Ray Bradbury

I spent a great deal of my youth feeling like an alien. I didn’t fit in with my family or at school and I had few friends. I walked the five or so blocks home from school each day, eyes on the ground, imagining myself a faraway land. I spent a lot of time reading and imagining, pretending to be the person I wished I could be in real life.


Sometime in my troubled youth I encountered Ray Bradbury’s work. I think I started with some of his collected short stories; R is for Rocket seems to stand out in my memory. Eventually, I began reading his novels and that brought me to The Martian Chronicles. In Bradbury’s writing I found an echo of my own loneliness, a mirror held up to my own feelings of alienation.

When I started writing, I went back and read Bradbury. I didn’t want to imitate him, but I wanted to reach back into my own past. I wanted to stir up the silt, sift it, and find a few shiny grains of sand to examine. Re-reading his work brought up new levels of complexity, small observations about being human that I’d been too young or self-involved to notice all those years ago.

The world’s a little sadder and a little emptier for losing Ray Bradbury, but as an old instructor of mine once said, “Writing is the only form of immortality”.

“Some people turn sad awfully young. No special reason, it seems, but they seem almost to be born that way. They bruise easier, tire faster, cry quicker, remember longer and, as I say, get sadder younger than anyone else in the world. I know, for I'm one of them.”


― Ray Bradbury, Dandelion Wine