My journey with words has been one filled with joy and wonder, excitement and passion...
Growing up, words were secondary only to church; and often they were interrelated. As I reflect on my history with reading and writing, the first thing that came to mind was the importance my family placed on education as a whole. My father is a school administrator, my mother and little sister are elementary school teachers. But it wasn’t that influence that shaped my early years as a reader...neither parent joined the profession until well after my addiction to words had taken root.
My earliest memories include reading...period. My father was in school to be a teacher and worked on the grounds crew at the college. My mother was a bookkeeper for the college cafeteria and wouldn’t become a teacher until I was in sixth grade. Even though they weren’t teachers yet, the influence was there somewhere, somehow. I was reading at age three and vividly remember “See Spot. See Spot run. Run, Spot, run.” I have no memories of the struggles and frustrations of learning to read…and maybe that is a curse...I’m the first to admit that I have little empathy for beginning readers, just ask my daughters about when they were starting to read.
As I grew older, all I ever remember was books, books and more books. I read adventures about frontier explorers, wagon trains, horses, dogs, etc. I read anything I could get my hands on. I lived for Scholastic book orders...Christmas presents from my maternal grandfather were always books (not that I would have ever read the ones he gave me, but I appreciated the sentiment)...my paternal grandmother was always reading despite having no high school education... When I was eight I remember moving into a large farmhouse that had a built in library under the stairs. It was my own private cavern; my own escape into fiction (it was this influence that led me to create a similar room for my girls under the stairs on our current house). I’m not sure where my parents bought all of those books, or where they disappeared to for that matter...but I do know that the written word was far from scarce.
The Christmas of my third grade year I received the Encyclopedia Britannica complete 26 volume set. Granted it was second hand and printed almost thirty years prior...but it was the world at my finger-tips. I used to hole up in my room and spend hours reading, skimming, scanning, perusing those pages. Every time I go into the used bookstore I can still smell that same sweet smell of my encyclopedias. From my bedroom in rural Idaho I could visit Italy, or New York, or Australia...I could walk alongside Napoleon, George Washington, Julius Caesar...
And from there my love of the written word grew exponentially...and my nerd quotient along with it. I vividly remember researching books I wanted to write, creating character sketches, setting scenes in distant times and lands. By sixth grade I was an avid writer in addition to my insatiable desire to read. I laugh now when I think back to the stories I wrote and their stark similarities my obsession at the time, the Hardy Boys...everywhere I went I saw the potential for a mystery caper.
My mother encouraged me every step of my clinical compulsion...taking me to the used book store...encouraging me to write my stories. I wonder if she ever realized the extent of my addiction...that my closet became a veritable writing workshop complete with desk and chair...with notes and pictures and maps pinned all over the inside walls. I couldn’t walk by a box of books at a garage sale without rummaging through them.
My next treasure would forever shape my future. Tom Clancy; a name I was far from familiar with at the time. I remember seeing the paperback in the box...bright crimson...RED STORM RISING. I will admit that it was a difficult book to read. I struggled to forge through the military jargon, analyze and characterize the various acronyms...and somewhere along the way I lost the storyline in the book. However, I was hooked...I was hooked on military history more than ever...I was hooked on Tom Clancy...I was hooked on the Cold War...I was hooked on the Soviet Union.
I have to depart for a minute to explain a major hang-up I have with reading. I find it incredibly boring and impossible to reread a book. Once I have devoured the book into my subconscious, the film strip inside my head races in fast forward…faster than I can read and the books are simply spoiled. I talk to students and colleagues and friends all the time that are rereading books for the “seventh” time. I simply cannot fathom that as a possibility.
That being said, Red Storm Rising was the first book I remember rereading. It was a couple years after my first bout with Tom Clancy. Since then I had purchased nearly every paperback he had in print. I used to pack them all in my suitcase to go camping even though I would only read them one at a time...what I thought I was going to do with five novels over 500 pages on a four day camping trip is beyond me. But I took that bright crimson book and reread it...I soaked up the terminology, and most importantly, I understood the storyline.
Throughout high school and even into college the impact of that first Tom Clancy novel was dramatic. I read every book I could find written by Clancy, including the non-fiction military history/tactical books. I studied the news of the newly democratic Russia with an intense passion. I read Alexander Solzhenitsyn for fun…and not his novels. I remember scouring the library card catalog (my students never believe there were actual cards) for anything about Soviet history. I stumbled across the Gulag Archipelago, the accounts of Stalin’s purges and the KGB’s reign of terror throughout the USSR. I remember noticing that the book hadn’t been checked out for fifteen years. And I remember being more than offended when my history teacher asked me, “Are you seriously reading this?”. Of course I was. I even chose Solzhenitsyn as my topic for my author study during my Senior year of high school. I went on to college and took Soviet history. A group of my friends made a short-lived attempt at learning Russian (that could be a great story for literacy frustration later). While interests have shifted and my OCD tendencies have been “harnessed”, I still secretly mourn the fact that the USSR is no more...that I couldn’t be a spy...that I’ve never been to Mother Russia, though perhaps someday in the future.
There are so many other stories I could tell that have shaped my philosophy on reading, and I’ve barely touched my experiences as a writer. My habits as a reader have grown and developed, probably not for the best...I can’t read in a distracting environment if I’m reading for fun, and it is a fairly slow pace at that...I have to read in a distracting environment if it is for school or homework (I blame my ADD and my hyper-focus when forced to concentrate)...I tend to be reading anywhere from four to eight books at a time (a trait I have unfortunately passed onto my eldest daughter), thus it takes me forever to finish one, however, my recent membership in a book club has focused my energies a bit...I have been known to read while driving…I know…I know…
The major reflection for me at the end of this brief history is that I cannot imagine life without the written word...I cannot imagine not being able to understand everything I read...I cannot imagine not being able to write my thoughts for future generations. Literacy, in the most traditional sense, has been the basis of my entire life. I desire to impart my love and passion to anyone I come in contact with...I am constantly asking my students for recommendations for books...I conduct writing workshops at home for my daughters...I purge my emotions through occasional journaling and infrequent blogging.
I want, more than anything, for my students to have a positive experience with reading and writing. I want to inspire them to find the story that ignites their passion. I want them to know that finishing a book isn’t the destination, it is simply part of a never-ending journey...
