Literacy Autobiography

Book-Shaped Present

When I think of books, I think of Christmas. My immediate family is full of avid readers, myself included. It is almost an inevitability in my family that a good number of the presents under the tree on Christmas morning will be books. The inevitability that follows is what we call the “Great Christmas Freeze-out.” After opening their presents, the book readers retreat to quiet nooks and corners to break into their new treasures. It only recently occurred to me that most families probably spend a lot more time talking to each other on Christmas Day than we do.

I don’t have a distinct memory of learning to read, perhaps because I began reading around the same time kids begin developing long-term memories. To me, reading was just something I did, and in my family, something most people did. My maternal grandparents were both published writers who wrote for the fishing and hunting industries most of their professional lives, and the three things I remember their house being full of was guns, rods, and books. I think this is the reason my father, a born and bred Lancaster County boy, was able to get along so well with my mothers family. He didn’t have much in common with them (especially the guns and the rods), but he had the books. They loved to talk literature and my grandmother loved never having to agonize over a present for my dad come Christmas time.

I don’t think I truly appreciated this attitude towards literacy in my house until I went to college. Announcing my intention to declare a writing minor was met with praise, rather than the disdain I can imagine and have heard tales of in other families. In my family there was no question that skill at writing was not only valuable, but viable as a career path.

Dewey Decimal

My first memory of the library is of going to a “bedtime story” club at the small neighborhood library down the block from our first house. A group of neighborhood children and their parents met up in the basement of the little library to hear a bedtime story, the kids all decked out in their jammies. Most of us lived so locally that we walked to the library for the club, a parade down Broad Street of parents and their children all dressed for bed. I think maybe that was weird now, though I guess it wasn’t at the time.

When the library down the street closed down, my dad started taking me to the large public library in Lancaster city. I remember thinking it was a palace of a place with great marble steps and three giant floors filled with books. The children’s section upstairs was where I started, but I have stronger memories from this place in my high school years, coming here for hours to do research for term papers on subjects from John Berryman to A Streetcar Named Desire (I suppose I had a penchant for the dramatic as well as symbolism, apparently). I remember walking the long stacks of reference books, and shuddering when my call number directed me to the basement, with its newspapers on rods and homeless guys napping. But I loved it, the safety and anonymity of the stacks of books. You could disappear for hours and no one would know, no one would even stumble upon you.

To this day I find comfort in the peace and quiet of the library. A year or so ago, I was home on break, driving around aimlessly and having a particularly existential moment. I began to panic, about my life, about my major, about having just two years left to decide my life’s trajectory. I found myself in the Mountville Library, the one my mom used to bring my brother and I to every week, the two of us always entering and leaving with stacks of books piled up in our arms. The same library where I worked my way from kids stories to young adult fiction to real fiction when I started to find the young adults petty and predictable. I grabbed a seat at a table and just took it in for a moment. Then I read A Tree Grows In Brooklyn for the umpteenth time and walked out feeling immensely better about my situation.

The Letter “r” Does NOT Look Like That

To this day, when in conversation my friends and I stumble upon the topic of handwriting, two subjects inevitably come up: elementary school and the SAT’s. Drastically different times in a scholar’s life, linked only by the fact that they were the only exposure we’d ever have to cursive handwriting. Handwriting samples in elementary school were the bane of my existence, the copying of script and getting it sent back from the mysterious grading center with commendation being one particularly frustrating thing I couldn’t master no matter how hard I tried. No matter how painstakingly long I took to form my letters, my samples never came back. I tried with a vengeance for a few weeks, before realizing that it was probably never going to happen for me. I held the pencil wrong, the teacher said. And she was right, but for the first time, I couldn’t bring myself to care enough to change it. Despite teachers’ warnings and special pencil grips my mother bought, to this day my hand still cramps from having two fingers wrapped around the pencil rather than three placed gracefully, holding it comfortably.

Being forced to produce these samples at the same time personal computer technology began making them obsolete lent a special kind of futility to the exercises. However the effect of this is one we didn’t realize until ten years later when we had to write a sentence, ONE SENTENCE, in cursive. For most of us, it took the whole time block, and more than the shaded block of allotted space on the answer grid to finish our sentence, an ungraded proclamation that we would not cheat on the exam. To this day, we half-joke that it was the hardest part of the test. Who knew we were practicing, all those years ago?

Living Fiction

Like most kids in general and writers in particular, I kept a notebook/journal of sorts as a kid. However, my journal was not a “Dear Diary” type of deal, it was a place for intensely personal thoughts, including itemized lists of my current crushes:
1. Andy T- nice smile, made me mix CD
2. Bryan B- London Calling t-shirt
3. Marcus N- snack bar, free drinks?

However, most of my journal entries took the form of fiction. Even when I was writing about something intensely personal, it was happening to someone else, in some alternate, but completely identical universe. I wrote short stories about school dances, dramatic scenes about failed relationships, there was even a distinct protagonist in my emo high-school poetry. I’m sure a shrink would have something to say about this, but I’m not sure I care to know what it is.

I remember the first story I ever wrote. It was inspired by a particularly tumultuous event in the life of an elementary school student: the loss of a best friend. Now, this was almost on a yearly basis at that age, the title of “best friend” generally being someone who fulfilled three categories:
1. Was in the same class (our school had eight third grades, proximity was essential)
2. Shared the same interests (including but not limited to: foods in the cafeteria, class subjects, boy bands, sports/games, fictional characters)
3. Would totally never, ever talk to your worst enemy
The amount of kids in our school assured that different people would fulfill these qualities each year, and so it seemed inevitable that best friends would change. However, at the beginning of my fourth grade year, I was feeling particularly scorned. My best friend from third grade was not only in a separate class, but a whole other hall, and by the looks of it at the first recess of the year, a new and improved group of friends. My insecurity over this, as well as an unfortunate looking pair of glasses I had acquired over the summer, made me spiteful and vindictive, and I spent he whole recess talking with my new best friend about how stupid her perm looked. That night, I took to my journal with a vengeance, crafting a fictional tale of “former best friends pitted against each other.” The story featured the girls combating each other with pranks and trickery, only to reconcile with each other and themselves at the end. The tale of “Four Eyes and Fuzzhead” will always live with me, both as my first story, and my first foray into using writing to create a more desirable reality.

Fiction and Reality

This penchant for fictitious worlds followed me even to my chosen major and (hopeful) career path film and television writing. The first screenplay I ever wrote was a story of a “popular” girl who gets cancer, making her feel guilty and have to make up for terrible way she’s treated others (only to wake up and realize the whole thing was just a dream). The main character in the script was a variation on mean girls I knew, and most of the supporting characters were based on people I knew, including myself. To this day I flinch when professors criticize my characters, knowing that there’s a part of me or my friends and family in almost all of them.

I’ve always been curious where this propensity for fiction comes from. I wonder if, in studying the background and literary roots of authors today, a common link could be found between those who choose fiction over non-fiction. Surely, there are some people who are inclined to be writers and some who are not, but I wonder if there exists an inclination for the type of writing these people feel compelled to do. Perhaps the kids who find comfort in fictional worlds of reading in their youth are the ones who grow up and strive to make similar utopias for new generations of readers. Maybe fiction writers are the most elaborate escapists. Or maybe it’s just in my blood.