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Besides my paternal grandmother, no one in my family was really a "reader". My dad's mom is the only person I can ever remember sitting around and reading my whole childhood. She always had tons of books, and she also had tons of books available for my sister and me as kids.

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Me as a kid anytime anyone read anything ever to me:

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Me as a kid anytime anyone read anything ever to me:

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However, my mom and dad knew that I loved books, so they would always ready to us as kids. Eventually, although they mostly taught me the basics of reading, I ended up essentially teaching myself how to read. I was reading longer picture books, and even some shorter chapter books before kindergarten, namely the Junie B. Jones series.

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My mom and dad were definitely my first sponsors of literacy.

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My mom and dad were definitely my first sponsors of literacy.

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As Deborah Brandt says, literacy sponsors are "any agents, local or distant, concrete or abstract, who enable, support, teach, model, as well as recruit, regulate, suppress, or withhold literacy--and gain advantage by it in some way" (Brandt 166). As a very local and concrete sponsor, my parents were the first to introduce reading to me. Even though I ended up learning a lot of reading myself and becoming my own sponsor for literacy, my mom and dad were definitely the first to really instill my love for reading and writing.

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When I entered elementary school, I remember being in awe at all the new choices I had for reading. I also remember going to my school's library for the first time, and never having seen a library before, just being in complete disbelief that such a thing could exist.

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After telling my maternal grandparents about the school library, my grandfather took me to get my first library card as a kid. I remember checking out my first library books, and I remember how excited I was to start reading all of them. I tried to read them all at once with each one open next to the other and stacked on top of each other. It didn't work very well, and I eventually conceded to the fact that I'd have to read them one by one.

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In middle school, I joined my first creative writing club. We had to choose a club, we had no choice. I remember going to check out a film club and an improv club, but was already decided once I found out about the creative writing club. The club focused mostly on poetry, and it was in this club that I first learned about haiku's sonnets, and couplets.

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I was already writing a ton of poetry outside of school. I used quiz making sites (whatever was available in the early 2000's) to publish my poems with a "Click for a poem: Sad, Happy, Scary, Angry" format. Whichever option the quiz taker chose would lead to a poem in said genre. Taking the creative writing club definitely helped me to shape up my poetry since I now knew actual terms and literary devices that I could be using to enhance my writing.

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Although middle school was when my writing really flourished, I also was still an avid reader in middle school. Like every other kid my age I was reading things like Harry Potter (I think book 6, The Half-Blood Prince released when I was in 7th grade), Twilight (Eclipse was just published; though I wasn't a huge fan of the series, I had already started and needed to finish them), the Percy Jackson series, the Eragon series, and more. I was (and still am) obsessed with fantasy literature.

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My middle school years is really when fantasy literature became a resource for me to deal with my anxiety and depression disorders. Although I had both as a very young child, middle school was probably the peak of having Panic Disorder for me. Fantasy literature was a way to escape all of these problems, and it gave me something else to focus on when I was going through panic attacks or depressive episodes. However, this also was sometimes additive to my anxiety if the book dealt with any really intense scenes or imagery.

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In high school, the focus of my writing switched to lyrical writing instead of poetry. I have loved to sing since I was a kid, and I started to become really interested in writing lyrics for songs. I wrote lyrics for over 20 songs by the time I entered my junior year of high school. I even had recorded one of the songs with a friend of mine in my senior year (it's still floating around the internet somewhere ;)). I have friends that still know some of the lyrics to my songs because we sang them so much growing up.

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I also continued to read heavily in high school. My best friend throughout high school was also a huge reader, so most of the time we just read together (check out my literacy narrative on her here). I still focused mostly on fantasy literature, but I really became interested in other genres as well during this time. I read Angels and Demons by Dan Brown in high school and was absolutely enthralled with his high-action stories. I read classic literature for the first time such as Of Mice and Men, The Crucible, and A Separate Peace. I discovered more poetry that I loved (Robert Frost is still my favorite).

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At the end of high school is when I really began to first notice a shift in what I was being asked to read by my teachers. At some point in high school, I stopped reading novels, and the focus was instead shifted onto articles, journals, and other peer-reviewed sources. We started delving into heavy projects that were all researched based, and we started to read more and more non-fiction works. I remember having a really hard time dealing with this because I loved fiction.

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By this point in my life, reading and writing had become a huge part of my identity.

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By this point in my life, reading and writing had become a huge part of my identity.

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I was always the girl who carried a book with her wherever she went. A modern day Belle from Beauty and the Beast. But my interests in reading and writing weren't in the research papers that were becoming so engrained into us in high school, they were left behind in the fantasy worlds that I had fully immersed myself in. I craved the same action and adventure in what I read that the high school turned its nose up against. I wanted to write like that too. Bronwyn T. Williams says in her article "Boys may be boys, but do they have to read and write that way?" that the fear of fantasy and science fiction in high school is that "boys [and in this case, me] cannot distinguish between the violence in a story and the violence in real life, or they are unable to process imaginative work but instead absorb it and are molded by it without thinking" (Williams 512).

However, as Williams also explains in the article, the violence in these stories always serves a plot. I definitely found this to be the case in the things that I loved to read about. The violence was there to fight against an evil force. It was to overcome oppression. It was to get out of terrible situations and triumph over hardships. It wasn't there just for the sake of violence. In some ways, I needed this kind of action in the stories I read to really emphasize how horrible the plots and themes in these stories were that they required this violence as the only and the final way that evil would receive its justice.

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Me looking for fiction at the end of high school:

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Me looking for fiction at the end of high school:

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My college journey was a rough one to begin with. I have technically been attending college since the summer of 2011. I started immediately after I graduated high school with one summer class. I went back and forth between majors, not knowing for sure what I wanted to do. I started as a Liberal Studies major thinking I wanted to teach elementary school. Then decided that I didn't want to teach little kids. I switched to a Graphic Design major because that's what I was mostly doing at that time. I then switched again between Communications and Computer Science. I couldn't make up my mind at all, and I liked way too many things to decide on just one.

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Then in 2014, I decided I really wanted to be a hairstylist. I went to Paul Mitchell in Fresno, graduated in 2015, and proceeded to do hair for the next 5 years. But, I still wasn't fulfilled enough and wanted more out of my education. I still had a strong desire to teach, and I missed writing. Although I was still constantly reading all the time, I needed more.

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After I had my son in 2018, I decided to go back to school to finish my degree. I was only about a year away from my associates degree, so I gave teaching another shot.

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My reading and writing skills really began to take shape. My first semester back, I realized how much I really loved reading and writing. I changed my major to English right before my last semester at Clovis Community.

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I started creatively writing again and took both a fiction writing and a poetry writing class my last semester at Clovis Community. I even got one of my poems published in the Reedley College literary journal! I also got really into theater, and decided that I wanted to also teach that. When I left Clovis Community, I transferred to Fresno State as an English Studies major and took my emphasis in Theater.

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It was like everything leading up to that point was finally starting to make sense. I was absolutely in love with my theater classes, and I loved every English class that I took. In my literature classes at both Clovis Community and State, I found my deep love for fiction all over again. I loved reading and writing about late American literature, and even my non-fiction readings were interesting to me again.

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However, over the last year or so, I really began to struggle in reading. Although it wasn't objectively hard for me, I started having a really hard time focusing on what I needed to read. I had a difficult time doing nearly anything at all. I realized, way too late, that I probably have undiagnosed ADD. Looking back at my constant major changes, the fifty hobbies I had picked up over the years, the ten different jobs I had gone through, it all started to make sense.

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Now, I really have to set up a proper environment to get myself ready to read or write and eliminate all possible distractions while I await a proper diagnosis. This is ten times as hard if I am not as interested in the reading (*cough* Shakespeare *cough*). With my past history with reading and writing, I never thought that I would ever struggle so much with it. It was extremely disheartening to not be able to read the same way that I was always able to growing up.

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College also was the first time I was challenged to be fluent in multiple literacies.

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College also was the first time I was challenged to be fluent in multiple literacies.

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During college, on top of my new struggles I had found with reading and writing, I was also being challenged to learn many new literacies as well as become an expert in them very quickly. Through using new technologies, learning new strategies for learning, and learning how to actually teach others, I really found college to be a time of growth and discovery in my literacy journey.
Allan Luke says in his interview with Antero Garcia and Robyn Seglem, "Any reconnoitering of multiliteracies has to begin from an educational engagement and critical analysis of these new economic and cultural, civic, and media conditions" (Garcia et. al. 74). I feel that this quote really stuck out to me in reflecting on my literacy journey because I definitely needed to come at learning all of my new literacies through an educational standpoint. For some more complicated things, I really had to educate myself on the current events happening in the world, and for some simpler things, it was just learning how to use a new program. Both these complex and simple ways of going about my literacy have really helped me to understand why starting at an educational level is so important as Luke says.

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After a lot of reflection on my journey through reading, writing, and school in general, I am still mostly undecided on where my journey is going to take me. After subbing this past school year in high school English classes, I have decided that I really don't want to teach, I want to write. I have been exploring other avenues lately in copywriting, publishing, and other writing jobs where my passions in reading and writing truly lie.

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My pedagogical influences have changed a lot over the last year.

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My pedagogical influences have changed a lot over the last year.

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I have been especially inspired by the ideas in April Baker-Bell's "We Been Knowin: Toward and Antiracist Language & Literacy Education". I think that the ideas of keeping an antiracist approach to pedagogy is so important and may truly be above all other influences on pedagogies for me. That along with any ideas that lead to non-discriminatory practices, since acceptance and inclusion are probably what I place the highest importance on when it comes to thinking about my teaching, if that is what I decide on doing. I definitely would want my classroom to be a safe space for every single one of my students, not only some of them.
I especially want to give my students the space to have a voice, and I think that this is really emphasized as a need in classrooms in Baker-Bell's article. She says, "We Been Knowin also signifies that communities of color, especially women of color, queer and trans people, people with disabilities, and people living in poverty BEEN knowin what has and has not worked" (Baker-Bell 3). This idea has been expressed a lot in the last year in my readings and from just listening to people in other communities. I think that it is so important to just ask students what they want and need, and figure out how to accommodate my teaching to work for them in this way. Baker-Bells explanation of these ideas really solidified including this in my pedagogy.

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Outside of school and thinking about teaching, I am still a huge fiction reader. I love the YA genre of fiction, and I have recently been trying to explore adult fantasy also. I still desperately want to write, but I have had a hard time finding the balance between school life, mom life, and work life. I am working on getting back there as soon as I can.