Stories came first. And then libraries. As an adolescent in a troubled home, I learned that a library filled with books could become an escape, a sanctuary, a place of healing. My first attempts at expression involved songs. As a young teenager I took an initial, tentative step into songwriting with a ballad featuring my neighborhood friends on Carlton Avenue in my hometown of Tracy, California.

Later, with the encouragement of our legendary high school English teacher at Anaheim High School, Ms. Lenore Fields, I learned how words could become treasured guests, instructors, companions on the daily road of life.

I found it easy to lose myself in Robert Louis Stevenson, Mark Twain, Herman Melville, Charlotte Brontë‍, Charles Dickens, Nathaniel Hawthorne and others.

Thomas Gilbert