English 521: Composition Theory and Pedagogy

     Once upon a time, in a land far, far away, called Florida, there was a little girl who loved to read. One cold, winter's night, she lay before a crackling fire, her already-battered copy of Snow White and the Seven Dwarves propped up against the brick hearth. The thin, green carpet insulated her from the cool, hardwood floors, the throw pillow she wasn't supposed to have on the floor cushioned her elbows, and her hands were falling asleep from the weight of her face as she flipped to the beginning of the story for the third time that evening.

     Really, I wanted to be in Snow White, not just read it, though I didn't actually want to be Snow White. If I'd had my way, I would have climbed into the story and intervened somehow; I would have kept Snow White from eating that apple (why is it always apples these women are eating?), or, failing that, I would have gone to fetch the prince instead of sticking around to build a glass coffin for the distressed damsel. In any case, I knew the story so well that I wanted to make it my own, but since I couldn't climb into the book a la "The Neverending Story," I decided to write it myself.

     I gathered my tools: some fat-lined notebook paper and a pencil and a big eraser. I must have been four or five years old--old enough to be a proficient writer, but not experienced enough to go without an eraser. I set to my work, starting with page one. "Once upon a time, in a land far, far away...."

     And so, I began writing the story of Snow White for myself. Now, you should know that I didn't change a single word, didn't alter any of the details or events as I knew them. But, because the story was now unfolding in my own handwriting, on my own paper, and with my own renditions of the illustrations soon to follow, the story was indeed becoming more my own.

     That is, until my brother came along, stopping first to stand on my back and squish the air out of me. When this failed to disrupt me, he paused, looming six feet over me, and squinted down at my paper. "Whatcha writin'?"

     "Dummy, can't you read? Snow White."

     "Lemme see....Nah, you're just copyin' it straight outta the book. You're not s'posed to copy stuff; you're s'posed to write it yourself. You're the dummy."

     And with that pronouncement, he strolled off to the kitchen, leaving me, now doubtful and vaguely ashamed, with my aborted fairy tale.

     Twenty years later, I'm trying to figure out why I, someone who loathed writing for most of her educational life, have devoted my advanced education and career to the study and teaching of writers and writing. Of course, I could point to relatively recent intellectual, academic, and social concerns which have led me to this point, but I'm more interested here with the passion which drives teaching, at least, I hope, my teaching. While I have come to value the role writing plays in my own intellectual development, writing as an activity that I engage in on a regular basis is not one that I would immediately describe as something I am passionate about doing. (Unless, as a poet/writing-teacher friend of mine is fond of pointing out, you remember that the original meaning of "passion" is rooted in suffering or agony). Nevertheless, passion, in all senses of the word, is what led me here, to graduate school and to teaching.

     Though Donald Murray, by way of Carol Chomsky, "tells us that children want to write, in fact need to write, before they want to read,"[1] my sense of my own writing life is that it began with reading. Researchers, however self-reflexive, inevitably construct a different story than the subjects of their research would tell. Which brings me back to the episode I've reconstructed above. Now, there are some details of the scene which I have created more than recreated. I don't remember who the person was who interrupted my writing, nor do I remember the actual words spoken. But, given what I do remember of my interactions with my two much-older brothers, the dialogue is not unrealistic. More importantly, I've carried with me throughout my educational and writing life the lessons learned in that moment: writers are supposed to be original, they're not supposed to copy other people, and you can get in big trouble if you break the rules. My subsequent memories of writing during childhood are spotty, almost nonexistent, and primarily concern the technology of writing--making my letters look like the ones in the workbooks, learning how to write (and read) cursive writing, and, later, debating whether or not I wanted to be the kind of girl who wrote with bubble letters and hearts instead of dots over her i's. (I wasn't, in case you were wondering). Though I've always been both a good student and someone who genuinely enjoyed school, my memories of school writing are vague and vaguely unpleasant; writing was the one aspect of school work that I always dreaded.

     Reading, however, is another story. What that Snow White episode in particular and education in general did not affect was my love for reading. Reading, at least, seemed to be safe and resulted in no product which could be criticized. So, I took up reading as my favorite hobby and defined myself as a reader, not a writer. In fact, throughout elementary school I was pleased to have earned "Bookworm" as a nickname/label. I read Nancy Drew books and Judy Bloom and Beverly Cleary. During the summer between third and fourth grade, which I spent away from home with my aunt, uncle, and three cousins in Texas, my mother sent me the first three volumes of L. M. Montgomery's Anne of Green Gables series, books that I cherished, that became my sanctuary from my terrorists-in-training cousins. (I often had to hide in a closet with a small flashlight in order to read undisturbed.) Later, reading became more social when I found a friend who was and is as passionately involved in books as I; we spent untold hours reading together--in her room or mine, in a pool or on a beach, in cars and buses, during school lunches or after dance classes. In the fourth grade, I proudly lugged my two-inch thick, hardback copy of Little Women around; it took me close to six months to read it (I read several other books during the same time span), but nevertheless I finished it and went on to read Little Men and Jo's Boys as well as biographies of Louisa May Alcott. One year, thanks to a gift certificate, I bought and read all twelve volumes of the Little House on the Prairie books, plus a biography of Laura Ingalls Wilder. I became a little more self-conscious about my habit by the time I reached the fifth grade; while I read adaptations of Shakespeare's comedies, I was careful to conceal the title and author's name from my peers by making a book cover out of a brown paper bag. Some of the books I saved and returned to over and over; some I sold to used book stores for store credit.

     Though I may not have written much during these years, except what was required of me for school, I nevertheless kept in touch with writers through my reading. The primary characters in the many of the series I read, Jo March of Little Women and Anne Shirley of Anne of Green Gables are writers and/or teachers, though they follow different paths as writers. (Laura Ingalls Wilder was, of course, also a prolific writer, but writing doesn't figure as prominently in her memoirs). Jo spends her youth with her sisters and close friends writing and publishing mock newspapers, writing and performing plays, and even submitting sensational stories to writing contests. As she becomes older, Jo leaves home to pursue the writing life and is moderately successful, publishing lurid stories under a pseudonym. In many ways her story follows a familiar feminist narrative: after struggling to shape herself and her writing to meet patriarchal standards, she eventually, with a little help from a friendly reader, turns away from writing which has no connection to her own life and which she cannot claim as her own if she wishes to publish and be paid for it to writing which grows from her own experiences of family, friends, and community.

     Anne's storytelling, initially, is more of a survival technique: as a young orphan in Canada's Prince Edward Island, she creates elaborate fantasies in order to both cope with harsh realities and maintain her own identity and sense of agency. After she is adopted by a family in Avonlea, her world gradually becomes more stable, and she begins to share her rich imaginative life with those around her and draws them into her way of seeing the world. She daydreams and concocts elaborate stories and fantasies; she and her friends reenact favorite poems; and she renames landmarks and roads in town. For instance, Barry's pond becomes the Lake of Shining Waters, the Avenue becomes the White Way of Delight, and she herself tries to become Cordelia because "Anne is such an unromantic name." Though she does not pursue writing directly, Anne grows up to be a teacher, and, as a wife and mother, she continues to weave stories from and into the life she shares with her family and community.

     As writers, Jo and Anne teach and enact different, but complementary, writerly roles. Jo's writerly life exemplified the dedication and determination necessary for anyone to succeed at writing. That she so often became fervently absorbed in her writing illustrated the joy and passion that motivates many writers. At the same time, she epitomizes a romanticized notion of writers and writing, with all its attendant complications and double-edge swords. (For instance, the idea of a writer as an inspired genius can be either empowering or repressive--either you've got the goods or you don't). Anne, on the other hand, represented a writer less concerned with producing texts than with playing with the relationship between language and reality, or sometimes simply playing with language for the delight of its possibilities. She endlessly marveled in words, turning them around and over in her mind and on her tongue, shaping and reshaping reality through language. Of course, her frequent mishaps and catastrophes illustrated the danger of failing to communicate effectively with those around her. Both Jo and Anne showed that originality and creativity grow more from what we know than from a divine inspiration, and, further, that it is acceptable to draw on the stories we read and hear in order to tell our own versions of the story.

     As I moved through middle and high school, I began to write more, both for school and for myself. But I never became as engaged with my writing, even when I wrote my angst-filled poetry in high school, as I was with my reading. And though I slowly gained more confidence in my writing abilities, I held on to (and still do) the internal critic that I began developing almost as soon as I began writing (note the pejorative qualifier "angst-filled" in the previous sentence). Nevertheless, it was my love for reading that led me to teaching and, eventually, to writing.

     Though I've wanted to be a teacher for most of my life (notwithstanding a brief period in the third grade when I wanted to be a CPA, like my father), it wasn't until high school and college that I began to articulate why. Underneath all the social and intellectual aims I have for my teaching, I am driven first by my passion for reading, and, in a larger sense, by those moments when I do get entranced by a book, when I'm so enthralled that I want to either be a part of it or, failing that, to share my passion with the world. Educationally speaking, there are those moments either in or connected to school something clicks, a light goes off and something, whether profound or mundane, makes sense for the first time. Those are the moments I look for in my reading, in my experiences as a student, in my writing, and now as a teacher. At some point, I decided that I wanted to be a teacher who allowed for the possibility of those moments for my future students, and no matter what or who I teach, no matter how I intellectualize my teaching, that goal is what guides me still.