Renewing the Fire: Notes Toward the Liberation of English Studies

Abstract

Reading Roots Freedom came early to me in the form of literature. One of my earliest memories is of reading Ilse-Margret Vogel's gentle children's book, My Little Dinosaur, and the slow, indescribable awakening of that moment. It was the first time I'd ever read a book by myself, without someone reading the story aloud to me and passing far too quickly from one page to the next. The realisation that I had the power to open up such mysteries by myself filled me with such an energising joy that I fell passionately in love with literature that day. Such freedom was not something many people seemed to understand in my home town of Victor, Colorado. It's a small mining town on the eastern edge of the Colorado Rockies, and has long been a hard place to make a living. Until limited-stakes gambling arrived in the neighbouring town of Cripple Creek in 1990, the only viable jobs were in mining or the ever-mercurial summer tourism industry. This was 1980, and a difficult time for both. Most families--mine included--struggled hard to get a little ahead in the summer, and fought against snow and despair in the winter to make it to the too-few warm months of the next summer. Imagination is a frequent casualty to the grinding plod of poverty. Fortunately, my parents treasured and encouraged my love of reading, so books became a feature of my life that wasn't shared by many other kids in town. My mom would take me to the local library, and there My Little Dinosaur was followed by William Steig's Sylvester and the Magic Pebble and Mike McClintock's A Fly Went By. The Victor Public Library wasn't particularly well stocked with books, but to five-year-old me it was a wonderland of imaginative possibilities. Everything about the place thrilled me: the rich, crackling pop of a new book's spine as I opened it for the first time; the crisp smell of old, slightly-musty paper; the dust motes that hung suspended in the fading light of a golden afternoon; the squeaking rustle of the bean-bag sofa as I settled down to immerse myself in another story. I remember being particularly thrilled about Kindergarten, where I expected to meet other children and share my stories with them. My classmates didn't tend to share my enthusiasm about storytelling and reading, but books meant something to them, too: only the coolest kids ever had access to Tomi Ungerer's brooding storybook, The Three Robbers, and it was always checked out. The day that I finally found the blue and black book on the shelves was a coup, and I relished my victory that night as I read it to my parents at the dining room table. For whatever reason, my peers lost their love of reading while mine flourished, and we became strangers to each other. By second grade I was designated a first-rate nerd, nicknamed Tinkerbell for my love of fairy tales and fantasy stories. It got worse as we grew older, and as all the pain and uncertainty of puberty raged through us, and as new desires stirred in our blood, their suspicion became contempt. And I retreated again to my books, emerging only after the storms of adolescence had passed over. My books and stories were no blind sanctuary, as some might argue; they were instead a safe harbour that helped give me healing, that showed me the possibilities of a life lived fully, free from fear or resentment. They opened my imagination to hope. A Vulnerable Passion Now that I'm a literature professor, I often think back to my childhood, to the memories of pain and passion that are tangled in my experiences as a reader, and I wonder what happened to so many people in the daily toil of life to strip away the tender joys of reading literature. It seems that too many of our students see reading--deep, life-altering reading--as nothing more than a necessary but unpleasant means of getting a bigger paycheque, a nicer car, another garage on the house. And, sadly, it seems that far too many English instructors, from grade school to university, have forgotten the joys that first brought them into the field. …