>>Stephanie: My name is Stephanie Morgan

>>Speaker: And what's your story?

>>Stephanie: When I think about literacy, my story is actually kind of a funny dark story in a way.  I think that I was doomed to be an English major, in the Garrison Keiler sense of an English major.  My mother took a long time to finish her master's in English, she worked full-time as an English teacher, she had two children, she also had more of the family responsibilities.  And as she was working on her master's project and her course work, my sister and I would often be around a small children. And I remember one summer she was working on a Shakespeare project I think, and I kind of crawled into, I was probably about eight, and I crawled into her workroom and she was telling me about Macbeth, and she was telling me about Lady Macbeth, and I remember her telling me about how Lady Macbeth was so committed to the cause that she told her husband that "I am so truthful and so committed to this cause that if I had a child nursing at my breast I would dash out it's brains" as a vow.  And I still have nightmares about that scene. (Chuckling) I remember being so freaked out about the imagery, and sort of the glint in my mother's eye about how turned on, by the horror and the gore of that, that my image of my mother changed so much.  My image of literature, and what it could do changed. And I think I realized the power of the word at the same time. And it twisted me profoundly, and that now I had to go and get a PH D. So a cautionary tale to mothers out there, see what can happen? And that's my literacy story.