Birthday cards and video skits
Kuralt, Karen (2011-03-12)
>>KAREN: Hi, I'm Dr. Karen Kuralt with the Little Rock Writing Project.  I originally grew up in Utah though and I grew up with parents who I don't think would've said they were readers or writers.  My dad was a bowling mechanic and my mother was a housewife.  And my dad never go to college and my mother did a couple of years of secretarial school.  The irony of it was even though they didn't think they were readers and writers, everything about the way I grew up instilled the value of reading and writing into me.  Probably starting from before I was old enough even to remember my parents read to me all the time, both my dad and my mom.  It was the thing that we looked forward to at bed time more than anything in the world.  And I remember all the Golden Books and all the Dr. Seuss books and I had nursery rhyme books.  I remember my most prized possession when I was three years old were these two little red and blue nursery rhyme books that were always on a shelf down low where I could reach them so I could read them anytime and I knew that they were for me.  Then beyond that there was a lot of writing that we did inside the family.  So I remember it wasn't long after, I was reading by the time I was three or four, my mother would sit me up on the kitchen counter and make letters on the whiteboard where she wrote our shopping list and that was how I learned my alphabet.  And so it seemed like a natural transition from that to begin writing things like birthday cards for the family.  And I remember my brothers and I would get up early in the morning before somebody's birthday and go grab pieces of paper fold 'em in half and design our own little Hallmark cards and write poems on the inside and give them to people.  And then as we became more sophisticated readers and writers of stories, so I got into science fiction for example, and I would sit my brothers on the carpet and read to them from Star Trek novels and do all the voices of the characters.  And then I was writing the plays for them so our favorite toy was a tape recorder and I would write these ridiculous skits and we would read these skits into the tape recorder and laugh hysterically playing them back afterwards.  I remember when my dad got his very first video camera and one of the first things we did was take the ridiculous skits that I had written for the tape recorder and write them out as plays.  And my father couldn't memorize his lines and so he would write out his lines and tape them to the wall off camera and read them. While he would read them and look back at the camera and read them and look back at the camera [laughing].  And the fact that my family was so into just these little meaningless things  and made it such a big family event really made me feel that reading and writing was special.  And I was reinforced by my teachers in school who as soon as they saw that I was doing some of this stuff at home very much encouraged me and so there were PTA writing contests throughout elementary school.  Between the encouragement I got from the teachers that reinforced what was going on with my parents, that's what led me on the path to a career as a professor of writing.