My Story
Walter, Paul (2010-11-19)

>>PAUL WALTER: My name is Paul Walter, and I am from the Fox Valley Writing Project in Wisconsin, and I teach seventh grade English and social studies in Singer, Wisconsin.  And I don't have, really, an outlandish story or anything real over the top.  But I just remember as a child trips to the library with my mom, picking up books.  I forgot what the hippos names were, but there were two hippos that really stood out.  And the stupids I always got a big kick out of.  One book in particular though, called Uncle Timothy's Traviata, was a book about this car that the family would go on trips with.  And I remember the grandmother would always say "bless my buttons" as an exclamatory.  And I just thought that was a stitch as a kid, and that's something that still sticks with me to this day.  And then besides just instilling the love of reading, the fact that she would sit down with me at the typewriter and type out my stories.  And as a child of the eighties, I remember stories about Super Dog and trying to collect the bombs that Reagan and the Russians were dropping and everything else.  And without really judging the writing, she just went with whatever I had.  And I still have some of those stories archived.  And now I do some of those same kinds of things with my daughter, except we get on the computer vs. the typewriter.  And she tells me the story and we go from there, import a couple pictures, and it's something that we'll be able to hold on to, and hopefully she'll be sharing in some kind of medium later on in life.