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Hunter Hurst
Dr. Harris
ENG 1101-H4
9/15/2011
My Literary Journey
When I was very young, I hated reading and writing with a passion. I did not like the idea
of spending my time sitting down to read or write anything. Why would anyone in their right
mind read a book when he could be building forts and playing Army? My mom would always
tell me about how much fun reading was and how I could experience story time whenever I
wanted to. I did not buy into this parental propaganda. I hated to read and nobody could change
that fact! This was my attitude towards literature until the day that I discovered The Adventures
of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain.
My interest in reading began when my mom made me pick out a book to read from the
children’s section of The Dollar Tree. When I first started digging through the mountain of
literature, I found nothing that interested me at all. There were books like Oliver Twist and Peter
Pan. These stories looked boring me because I liked nature and realistic stories. Ever since I was
a baby, I spent every second of my time outside. I had every adventure that I could. Nature was
where my heart was. I was just about ready to give up on my search for a great read, when a
book caught my eye. I pushed the other books aside and picked up the children’s novel of my
dreams; The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. I was excited by the cartoon sketch on the cover
featuring a rascally clad boy with a straw hat. This was MY book! When we pulled into the
driveway of our home, I literally jumped out of our van. I couldn’t wait to go lie in my bed and
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read my first “big boy” book. When I started reading, I was so excited about the fact that this
story was about an adventure! I wanted to get to the adventure but on my way there, I was
intrigued by the introduction chapter so I decided to keep reading. There was much talk about
steamboats and the river life. I never thought that such things would be so enthralling to a young
reader, but o how they were! I caught myself reading along and placing my friends in the place
of the children that were in the pirate gang with Tom. My parents became characters within the
story and soon enough, almost every prominent person in my life at the time had their
comparative character in the novel. Midway through my reading adventure, my mom came into
my room and made me turn out the lights and go to bed. Little did she know that as soon as she
left my room, I grabbed a flashlight and employed the tactic of under the covers reading. I was
determined to finish that book. I read all night long and had finished that book by sunrise. I had
done it!
I became a new literary creature. Once the boy who wouldn’t pick up a book if my life
depended on it, I was now eager to overcome any book that I could find. I had seen that my mom
was right when she told me that I could have an adventure just by reading a book. My eyes
itched for more adventures, so I negotiated a deal with my mom; she would buy all of the dollar
store books that I wanted her to, if I read them. An added bonus to this deal was that I could keep
any book that I read on MY bookshelf. This incentive completely changed my view of reading. I
read every dollar novel that I could get my hands on, including Peter Pan, and Oliver Twist. In
no time at all, my little book shelf turned into my personal trophy shelf where I stored every
book that I had conquered. In this literary conquest transformed my mind from hating literature
to craving it. While this instance affected my love of reading, it did not change the fact that
writing was still one of my least favorite activities.
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The next great event that helped mold my mind into what it is today was the painful and
miserable process of composing my first research paper. On the first day of class at The King’s
Academy, my evil teacher, Mrs. Campbell, told the class about the six-page paper that we had to
write. I could not believe my ears! I had never written anything more than a page or two and here
is this crazy lady telling me to make source cards and parenthetical citations. I knew that I was in
for a rude awakening. I chose to write my paper on the country of Australia, only because I had
recently watched Crocodile Dundee. I had seen all of the scenery that was used in the movie and
was so intrigued by the beauty. I knew that all of the people in Australia were awesome because
they were like Mic Dundee. I thought that most people over there had lots of guns and drove a
cool vehicle. When I watched that movie, It made me yearn for a chance to pull a big old knife
on a thug bad guy. I had also grown up with a love for the Crocodile Hunter. I wanted to be
Steve Irwin. I even dressed like him for Halloween. Everybody thought I was a UPS Man with a
large snake around my neck. I wanted to travel around and find all the animals that I could. I
thought that the reason that both Mic Dundee and Steve Irwin were so amazing with animals,
was because they were Australians. With these two characters in mind, you can start to see my
mentality when choosing to write about Australia. Unfortunately, my subject choice was a bad
one because I could not find hardly any useful information to use in my writing. I had to order
books from Amazon.com to mend my lack of knowledge on the subject; the problem was that by
the time they arrived at my house, the paper was supposed to be close to finished. I had to teach
myself about the use of parenthetical citations and MLA formatting. The last week before the
paper was due, I spent almost every day and night researching and compiling information into
what I thought would be the perfect paper. When I turned that sucker in to Mrs. Campbell, I felt
as if I had just conquered the entire world. I was the man! Nothing could bring me down except
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for the fact that when I received my grade, it was a very low B. I was shattered. This was my first
real writing experience and I had worked hard. My eyes were opened to the fact that I could
work as hard as I wanted to, but if I didn’t give the teacher what she wanted, I would not get the
grade that I wanted.
The experiences with Tom Sawyer, and Australia started me on a journey that I am still
venturing today. By opening my mind to the world of literature, I was able to give myself a
confidence that I could read and write on a real-world scale. I was no longer limited by the
chains of youth. I was now on the same field as college students and adults. I realized that it is
important to be a skilled writer and reader in the modern world.
The next time in my life when I can remember a drastic growth in my literary mind set
came when I read a short novel called Hatchet for school. As I mentioned before, I have a certain
love for nature adventure stories. This book was about a boy who was in a plane crash in the
wilderness. The entire story line is centered on this boy and his struggle to survive alone in the
wilderness. This book was the first time that I was inspired to do something because of what I
read. Upon completion of this book, my buddy Garret and I, decided that we needed to have a
wilderness adventure of our own. We decided to go on a twentyish mile hike from my house to
Lake Altoona. We packed our backpacks with every survival tool that was known to man. We
had fire starters, tents, canned beans, signal mirrors; we even had hatchets. The one commodity
that we left out of our packs was water. Who needs water? “Not us,” or so we thought. We ran
out of water but we kept on walking. As night time fell, we realized that we were lost in the
woods and out of water. We freaked out and started running in one direction with the hopes of
reaching some sort of civilization. With minutes of light left to spare, me and my compadre
reached Interstate 75. We flagged down a beat-up station wagon and arranged for rides back to
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town. This entire flaming event was started by the spark that The Hatchet placed inside of our
souls.
As a student today, I thoroughly enjoy writing. Although I am not planning on making a
career out of it, I am now able to find the joy in composing works of art that are uniquely mine.
A perfect example of how far I have come from my aboriginal days of writing is my eleventh
grade research paper. In eleventh grade, I was blessed with the most amazing literature teacher in
the world; Mrs. Drury. Her love of literature and her love of students was an inspiration to every
student that walked into her classroom. One area of my literary life that she honed and polished
was my research paper writing skills. While I had been composing research papers since the
sixth grade, this was the most technical and lengthy. Thanks to Mrs. Drury, this research paper
was also the easiest paper that I had ever written. Mrs. Drury was a middle-aged woman whose
blond hair and classy style made her a sharp, looking teacher. When I walked into her class for
the first time, I was overtaken by the objects that were furnishing the room. My eyes took in the
gruesome sight of a massive hairy arm that was hanging limply from the ceiling. Other objects in
the room included; a raven that was perched above the doorway, a broken skull that was up on a
shelf, and a shiny suit of armor. At the time, I thought that these items were very odd for a
literature teacher to keep in her place of teaching. Now in hindsight, I can see that these objects
were Poe’s raven, Grendel’s arm and Yarick’s skull. It is amazing how the meaning of objects
can be so drastically changed over the course of a school year!
Our assignment was to pick an American author and construct a research paper on his
life and to complete a literary analysis on one of his most popular works. At first, the usual dread
of possibly receiving a boring topic took control of my mind. This dread was soon cut off when I
heard a name that was quite familiar on the topic list: Mark Twain. This is where I decided to
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make the best of my situation and enjoy what I was doing. The first step that our teacher took to
ensure the proper writing of this paper was to take a class fieldtrip to the library. Here she took
the time to walk each student through the initial research process. She taught us how to find the
right books to fit every source requirement, sat down with us and helped us dig through the
sources to find relevant information, and even showed us how to cite our research. This lesson,
in itself, brought me into the real world of research writing. The next valuable lesson that was
given to me by Mrs. Drury was that of draft writing. I had always written a rough draft for every
paper that I had written, but Mrs. Drury told me how drafting should take place. She gave me
some of the best advice when she told me to free write for my entire first draft. By doing that, I
saw that an initial paper could be creatively written in a painless process. The lessons that Mrs.
Drury taught me while I was in her class, not only gave me an A on the research paper, but
brought me to a point of confidence in my ability to construct a well-written, well-sourced work
of art.
Looking back into my childhood with the insight that I have now, I really hated to read
and write. I am not quite sure if it was the fact that I was not very literate, or because I thought
that these activities were wimpy. I just wanted to be a big kid and do big kid stuff like drive and
buy whatever I wanted to eat. I looked at literature as a waste of time. Every kid that I knew who
loved to read and write was a total weirdo. I did not want to be a weirdo so I didn’t read. The
reason that this mentality started to change, was that my mom made me read; and I enjoyed it!
As I mentioned before, I wanted to be a big kid. The way that I knew what big kids did
was by talking to one of my “big kid” friends who was a 20 year old and still in high school. He
also hated to read. I guess that he probably wasn’t the best person to give me advice regarding
my schooling because he did not get his GED until he was 22 years old. I struggled with wanting
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to do fun and exciting things but as I read more exciting books, I began to realize that maybe
literature wasn’t so bad at all. I finally embraced the fact that if I wanted to be a truly successful
“big kid”, I needed to embrace reading. Looking back now, I can see how ignorant I was in
thinking that big kids did not read or write. Looking back at my memories here, I can now see
that my “journey” from a boy to a man greatly involved literature. Imagine that!
Today, as a man I really enjoy literature. Now don’t expect to see me miss a hunting trip because
I am hiding in my bedroom with the newest Twilight book. I now understand that literature does
not make you cool or un-cool; that is up to the individual. I am so thankful that I have people in
my life like Mrs. Drury, Mrs. Campbell, and my mom. Without them pushing me to explore the
different aspects of literature, I might still be an ignorant kid who thinks that I am cool because I
don’t read.