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 he first time Scott Pratt's slender, young hand gripped the writer's pen, he was nervously preparing to write a paper for his high school English teacher.
It wasn't easy to get published in Reflections, a literary magazine comprised of poetry, verse and short stories written by David Crockett High School students of Margaret Berry, who was also faculty adviser for the Jonesborough, Tenn. school's award-winning yearbook, The Pioneer.
It was good training, though, and the internationally published author still remembers the anxiety as he handed in that first paper. "It was a piece about black being a misunderstood and under-appreciated color, ostensibly about racism. The committee thought it was good enough to be published.
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"I remember feeling proud. I was a jock, but I also thought I had at least a bit of a brain. And, once you gained Mrs. Berry's approval, you knew you had something. She was tough, and it paid off," Pratt said, his fingers silently drumming the tabletop for a brief moment before he leans his big frame back in the chair.
His high school years found his hands characteristically wrapped around a football or basketball – fingertips only for the latter, of course – or sending a golf ball rocketing down the fairways courtesy of a firm overlap grip.
Still, that first high school competition, along with many rewrites and stringent grading, poured a firm foundation upon which a keen intellect could cause a determined hand to build with words.
"I majored in English in college, so I did plenty of writing for that. And I really enjoyed writing introspective and philosophical pieces for political science classes," in which he studied under the late Dr. Glenn Broach, longtime professor at East Tennessee State University in Johnson City, and later at Winthrop College in Rock Hill, S.C.
"I was never scared of writing. It always fascinated me. I always wanted to try to convey exactly what I meant. At the same time, I wanted to convey even more, depending on the symbols and images I was using.
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