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Home > Archive > May 1, 2008

Reading in the Doghouse
By Bill Brown
Camille McCausland came by her love of books and reading from her father, she said. Her father was a physician and surgeon, and he loved to read. When he came home from work, he would sit and read a book or the paper. This made a lasting impression on young McCausland, who was about 4 years old at the time.
“I would see my father reading, and I made up my mind I wanted to read,” McCausland said. “I remember thinking 'I know those are words, and they mean something.  I want to know how this works.'”
She said she would point to a word in the news paper her father was reading, and ask what it meant.  Then she would take the paper and run to her mom and point to the word and read it for her. Then she would take the paper back to her father and point to the next word, and start the process all over again.
“He became extremely annoyed,” McCausland said. 
However, through that process she learned the rules to the game, and figured out how most of it worked, she said.
As she got older, she became an avid reader, something that would stick with her for the rest of her life. She said she would sometimes crawl into their hound dog's dog house and read to escape chores and other interruptions to her reading. That was her secret hiding place, she said. She recently confessed this information to her mother. 
“I divulged that little piece of information to my mother about four years ago,” McCausland said. “And she said 'That's where you were all that time? I was looking all over for you.'”
McCausland said she thought her mom had figured out where she was hiding, and had just decided not to disturb her and let her read, but that was not the case.
McCausland also became interested in music as she grew up, and found it was a much needed outlet for her self-expression. She studied music through high school and college. She said she even started dabbling in writing her own material. She is now an accomplished musician, composer and arranger. And she writes material to support her music, as well, such as children's stories, she said. However, through it all, she has still retained her first love of reading, she said.
While at college, she met her husband, fell in love and got married, something she swore she would not do. She said all her friends were going off to college, and coming back engaged, and she decided she was just not going to fall in that trap. However, life has a way of finding away around even our most determined efforts when something is meant to be. Today, her husband is still her best friend, she said, and together they have 9 children between the ages of 30 and 10. 
“When we got married, I told him I wanted a dozen children,” McCausland said. “After our first was born, he turned to me and said, 'Are you sure you still want 12 children?' I said, 'Well maybe only 10.' He just cracked up, but I was totally serious. To me I was really cutting the number down.”
McCausland received her bachelor’s degree from BYU, with a dual major in music and literature. She has since written several children's stories, and a large selection of musical arrangements.
She has a wide range of interest in reading material, McCausland said. She enjoys reading just about everything, from biographies and self-improvement books, to mysteries and even science fiction, as long as it is quality writing.
“My husband got me sucked into Science Fiction,” McCausland said. “Now, I absolutely love Orson Scott Card, and Isaac Asimnov's works, to name a few.”
McCausland said she feels that reading is a vital life skill. She said if you can read you can learn anything. You can find information about almost any subject in a book. It opens many doors, and provides access to many different realms of knowledge and imagination. She also feels it is one of the first steps towards learning self-expression, she said.
McCausland is making her debut as a book reviewer for the Southern Utah Focus this week. She will be reviewing books on a wide range of subjects, some classics and some new releases. Her reviews will follow a theme, with three to four books on that theme reviewed per article. She said one of those books will always be a children's book, because she feels it is very important to encourage children to read from a young age, about a wide range of subjects. McCausland's column “Camille's Book Corner” will appear regularly in the Southern Utah Focus. She can be contacted at editor@hvjournal.com.

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