>>Ron: Hello I'm Ron Strickland, I teach English literature at Illinois State University.  My mother taught me to read before I began school about the age of five. And I grew up on a farm and in a small town in southern Missouri. My father's family especially were devoted to farming. And we were of modest but my father's family had land, and keeping that land and those lands in the family was really important to them. So they were quietly uneasy and ambivalent about my mother's aspirations for me to leave farming and have a different kind of life than that. And through my childhood reading set me apart from the rest of my family. And my parents another close relatives, other adults, older adults would often mark with a kind of amusement about how much I read and how unusual that was. And just how it set me apart. And I think behind their noticing my reading was a little bit of concern, unstated nonetheless there that I wasn't going to be the farmer that they hoped I would be. And so I, being a reader, I became aware of people with other experiences, different experiences from the one I had, and I can remember very early on having a sense unlike that I think of many people who imagined that their neighborhood, there home, their hometown, was the center of the Universe. I always had a strong sense that where I was was on the periphery, on the margins of civilization to exaggerate just a little bit. And I chose friends growing up, kind of with a sense of choosing friends who had a more cosmopolitan sensibility, as compared to other people whose horizons were bounded by the farm life and that whole cultural experience. So even though I wasn't a particularly good student in the conventional sense, I didn't make a particularly good grades, I always read a lot and enjoyed reading and always had a sense of reading as a window onto the outside world.  On to the world of cities, and culture, and adventure that was beyond what I was experiencing. So I went to college and I was the first in my family to attend college, at the time of the Vietnam War with some sense, with my Uncle having been killed in Vietnam, that for my parents, a good part of the appeal for me to go to college was to avoid suffering the fate my Uncle suffered of having gone to Vietnam and being in danger of being killed. Of course my parents wanted me to succeed, and my family wanted me to succeed, they just wanted me to succeed and remain unchanged. They wanted me to be educated but remain in the small community and remain on the farm.  So there was always a small bit of concern with my reading and with the broadening of my horizons that I experienced as a college student.  I did political science for my first degree, and then after college I worked as a handyman in my small community, and lived on a farm and raised a big garden and kind of had a countercultural lifestyle. Eventually though moved away from southern Missouri, to upstate New York, and worked in various jobs, for the Department of Labor. I was a rural manpower representative, and worked with migrant farm workers and (05:19.2). And eventually I began graduate school part time in English and eventually did a Ph.D.. And all that time, I travelled as much as I could, travelled as often as I could, to Mexico and eventually to England. Always at least tacitly connecting the kinds of experiences I had traveling with my reading. And I've always found reading and traveling to be very similar experiences, and experiences that complement each other very directly and strongly. And I've always, my teaching of literature has always been something that connected with my interest in other cultures and other experiences, and travel. And just a continuous kind of learning experience.  So as a professor of English literature I've continued to travel a lot, and continued to expand my knowledge of other cultures. And I've made many trips to Africa, Southeast Asia, to Europe, and South America. And well actually only Mexico in South America.  But those experiences for me have always been very close to reading, and so I will oftentimes when I meet someone or when I see an old friend, quite often will I ask the person what he or she has been reading and seek out what other people are reading in order to cultivate my own sense of life experience and the common experience and the different experiences of humanity. And I've been in a kind of lifelong learner on that journey of reading and travel and living.  Being open to new experiences always, being open to and welcoming to embrace the knowledge and experiences of other people I meet. It's caused me to have, it will enable me to have very strong, rich friendships with people from a wide variety of backgrounds, and wide variety of experiences. People from different cultures and nations and religions. And something that hopefully won't end soon, and I continue to travel a lot, and continue to learn and read into the sunset. Thank you.