Literacy Autobiography: Project Alianza, ESL Teachers Authoring Their Own Identities
A wall of books: this is a metaphor for one of my earliest memories of the written word.
When I was seven years old my family moved into a newly-built home in the country.
One of the first “improvements” my parents made to the house was to have one entire
wall, corner to corner, floor to ceiling, covered with a custom set of built-in bookshelves.
I grew up seeing this mini-library of volumes on a daily basis, including classics, World
War Two history, gardening and landscaping, music, art, and assorted miscellany. Across
the room lay a side table filled and covered with a diverse assortment of periodicals:
Psychology Today, Popular Science, Popular Electronics, Organic Gardening, Life, and
National Geographic, to name a few. Oh, and TV Guide – ours was not only a reading
family, but a television family as well. My father, having started in radio in the 1950’s,
spent the rest of his career as a television announcer and weathercaster.
Growing up, it was far from unusual to pass through a room in our home and see one of
my parents absorbed in a book or magazine. I remember both my parents reading aloud to
my brother and me, together and individually. We had a wide variety of children’s books
in our home as well, and we were always encouraged to enjoy reading from an early age.
Despite this, I was something of a late bloomer in reading. I distinctly remember learning
to read PD Eastman’s “Go, Dog, Go!” and repeatedly misreading the unfamiliar word
“again” as “a greeting,” inexplicably. Though reared in a highly literary environment,
surrounded by family members reading (my older brother did little else, as I recall), I
only really began to enjoy reading in high school. At some point I discovered the school
library, where less sophisticated books could be borrowed than those found in my home
library, books more to my liking during those angst-filled, peer-dependant years.
Somewhat ironically, while reading for pleasure came to me late, I developed a bit earlier
into something of a writer. I cannot remember a time when I did not love words, and the
fun of exploring ways words could play together, evoke particular feelings and ideas. My
favorite medium during my formative years was poetry. I wrote as therapy during
adolescence, and less often into young adulthood. When my own family made the scene,
I forgot about writing for a period of years. When the children were small and the first of
many crises came in my marriage, I briefly went back to college and rediscovered the
joys of writing again for a time. I always longed to be a novelist or playwright, but
seemed to find more success in poetry and expository or research texts. In college later in
life I made it my goal to get an “A” on every paper, and I succeeded.
Though I do, finally, consider myself a good writer, and a good reader, I was surprised by
my reaction recently when I stumbled over something long-forgotten during a recent
move: my Creative Writing Final Portfolio from 1987. I remember creating the portfolio,
consisting of some poetry, a short story, and a two-act play. I remember the ease of
writing the poetry, and the struggle of writing the short story and the play. I remember
how, at one point, the short story took off and developed a life of its own, and when I had
finished it seemed to me like such a “magnum opus.” I remember feeling absolutely
crushed when I read the comments of my professor to my “great work.” I put it all aside
and didn’t think about it again, until a few weeks ago.
And then… after more than twenty years in a box somewhere, I read again what my
professor had written, describing her assessment of this work into which I had poured so
much and been so proud. Why had I been so desolate back then? Her words now struck
me as both praise and encouragement to continue writing, and honing my craft. My grade
for the portfolio, in its entirety, was an “A.”