From No Books To Writing Some

In a burst of despair, he once burned his report card in the sink of the KFC, where he scraped carbonized grease from the pressure cookers.

Yet in 2008, Scibona’s first novel “The End” (2009, Riverhead Trade) was a finalist for the National Book Award. He received a Fulbright Fellowship for a research trip to Italy. He teaches at Harvard Summer School. The New Yorker, for which he penned an essay about St. John’s called “Where I Learned to Read,” named him one of its “Fiction Writers to Watch.”

He says he owes it all to St. John’s, where Scibona will be today to address the college’s President’s Council.

Scibona grew up outside Cleveland, where television reigned as both educator and entertainment.

“We didn’t have a book store,” he said in a telephone interview from his home in Provincetown, Mass. “I didn’t know people who owned books.

“Outside of school, I had not seen a grown man read a book.”

But something gnawed him toward reading. After school and his $3.85-an-hour job, he stole away to a derelict shed and read “Out of Africa” (the girl he loved had loved the movie) and Faulkner, among others. He could stick with a book that wasn’t assigned. He started scouring the library stacks, scanning the spines for familiar names.

“I just thought, ‘I’ve heard of this; it must matter.’ ”

Then a friend told him about a New Mexico school with no grades, no tests and a lot of reading. It sounded too good to be true. “I did not believe there could be such a place,” he said.

“St. John’s students are a curious mix,” Scibona said. “Either they come from families where the parents think St. John’s is the most beautiful concept and they wish they’d gone there, or there are students with no culture of reading in their background at all.”

At first, he was flummoxed by the avalanche of assigned reading.

“They demand of students a little bit more than they could possibly do,” he said. “And the next year, they demand even more.”

But Scibona flourished in the saturation of literature, devouring Newton and Euclid in math, Aristotle and Lavoisier in science. Immersion in the Great Books helped him navigate his path.

“A public school education is always trying to justify what immediate use this subject is going to have,” he added. “Tons and tons of people go through algebra and say, ‘Thank God I never have to do that again.’ St. John’s is for people who do not need that conversation. They want to read because it’s a joy that overflows into all parts of life.”

He had found his tribe; he says it was like taking Holy Orders.

Scibona would go on to earn his master’s in fine arts degree from the prestigious Iowa Writer’s Workshop.

“In a way, I was totally unprepared because there are no composition classes at St. John’s,” he said. “But I had still written a lot. I had read so many old things than most of the people I was going to school with.”

He penned the June 13 New Yorker piece after the magazine called him to write a story about starting out.

“I almost never write in the first person, let alone about myself,” he said. “I’m kind of a private person.

“I thought St. John’s was really my starting out point. That was where everything started to get better.”

He graduated in 1997.