by Megan Nix
When I was in seventh grade, my school decided we’d have an invention fair instead of the usual science fair. I had two ideas that I brought up to the teacher:
- A microwave that cooled food down instead of heating it up.
- Edible Taco Tape, which would provide a nice adhesive for cumbersome foods that never stay together (soft tacos, burritos, big sandwiches, etc).
[caption id="attachment_6323" align="alignright" width="184"]
Ponyboy or edible taco tape? We'll take Ponyboy.[/caption]
The teacher explained to me that neither was possible. For years, scientists had been looking for ways to cool food at the rate a microwave warmed it. And as far as Taco Tape went, the scope of time for the assignment would not be enough for me to devise a recipe with the necessary sticking power and/or tastiness of my proposal.
Crestfallen, I instead invented a pair of scissors attached to the index finger and middle finger of garden gloves to alleviate the hand pain that comes with overuse of traditional scissors. These were neither useable nor a good solution. The scissor-gloves didn’t cut well enough because those two fingers aren’t strong enough to leverage the scissors open and closed. They looked kind of cool, but they never became a part of the world that uses things for either function or enrichment.
Across the hall from the science classroom is where I could always calm that part of me that never fully understood physics or laws of dynamics. If someone conceived of something wonderful, wasn’t that, in part, enough? In literature class, this was confirmed. I know that science and literature aren’t mutually exclusive, but I felt that the rules of science excluded me, whereas the rules of literature (simply, that work be written with sincerity and skill) invited me into its lifelong transformations.
Seventh grade was the year of The Giver and The Westing Game, Outsiders and A Wrinkle in Time. Of writing stories with immediate inhabitability, independent of patenting or teacher-approval. Mysteries intact. Characters closer than friends. Entering other worlds through a cover, a title, and a first sentence, and then, bam, you’re in. Here, the failure of humanity in creating a reverse microwave and my own failure to come up with something absolutely my own was soothed by the very word author: “a person who gives existence to anything.”
No one could have already thought of a tesseract or Ponyboy or my next story. It seemed literature, not necessity, was the mother of invention, and its call to me was—and still is—more than magnetic.
Plus, I just looked it up, and Edible Taco Tape already exists.
This post is part of our Lit Matters series, in which writers and readers express why supporting and elevating literary arts is meaningful to them. Lit Matters stories will be posted throughout the month of November, leading up to Colorado Gives Day on December 9. Mark your calendar for Colorado Gives Day or schedule your gift now. Thank you!
