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This craving for the mastery of suspenseful writing carried on almost until high school. I even wrote letters to the masters, Wes Craven, Stephen King, Dean Kuntz, and others, and received autographed pictures, and in one case an encouraging and personal letter from the Wes Craven, director and writer of “A Nightmare on Elm Street,” “Scream,” and many other films. At that point during middle school, I knew I had no other choice but to write. Now that I reflect, I realize my goal to become a writer could have been partly genealogical. As my dad had been working on a novel and books of poetry, perhaps some of the blood was in me. Yet, at the same time, seeing the writing, the suspense, and having the overwhelming influence conditioned me to become a part of that writing discourse, where the elements of knowing how a good story is played out was a mark of higher intellect, or of a larger brain. I unknowingly plunged into academia, not knowing it at the time, to become part of that higher society that people generally seem to value more. I’d meet someone, a friend or a friend’s parents, and they’d be so impressed that I was writing stories at such a young age, stories that I thought one day I would publish. And that kept me going for awhile. It kept me going through those times when I was forced to read Shakespeare, Hawthorne, and others, for I knew people would respect me for it, even if the canonical works didn’t seem to have values in themselves unless value was placed in them by that upper-class European book culture, the model which I now realize is not only incredibly ethnocentric, but stifling to creativity and to the self. Nevertheless, I continued on, losing self-worth every time a teacher mentioned a book I hadn’t read, unaware that they profited mentally at the separation between us, and that they felt privileged to be able to exclude, and now I realize I became somewhat of a puppet; I too would mention books which I knew other people, even friends, hadn’t watched, and each time I’d feel smarter. I entered the writing discourse to be admired, but somewhere in my first years of college the idea of cultural relativism came along, threatened my way of superiority, and taught me that the ways of other cultures with different books and forms of literacy were no worse than my own. I met friends and teachers who knew the canonical works, but suggested I read less world-renowned books, as well. Reading from Japanese, German, and many other culturally diverse writers, the stories I read went from suspense to drama, comedy, and into the metaphysical realm. I began to question why I hadn’t encountered these works before, why Shakespearian works dominated half the curriculum while so many other styles and forms of writing had been used in modern culture all along. They were hiding something, I realized, all the teachers and administrators, hiding the potential writing had to unleash the mind and open it to ideas, and not to neatly compressed themes in Romeo and Juliet. Questioning freed me from the book culture, where the canon is put on a pedestal and other cultures just seem to vanish in closed encyclopedias like primitive cultures defeated in the Crusades. But I was breaking away from high school standards, where good writing is a simple collection of grammatically correct sentences instead of an idea that may bring about change. Perhaps the equivalent to burning books today is denying their existence by not teaching them. College was a time of experimentation. I looked back at my typewriter, but the musty smell was gone, the yellow light was dimming, and I couldn’t feel the hard keys beneath my fingers anymore. All I could remember was wanting to write. Why did I want to write? Why did I want to give people suspense? Now I recognize it was the aesthetic quality in writing I valued then, and motivation was key. The literacy I was exposed to during school, the canon, the rules and grammar, was a facilitating agent that allowed me, once I knew the rules, to question the purpose of the rules long after I knew I wanted to write. Soon my individual consciousness transformed from mimicry of famous writers to a desire to write about whatever caused me to feel. Where I’d say my first literacy event was experiencing the pleasures of authorship by that old typewriter in my bedroom, what truly determined my role in the writing and education discourse community was my English 100 class. After thirteen weeks and thirteen essays composed of personal narratives, I no longer wrote to give suspense, to dream of fame, or to be considered another Stephen King, I wrote to share my experiences, to make myself vulnerable, and to open my readers to ideas that might positively affect their lives. It was at that point I truly became a writer. I remember it all happening the second week of English 100. I received my first graded paper, and after an entire school career of A papers, I got my first D+ marked in blood red ink. I didn’t know what to think, except that the professor misunderstood my paper and didn’t know a thing about good writing. After all, how could all my high school teachers be wrong? She had made some comments about my paper being too general, too formatted, and not personal enough, but those were all the elements that made the five paragraph essay spectacular. A few classes went by, as apparently many students experienced the same problem of generality. My professor taught the lesson of making your writing unique by making it vulnerable to the outside world. She said to not merely collect regurgitated ideas from previous scholars, but to generate new ideas that could open readers to new interpretations of texts. Quickly I learned to put the “I believe” back into my papers, and recognize my point of view instead of masquerading it as the general public’s. The “you” became “I” and “their” became “mine.” It was only after reclaiming myself in writing that I was finally free. Each successive essay handed back had an A marked on the top, and things returned to normal, but my writing changed, and so did my individual consciousness. Writing was no longer formal for me; it was whatever it needed to be, formal, functional, personal, abstract and metaphysical. I found myself through narratives, exploratory essays, and in epistemic writing as well as creative writing. Departing from the English village vision that the middle and upper-classes relentlessly cling to, I developed self and not self-worth through writing, and words no longer represented letters, but confessions of my soul laid out on the paper for anyone to see. By the end of the semester a true professor by the name of Melissa Joseph taught me that making my ideas vulnerable is the only way to make ideas, for writing doesn’t have to be an intellectual transaction where I deposit words for someone to receive, and where the thesis is clear and the points are manageable manifestations of abstract truths. For the first time in my life, writing was provocative, unexplainable, metaphysical, and sometimes perplexing. After realizing these many truths, I set out not to feel literate in some special way, but to encourage people to think and, more importantly, question. Long after the fact, I understand now that the typewriter was a source for creativity, which inherently involves questioning. While school, high school especially, stifled that creativity and forced me to think in formats and sentence structures, college allowed me to grasp the larger ideas that are sometimes hidden in writing, as well as the aesthetic value that writing has. At first I joined the English village, and I shut the door on those who hadn’t read The Scarlet Letter, Mark Twain’s Short Stories, or even Machiavelli’s Prince. I retained that idea that most people were illiterate for not enjoying the canonical works I read to become part of the English discourse community, and now I realize that education is geared towards that goal of excluding in order to maintain power and control over others, perhaps minorities. It can be heard that immigrants came to this country to escape a class society, yet many of those immigrants ended up representing the middle class of America. And being that two percent of the country controls over eighty percent of the nation’s wealth, what better way could there be for them to keep their riches than to exclude the lower class by feeding them Shakespeare, Melville, Faulkner, and all the authors they’ll simply take pride in denouncing. Writing is not about ideas or aesthetic pleasure any longer in schools; it’s about separating classes and seeing who will end up in the menial jobs and who will become the future white-collar scholars. And yet it was that typewriter, that creativity, that questioning, that led me to this point, that allowed me to realize the scheme behind it all that many administrators and teachers are unknowingly apart of. Therefore, it’s not a matter of condemning teachers; it’s a matter of enlightening those who have never experienced creativity at the typewriter, the very place that led me to the art of questioning, to the road to my own form of literacy.
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