Reading Autobiography

See that? That's the new-house library-pile. That's also the ski, exercise ball, and jumper cables pile. In the library-pile, somewhere, there is an external hard drive that houses a reading autobiography that I wrote more than ten years ago to share with my students. Phooey. There's no way that I'm going to find it.

My reading life is kind of a mess right now. This is the one organized bookshelf in my whole house:

Other than this one, which is only organized because a gal's gotta eat:

This is how the other unpacked books look right now because I live with a two-year-old, and he reorganizes them on a daily basis:

Fine. If I can't find what I've already written about my reading history, I'll have to rebuild.

The first book I remember reading was The Country Bunny and the Little Gold Shoes. My older sister, my mom, and I were sitting on my sister's bed.  My sister had taken the book out of the library, and she was reading it out loud to my mom and me. She turned a page, and I started reading it out loud. Thinking I had memorized the book, my mom asked, "Oh, do you have this at preschool?"

"No," I said. "I'm reading." And then I read the rest of the book out loud to them.

My mom was so proud.

Later, my sister totally wailed on me.

I probably deserved it.

This is a modification of an image in Mo Willems's Don't Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus (This book will come up again later). The girl in the back of the bus? That's me. I have just missed my stop (which is the last stop on the line) because I am reading Shel Silverstein's A Light in the Attic, and the bus driver is trying to get me to tell him where I live. I do not know my address, so the bus driver takes me back to school. My mother is not happy. I am very proud that I was able to read an entire book of poems in JUST ONE BUS RIDE!

This is the story of my reading life: exuberant joy mixed with absolutely giant social errors. Do you know what the neighborhood kids do to the girl who missed her bus stop because she read an entire book in just one go? Do you know what they do when that girl uses giant words because she doesn't know that no one else knows them?

Never mind that those same neighborhood kids have perfectly big vocabularies and are now:
1. A lawyer.
2. A lawyer.
3. A banker. 
4. The owner of a vineyard in California.

They beat the crap out of her.

Do you know what they do when she tells them about an awesome book called Rainbow Goblins? (This, in case you didn't know, is a picture from Ul De Rico's The Rainbow Goblins. The book is freaking awesome) They stop beating the crap out of her and start playing Rainbow Goblins every day after school, using their superhero powers to destroy the goblins before the goblins can suck all the colors out of the rainbow, and therefore out of the world.

We were very powerful and very important.

My life as a writer started at the same time as my life as a reader. I never separated the two. All that acting out and playing was my first way of writing. On Saturdays, after cartoons ended (back when cartoons used to end at noon and you didn't get to watch them again until the next week), I would pretend to be Firestar from Spiderman and Friends for the rest of the day. I could never hear, read, or see a narrative without jumping into it and playing with it until it was my own.

I also wrote by hand a lot. I would add on to stories, write new stories, extend stories for a minor character that I liked a lot. I just found the box with all my writing, but my journal from third grade is somewhere in the library-pile, so I don't have an image of it. By the way, my family found that journal in the attic a few years ago and decided to read out loud at Christmas. That was awesome. I felt vindicated in knowing that my third grade self didn't trust them with her privacy either. There were a LOT of entries complaining about them.

Sometimes, when I was young, I connected with books to the point where I was inconsolable. When I read Bridge to Terebithia, I hid behind the couch and cried until my insides felt like jelly-mush. When my dad said, "Calm down, Bethany. It's only a book," that did not help.

My first job was (surprise) at a bookstore. At eight, I conned the owner into letting me dust shelves and pick dead flies out of the window in trade for books. I mostly read The Babysitters Club. These books were awesome.  They were about entrepreneurship, they were about friendship, they were about responsibility. I loved them. I am aware that these are probably not considered high-brow fiction. Have you ever noticed how we're required to put things into terms of worthy and not worthy? High-brow and guilty pleasures? What if we just enjoyed what we enjoyed without categorizing? What would that look like for students?

The thing was, I really, really loved fantasy-fiction, and in the 80s, everyone was convinced that kids loved contemporary realistic fiction. I did NOT love to read contemporary realistic fiction because, other than The Babysitters Club, it was boring. The dog always died. I loved to read fantasy, and the only books I knew that were fantasy were The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. I loved these books. I took them out of the library every time we went (which was every weekend or more . . . my mom was a big library fan.) We didn't have much money, so my mom didn't buy books unless we really, really loved them. BUT, my mom worked at the same bookstore where I worked (I probably didn't con the owner so much as just show up at work with my mother). For my eleventh birthday, I asked my mom for a really nice set of Narnia books. These books are not still packed in the basement.

They were the most beautiful books I had ever owned. After I opened them, when I started reading them for the first time (I've read them at least twenty times each) I looked at the flap on the inside, and I realized that each book cost $12.95. Times seven. $90.65. We couldn't afford that. I tried to get my mother to return the books to the store. She wouldn't. I will never, ever get rid of these books. I will never, ever let anything bad happen to them. These books say, 'You have value as a reader, and we love you for that.'

High school happened, and I read every book they told me to. I also stole a lot of books because I have a really bad habit of not returning books that I've borrowed. Some day, I will have to donate a LOT of books to the Concord, NH School District. Here is a list of books I have stolen: A Wrinkle in Time, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, The Mists of Avalon, The Red Tent, Pet Semetary, The Omen, The Hobbit, The Collected Works of Nikolai Gogol, The Yellow Wallpaper.

(A quick aside, my writing and reading life happened at the same time that my mother's reading life happened . .  not to tell her story for her too much, but when I was in middle school, she started working at the library. By the time I finished high school, she had graduated from college. By the time I finished college, she was an adjunct prof. and school librarian. In 2011, she was named NH School Librarian of the Year.)

College happened, and I read every book they told me to and I wrote a lot. In college, I kept trying to write and read children's stories. They told me these sorts of things about that:
"Juvenile"
"An experiment that failed."
"This is great, but you're not allowed to write another paper like this"

Teaching happened. At first, I thought my students needed to all read the same book at the same time and understand the important metaphors and similes. They hated that as much as I had. I thought about that. In the second month of my first year of teaching, I stood in line with my students to get our copies of Harry Potter signed. Three hours of standing in the rain to meet J.K. Rowling. Our collective love of a book morphed into a collective love of books.

I started using Reader's Workshop. We all read what we wanted to read, and we had a great time.

My master's degree happened. It was in Writing for Children and Young Adults at Vermont College of Fine Arts. I learned a LOT. Including when and why what I was writing for children actually WAS juvenile or an experiment that failed. And when, maybe, my writing was okay, too.  We spent a lot of time talking about the validity of children's voices and what they care about.

That's when I really started to understand that there's way more than one way to read or write a book. The important part wasn't what my students were reading. It was how my students were reading. I started trying to find ways for youth to interact with books that mimicked the playing that I did when I was younger, and using technology felt like the natural way to do that.

To make our comic, we read Atalanta and the Three Golden Apples. Then, we made a storyboard, adapting as we went. We divided up the different sections of the storyboard, and used the ComicBook! app to 'write' the story.

We jumped into picture books that we loved and played around in there (Remember Don't Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus? Here it is again.) First, we read the book, then we talked about how to set up the book so everyone had a fair part. Frank, the adult, became the bus driver for two reasons: first, the kids couldn't decide which kid should be the bus driver; second, Frank looked like the bus driver in the pictures. We all took turns shooting the scenes, and then I did some work on it after the kids were done.  We featured this movie at our annual Talent Extravaganza to raise money for King Street Center.

The King Street Kids also taught me to NEVER tell a reading group that I hate the book they have to read. This summer reading group had to read Phineas T. MacGuire . . . Erupts! for school. I didn't like the book at all. I said nothing. The group loved the book so much that, when it came time to do their final project, which only had to be mixing baking soda and vinegar together, they decided to make a papier-mache volcano, paint it, and film the experiment. They found joy in the book that I didn't even know was there.

When some kids at King Street told me that they wanted to do a news report, we took that as another chance to be readers and writers. For each news report, we talked about what was going on at King Street and what people cared about. Thinking about audience was really important to the kids. Then, we split up into reporting teams, and they each wrote down three questions. The kids did the filming and the editing of the stories. I added in the subtitles with their help.

The reason readers have kids is so someone will sit in your lap and read the same book over . . . and over . . . and over . . . and over. This is my son, Arden, on the left, and Dave on the right.

Dave and I co-opt Arden's interest in books to help our students see the impact of literary terms. We shot this video last year to demonstrate 'dramatic irony' for Dave's 8th-grade picture book unit. Arden makes me read I Want My Hat Back every single night. I just read it to him fifteen minutes ago. Dramatic irony rocks.

And finally, these are the books on my nightstand. Picture book, memoir, middle grade fantasy, primary source on picture books, YA graphic novel, childrearing book, memoir, and academic non-fiction.

All the seemingly disparate elements of my reading life come together in this: for me, it's about joy. It's not about the specific texts involved, although that adds to the joy. Rather, it's about the community of engaging as a reader. That's the really powerful thing for me: the community of reading and writing. I might love the act of reading and the act of writing, but when those two things build community - be it through acting out a story with the neighborhood kids, shouting at the bunny with my son, or turning a Greek myth into a comic book - that sense of community is where the joy of reading lives, and it's where the importance of reading lies.

PS This morning, while I was trying to find my shoes, I found the external hard drive in the shoe box.

Hating Dave (a brief piece)

(This is a piece of Hating Dave, a novel where Sophie, the narrator, and her father, Dave, hike the 46 high peaks in the Adirondacks.  This excerpt is from their first hike.)

Gothics                 4736’

Armstrong            4400’

Upper Wolfjaw     4185’

14.3 miles

Mountains to date:  3

“It’s time to go,” says Dave.

“Have fun,” I mumble and roll over to face the wall.  Dave must be hiking today.  It’s not even light out.  Too early to be awake on a Saturday.  Too early to be awake on any day.

I slip back to sweet, forgetful sleep.

“We’re going,” says Dave.  His fingertips brush my arm.

I pull the arm away.

I open my eyes but don’t turn around.  The wall is enough to see.

“You’re going,” says Dave.

I roll over to look at him.  “Are you serious?” I ask.

“Get dressed,” he says, dumping a pile of clothes on my dresser.  “Wear these and pack a bag.  Your mother put food on the counter.”

He leaves the room and struts down the stairs.  From the bottom, he shouts, “If you’re not in the car in ten minutes, I’m coming back.”

Who peed in his cornflakes?

I blink for awhile, thinking about going back to sleep, but when Dave has a plan, Dave has a plan, and only major natural disasters change his mind.  I slide out of bed and onto the floor.  Even the vertebrae in my spine yawn as I stretch and put on the polypropylene clothes that Dave dumped on my dresser.  Remember: cotton kills.  Dave’s little mantra.

In the kitchen, I fill a fanny pack with two sandwiches, a nectarine, and two water bottles.  Then, I sleep-stumble outside, where Dave sits in the driver’s seat of the brand-new Subaru.  The morning sky is rosy and the air smells like sweet summer.  I don’t talk to him or wave; I just pull on the passenger door’s handle.

The clunk of the latch makes stomach acid rise to my throat.  I taste it as I take a deep breath.

Dave says, “Get in.”

I force my left leg forward and drop into the car.

“No more moping around.” Dave shifts into reverse.  “You’re hiking the 46.”

I close my eyes.  Dave talks on, something about the trail we’ll take, but I don’t respond.  I keep my eyes closed.  Dave assumes I’m asleep, stops talking, and drives faster, faster.  He knows better, but he still speeds.  I feel each curve stretch along my side, sharp like a knife’s blade.  It takes an hour and a half of zooming around curves to drive from our house in Vermont to the trailhead in New York.

I feel the car jerk to a stop.  I open my eyes; we’re in a parking lot.  Dave says that he’s so happy, so glad, that we got a space.

There are only four other cars here.

I put on my socks, boots, and fanny pack.

Dave puts on boots, gaiters, and a special moisture-wicking hat.  He repacks his fanny pack to fit his raincoat in with the EMT-level first-aid kit, bladder of water, layer of warmth, year’s supply of food, bug-net, and ditty bag  (Which has enough emergency gear to last us a week in case we get dead).

Where in the woods are we hiking to?  Canada?

Dave adjusts his collapsible hiking poles, then retightens them and clicks them together.  “Let’s go, Sophie.  Four miles of road before the trail.”  He takes off on his gazelle-like legs that I did not inherit and doesn’t wait for me.  I try to keep up, chugging along, swinging my arms.  Dave looks stupid carrying all that gear.

Next to a golf course, Dave stops.  I bump into him like one car hitting another.  This thought gives me goose bumps.  Dave puts his hands on my shoulders and spins me around.  “Look at that.”

The goose bumps disappear as I look at that.  It’s a massive mountain shaped like a once-perfect cone with the side scooped out.  There are huge cliffs, and one of them stands out, khaki against the darker hues of the rest of the mountain.  The khaki part looks like a maple leaf.

“It’s pretty,” I say.

“Giant Mountain,” says Dave.

“It’s the biggest?” I’ve only ever seen these mountains from home, a renovated schoolhouse on top of a hill, across Lake Champlain, in Vermont.

“That’s the name: Giant Mountain.”  He whispers reverently.

I squint at the mountain.  It’s nice and all, but how does it deserve whispering?

I start to walk on, but Dave holds out his arm, beckoning me to stand still and stare.  I sigh and look again.

The way the orange-ish rocks and the blue sky meet up is pretty.  And the trees look like a fuzzy carpet.  It’s nice-looking, but, really, the mountain just stands there.

Then, wind blows past, ruffling wisps loose from my ponytail, and words like ‘nice’ and ‘pretty’ feel too dull for this view.  It feels like a fjord as I stand there, leaning into the wind, pretending that I’m in The Sound of Music.  Just that first scene, when Maria is standing on top of those hills and there’s nothing in the way of the view.  Sometimes, I mute the TV and just look at the mountains in that part.  And even though Giant looks different – way more rugged and poky – it feels the same, and all I want is to stand here all day.