Literacy Narrative Draft
Brianna Douglas
Composition 1
9/14/2021
My Literacy Narrative
What does it mean to want to read and write? Who likes to read and who likes to write? What is the importance of it and why do we even do those types of things? My godmother taught me both reading and writing. Throughout my lifetime I felt as if I didn’t like reading but I do like writing and so it shaped me to be a published writer out in the world today.
My godmother started teaching me how to read and write when I was 3 years old. I learned my ABC’s and how to spell certain words that they now call “cite words” by the time I was 4 years old. When I was in pre-K I was top of my class and advanced. I took a gap year because long story short Kindergarten wasn’t mandatory and after attending a few classes the principal who had a past with my mom realized who she was and told her I had to leave the school because I wasn’t fully registered. I kept learning at home with my godmother, by the way, she’s disabled and has been since before I was born, the whole left side of her body is paralyzed. She taught me how to count and do math where I knew by the time I got into first grade how to count by 5s, 10s, 20s, and I was again advanced and top of my class where they wanted to make me skip a grade because of it yet my mom decided to tell them no I needed friends my age and to grow with those who I already knew, I am grateful she did that.
As I got older and continued to go through this in life, my godmother started trying to force me to read more. She kept pressuring me to read so much because of her hectic and chaotic yet endearing and overcoming past that made her like reading. She liked to read for the fact it helped her feel like she was in a different world, and she was imaginative and creative. What I don’t think she realized though is how much her forcing me to read made me feel further and further from the slightest bit of enjoyment of the task because it didn’t give me that same excitement as her because she wasn’t forced, it came to her naturally, with her interests. By the time I was in middle school she was trying to force me to read Edgar Allen Poe and so with that every day when I finished my normal homework, she would make me read 30 pages of his book, A Dream within a Dream. What she also failed to realize was that because of knowledge of old English I couldn’t really grasp what the book was saying and so it would bore me to the point where after I got to 10 pages, I fell asleep on her leather reclining sofas. She would scream at me every time, repeatedly I told her I don’t want to read, and she would just tell me that reading is important and something I must do. She would tell me to start where I left on and to continue, so I would. I was very compliant now that I look by on it, never going and questioning what I was being told, yet then again that’s what I was also taught to do. I repeated this for another 3 years of my life, including doing this on the weekends.
I got into a humanities class in 7th grade, this ended up being one of my favorite classes. In this class we wrote and discussed a lot. I started to like what I was writing about and so I wrote more and more. Later in the 8th grade I had the same class and with the same teacher and she told me about a poetry contest, she thought I should give it a try. I told her, “What do I write about” and she simply told me, “Whatever you want that will answer the prompt of the contest”. She gave me the slip of paper with the task and sent me on my way. I started to write more and more and realized I started looking like those people in movies like “Bigger Fatter Liar” and “Diary of a Wimpy Kid” where the kids would spend hours writing and just ball up papers and throw them in a trash can. I couldn’t think of anything to write about. The next day we read a poem in class, and I realized that’s it! That’s what I’m going to write about, the poem I ended up writing was about how we live in a dystopian society with all these rules meant to make us look perfect like those utopian ones you read about or see on TV. The truth is though that no society is even a utopian one because even they have flaws, they’re just harder to pinpoint out when you’re living through them. After this I won and I was happy to have won, I was being published and I represented my school as 1 of the two winners of the contest. I got the book my poem was published in and realized my name was misspelled my last name and they were giving out hundreds of copies, so it was too late for them to fix it, but I was still happy with the simple fact that this is one of my achievements, being a writer, being published, and not only that but at a young age. I also performed my poem in front of an audience at a fancy Manhattan building that the event where I got my poem in the published book at. Then I realized that it wasn’t as bad as I thought, I liked writing and all of that writing and throwing out the papers balled up and time spent was worth it. I later realized that all that reading that I did because of my godmother and her persistence and determination is what caused me to be great, she taught me what I knew.
My godmother was able to teach me reading, reading taught me how to write and by writing I have been able to express myself. I found that it’s not that I don’t like reading, it’s just I was never interested in that kind of reading that I was forced to do and matter of fact I read a lot, I even read while I write. People read in order to learn, you can learn about yourself such as your interests and what they mean or do for you, or (even like me with Edgar Allen Poe), your uninterests and why that is. “Reading and writing go hand in hand” as Sylvia Melvin put it, all people who read and write for enjoyment and not for task completion should be able to like it. We read and write with one another to communicate, to tell a story or moment in time and it’s important because as humans it brings us together and gives us connections and bonds over things so we can get the human interaction/bonding moment(s) that everybody might want. I currently have published works in that poetry book, and some collaborative works in a program called CUP (the Center for Urban Pedagogy) where I was published in a newspaper, a website, and a magazine. Even though I like writing though I don’t aspire to be a writer or researcher but at least I feel good knowing I’m comfortable in doing it and in a way that makes me proud of myself.