second, this guy is a genius.

So if Poe’s face ends up on posters or T-shirts or in the hands of some kid who found him in a mall bookstore somewhere, that feels right to me.

It doesn’t matter how you first meet Poe.

Maybe it’s a comic adaptation. Maybe it’s a paperback from a rack in a five-and-dime store. Maybe it’s a poem in a classroom or a horror movie on TV late at night.

What matters is that once you meet him, he stays.

He stayed with me.

The poems. The essays. The stories. Even Arthur Gordon Pym drifting down into that cold white mystery at the end of the world.

All of it.

First writer I ever loved.

Still my favorite.