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From a very early age, my mother would read to me. All the time. This was my favorite activity, as was going to the library for storytime. I was starting to read, so this was also a way of my mother and I saying: smart girls read.
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For most of my young life, my parents (especially my mother) would read to me. When I got older, often the books were slightly age-inappropriate or above my reading level. They often chose things that they considered canonical or important.
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I made the transition one day, and it lasted for years, from my mother reading to me, to me reading to my mother. Sometimes we would read longer books and trade chapters (for a period in high school we actually returned to this). My mother recounts my reading the newspaper to her every morning in second and third grade.
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Beginning before I can remember my father read to me aloud before I went to sleep and this activity continuing until the age of fourteen. I know that he did not ever attempt for force any brand of writing onto me, I do remember him reading some relatively literary stuff, most notably authors like Hemingway and Twain.
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This choice, odd as it sounds that a writer went through a reading drought, was an attempt to control her own life and to stop doing what everyone around her was telling her to do. I was addicted to story so I just found it in other ways: documentary, homemade movies with my brother, photography, secretly reading poetry, and writing (a lot). This lasted for years. Until I discovered Maya Angelou.
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When I was very young, my father would have me dictate stories to him. He would write them down and draw pictures to go with them. When I began to be able to read and write myself, he would often edit my school work for me--or offer suggestions on creative work.
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I don't remember is I was first introduced to Angelou's I KNOW WHY THE CAGED BIRD SINGS or whether it was of her "Inaugural Poem in 1993, but they happened close to one another. In reading her work, I saw a fusion of poetry & nonfiction. It was an epic discovery for me. Later, her poem was assigned in a class. I was a very quiet student, but when my teacher discovered the notes I'd taken. She helped make a critical shift, pulling me out of my academic shell, & dragged me into writing classrooms.
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After we moved, I really had trouble making friends. Often books served as a frienship replacement for me. I spent a lot of time reading to escape my boring real life. This early interest really helped me build reading and writing skills.
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My HS principal was the first person to encourage me to follow this un-named type of writing I wanted to do. He came to my house in the summer and passed a book he had discovered that he said "was doing exactly what you want to do." I would later learn that this was called narrative nonfiction and immmersion journalism. I studied this book. The author, Thomas French, would later win the Pulitzer and a few years later would become my mentor and friend.
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I was simply looking through my parents' CD collection and found a copy of Full Moon Fever. I don't know what drew me to the album, I think it was pabrobly the aesthetic qualtity of cover. It was the first music I ever discovered on my own, and I became somewhat obsessed with Petty for a number of years.
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My fifth grade teacher read an Underground Railroad assignment I had written to the class. I feigned embarrassment, but really was extremely proud. I began writing regularly in part because of her encouragement.
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This represented: 1) a break into having a new, institutional literacy sponsor (Boston College), 2) an alighnment with my father's Jesuit education (from 1st grade through medical school), which is also a new institutional literacy sponsor, and a return to allowing the Catholic Church (an old institutional literacy sponsor) back in my life, although this time around I was a more discerning recipient of their information curation.
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This moment represented so much for me in 1) my first major (internal) break away from my father's expectations (accepting it was ok to disappoint him), while also 2) illustrating the first moment I'd ever seen my father try to explore something that was important to me (without being asked or forced to).
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This choice represented, on some plains, a connection to and agreement with my literacy sponsors (mom and dad), as well as a clear break away from them in terms of a life long professional choice. This was a choice that many of my other minor breaks helpef me reach.
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My family (parents and brother) were driving one summer from Maine to California. I was at a point in my life where I didn't really have a direction to my reading and was sort-of sick of the young adult stuff. My father, one day, I think when I was particularly bored, handed me a copy of The Catcher in the Rye and told me to read it. I hate to describe it as my first profound experience reading to myself, but it did alter the way in which I viewed books afterwards. I developed a standard.
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My discovery of Jonathan Kozol and eventually meeting him was not only a break away from the traditional life choices my parents wanted of me and alter my life trajectory. I soon changed my major and finally accepted my personal focus on issues of social justice and cerative nonfiction.
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This represents the first real break with sponsorship. Instead of taking my father's advice, I began to believe that poetry is primarily used for "self expression" and therefore should not be revised. My father's sponsorship was replaced (or supplemented) with the sponsorship of various poets (mostly Sylvia Plath). Ironically, my father was the one who had introduced me to Plath in the first place by reading "The Colossuss" to me out loud.
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It sounds strange, but my life at Boston College and within the Faith, Peace, and Justice program caused me to finally break free fromt he Catholic Church as an institutional literacy sponsor. However, at that same time, I embraced the Jesuit order as an institutional sponsor. Since the Jesuits are non-traditional and have been kicked out of the church on numerous occasions, I feel they represent two ways of thought: one is blind faith, the other is question and educate in order to decide.
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I first discovered the novels of Amelia Atwater-Rhodes. She wrote her first book when she was 13. This inspired me to start reading and when I discovered that I not only enjoyed it but I was also good at it, I decided I would be an English teacher someday.
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Post-9/11 and struggling to see creative nonfiction as anything other than the ugly stepsister inside creative writing programs, I left graduate school (breaking away from my parent's put your head down and just do it mentality) and moved cross country with a shaky plan.
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It was an announcement I made one night shortly after I had started high-school. It was sad and I actually remember being sad at the time because I loved listening to my father read. However, I also thought it did not really fit into who I wanted to be or be seen as.
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Reynold's Workshop for Young Writers was the first formal workshop I'd ever attended. The competitiveness of the workshop and the rigor of the professors made me open to a new focus on revision and experimentation.
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I'm pretty sure that my father gave me a copy of On The Road and it almost immediatly instilled in me a need to see the world, to travel and meet people and to maybe understand something larger than I had ever encountered, which ended up creating conflicts between my parents and me. I didn't really get the opportunity to do any extended travelling by myself until I was in college, but even in high-school I took any possibility get in a car and go somewhere.
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During college, I began reading Jack Kerouac and he began, slowly, to displace the influence of the professors in my workshop. A rejection of revision was suddenly justified by the Beat's "first thought, best thought" sloganeering.
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I went into college thinking that I was incredibly smart. Finding out that everyone in college is comparatively smart made me realize that I was going to have to work a lot harder than I had been to keep up.
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Eventually, I found a place full of "my people" and where my passions fit into an academic discipline. This place was Goucher College's Master of Fine Arts program in Creative Nonfiction. This is critical break and personal acceptance that this in fact was a respectable life choice. I was not alone. The community of writers I joined here that still exists and goes strong after graduation serves as a very solid literacy sponsor in my life today. This was a self selected sponsor.
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While I was supposed to be reading/doing homework in class, I was most often reading whatever novel I was reading for fun instead. This was the time of my life I realized there were things to do with educaiton that I wanted to pursue that were not in the traditional curriculum of my high school.
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I still maintained an idea that I could learn more on the road than I could in the classroom. I had this idea that I would walk across the country (driving would be too fast, I wouldn't have time to take in all that I needed to take in). My parents disagreed and a point of contention developed when they began to believe that I might be serious. We fought often and passionately and eventually they at least convinced me that my plan wasn't sound enough to carry through with.
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In my junior year of college I had a particularly emotional workshop with a professor who was extremely strict about form, sentence structure and narrative. His strictness gave me new energy that was directed at revision. Most of the poetry I write during this time is narrative.
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Much to my parents satisfaction I went straight from high-school to college, not really knowing what I wanted to do and majoring in Journalism and Mass Communication (a poor decision).
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I attended Edgewood College instead of University of Wisconsin--Oshkosh, as my Aunt Dyan would have liked. Though this acutally brought be closer to her because she lives near Madison, it brought me further away from the path she would have liked me to follow.
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I was hired as a writing center tutor and began tutoring off hours in my dorm. This was the catalyst event to me entering the Rhetoric and Composition field.
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I had done poorly from the beginning in my journalism course and felt exceedingly uninvested. On a whim I took an intro to lit course with John McDonald, for whom I began writing a paper on the James Baldwin's story "Sonny's Blues." This paper provided excuses for me to visit John's office where we sat and talked about literature and life. As a result of these interactions I switched my major from Journalism to English.
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This is the first real, formalized, endorsement of her creative work.
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Norman Dubie becomes my new sponsor at Arizona State, at least temporarily, Norman's approach to writing workshops is a lot less strict. His comments do a lot more to encourage experiementation. My poetry becomes a lot more abstract, a lot more lyric, and a lot more meditative.
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Sally Ball becomes one of my first female mentors. Her interest in close reading and her rigorous standards for poetry reignited my academic interest in poetry.
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I attended and presented at the Midwest Writing Center Association Conference. This showed me the greater Rhet-Comp field and allowed me to see it as an actual career path.
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I switched my major from English Educaiton to English Literature, must to my Aunt's dismay. This allowed me more time to focus on my writing center work.
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I enrolled in a workshop with Greg Delanty, who gave me my first positive, objective feedback on my creative work. Also, the structure of the workshop helped me to produce work that I would not have othewise produced. I always railed against complaints, but it was the first time I ever wrote a poem every week and also the first time I became satsified with some of my work.
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Between 2010 and 2012 I moved from Burlington, VT, where Saint Michael's is located to Cape Cod, then Boston where I worked as a valet, had few friends, wrote and played music. I took three months andwalked across Northern Spain and then Lived in Granada for a month and wrote. When I came back to the States I moved to Chicago with my girlfriend, Jenn, into the apartment of a mutual friend, where I was unemployed, but where I finished my grad school applications.
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Unexpectedly, working at a content marketing firm makes me more determined to write and submit poems regularly. I was not only learning a new literacy, but I was also using that sponsorship to allow my previous literacies.
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And is excited about it.
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I would argue that all of my literacy sponsor breaks lead me to this decision. It was one that was made solidly without consideration for anyone but myself.
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I began my MA in Rhetoric and Composition, following my goal/dream of becoming a writing center director.
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His father's alma mater.
