Ingrid kummer englisch lk 12

Ingrid Kummer Englisch Lk 12   Alumna Lorri Hewett’s Biography   Lorri was born in Fairfax, Virginia, but spent most of her childhood in Littleton, Colorado. Her childhood was for the most part idyllic and uneventful, her father was a system analyst at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory and her mother stayed home with Lorri and her younger brother Derek. Lorri was a highly imaginative kid, spending hours in the imaginary worlds she created from the many books she read. One of her favorite things to do was to write herself into her favorite stories, altering the stories so that instead of Laura Ingalls, Charles-Wallace Murray, Luke Skywalker, or Indiana Jones, she was the principle heroine. All through her early years at school she was the difficult child, the one who was smart but didn’t apply herself, was continually challenging authority, and constantly daydreaming. Her first serious try to write was bei the age of 9 .

She got the inspiration for the novel from the lizzle house on the Prairie series. The novel, titled ‘Carlton’s Life,’ consisted of about 140 pages detailing the adventures of 6 year old Wendy Carlton,who was not only a pioneer (braving the ravages of the Florida winters in 1843 -- at that point Lorri didn’t know much about geography), but also a religious zealot (as in Joan of Arc). At this time Lorri became seriously involved in ballet training, which made a nice compliment to her writing because in ballet she was able to develop the discipline that would allow her to sustain long writing projects. The first major event in her life occurred when she was eleven and her Aunt Ginger died of cancer. Her parents then took in her eight year old cousin Darnel, and the family had to adjust to having a new member. The change was made even more difficult because Darnel’s biological father, learning that Darnel was to be the recipient of his mother’s life insurance policy, sued the court for custody of Darnel.

The next two years were very difficult emotionally and financially for the family, as social workers and lawyers became a regular guest on family life.Whereas writing had been mainly an amusement before, writing stories became therapeutic and a source of escapism. Her characters began to resemble human beings instead of fantastical adventurers.Although she had in junior high school become a part of the ‘bad crowd,’ her attraction to this crowd was their anger and their rebelliousness. They provided her with a window of observation into the world of teenagers that she had read about in S.E.

Hinton books and that she was not, by her relative comfort and her stable family life, a part of. In these years she was playing the role of counsellor to her friends, helping them through parental crises,substance abuse problems, eating disorders, and sexualvictimization. All of these experiences gave her new ideas for writing. She now became committed to the idea of recording the problems that she saw around her with people her age in a realistic way. Writing was still, however,an extremely private thing for Lorri. Aside from her best friend from childhood Lyda Acker, no one, not even her parents, knew to the extent to which writing was an important part of her life.

Her most productive writing period was in her high school years,in which she wrote nine novels. Her high school years were her most difficult years, because that was when she began to feel alienated.Being ‘different,’being the only black student in her classes,living in a middle-class neighborhood had never before been problematic for her because she had always been in many ways a leader, some other kids could look up to. Once she reached high school, being a leader was no longer enough for her. She knew that there was something more to her identity than she was seeing in her daily life. She had no real access to black organizations, had no black friends.

Her first thought to deal with this new dilemma for her was to throw herself even more into activities. At this time ballet had become an important part of her life. She was spending six days a week at the dance studio in serious professional training. She began to feel the first actions of racial discrimination, which she had not faced with to age 14 in her ballet company. As she watched herself being passed over for major roles, Lorri began to wonder why it seemed to difficult to have a black Sleeping Beauty or Cinderella, and in this way she began to see how tradition was often incompatible with social realities. Lorri actively tried to involve herself in the black community by making friends in the Denver area and becoming active in Shorter African Methodist Episcopal church.