A Hog is Ham
Craig, Daniel (2010-04-09)

>>DANIEL:  My first experience with literacy and becoming literate was probably when i was younger, 4 or 5 years old. I was having trouble reading and my mom pulled me out of school to home school me so I could concentrate more on reading and writing. She had these special books that were in pastel colors. 

One was called A Hog is Ham. It was about this farmer that has this pig and he wants to make dinner so he puts this big in a pot of water and he's going to boil him alive. It seems really barbaric, looking back on it, but that was the story and so he puts the pig in the put and he puts firewood under it and starts heating it up, and it's boiling and this pig just springs out of the pot and I had no idea how awful that was, but that's how I learned how to read, initially, with these books.

And I guess as I progressed I started writing my own stuff. When I was six years old I started making these little flip book comic books. And I would make like Superman comics or X-Men comics with really bad spelling. Superman was spelled "S-O-O-P-E-R-MAN" and I was sort of dyslexic so my words would be going from the right to the left. 

And I think I realized this when I was a kid, that I sort of had trouble with this. And I would write dyslexic instructions on how to read my comic books. And that wouldn't help much because they were also a mess. 

I guess with time, I honed it and I got better at writing. And I guess when I started perfecting the craft of writing was when I started writing songs and music when I was about fourteen. It started out really bad too, just general songs about how tortured I was and stuff. But it progressed into these funny songs about everyday life things. Like maybe like getting to class and noticing somebody's taking your usual chair. Or a complete stranger asking you for a piece of bubble gum. 

I guess that's really where I learned that people enjoy much more everyday things when they're reading literature. They like to relate to what they're hearing or what they're reading. And that's sort of my literacy story.