Mysti: My name is Mysti, and I teach writing, I have a beautiful job, getting to teach writing to first generation community college students in the gulf coast of Texas. And I actually give this assignment to my students to recollect the earliest memories of learning to read and write. And I've written my own so let's see if I can remember something about that. I did not learn to read until I was about 6. And I grew up on a farm, I was the 6th of 7 children, and my birthday was in September, so I didn't go to Kindergarten until I was 6. And I was so eager to learn how to read and I said to my mom "Can you teach me how to read" And she said "No, because then the teachers would be upset that you're ahead of everybody else." (Laughter) So it didn't occur to me that maybe I could ask my older brothers or sisters or... I remember in Kindergarten there was already a student who could read, Char Olston. And she, the teacher one day said, "Char, will you read to the rest of the class?" And we all sat in a semi-circle around Char sitting up in a chair. And I thought "How come she gets to learn to read, and how come she knows how to read, she got to learn that and I didn't." So that whole year, I spent learning the alphabet, which took about two days. I don't even think we did the sounds of letters yet. And it wasn't until first grade when they kind of had us learn the sounds and do the phonetics and put it all together, and then I could read just everything, everything. We would play the flashcard games, where whoever said the word first got the flashcard. And I remember that I felt like I was hoarding the flashcards, until I purposely got a word wrong. It was supposed to be "feet" because it had two E's you know, and I said "bet" so somebody else would get the flashcard. I think that's kind of interesting that even back then I was like "This isn't a fair system, this is making people feel bad." There weren't many books at home, the reader's digest condensed version of things, the child craft books and World Book Encyclopedia. Actually one of my brothers would read them, he would be sitting with "A" one day (chuckling). But I didn't read those cover to cover. But I do remember that my mother one year, as a gift for being the choir director, got a book of poetry, an anthology by Helen Ferris, called "Favorite Poems for Boys and Girls, selected by Helen Ferris." It was probably in the late 50s that she got this, and my father used to read to us from the book, on his bed at night, all of his kids on the bed. And we always had to read poems in season. So you couldn't go ahead in the book and read a December poem in June, and all these rules about, you know... But there were so many of us kids in the bed, and one of us would get knocked off, and it was a great fun time and eventually all my brothers and sisters stopped going to the poetry session, but I kept going, and eventually actually I would read to my father those same poems. Because he would be tired, he was a farmer, and I would try to read them in the same intonation, the same voice that he had. And when I would get it just right he would laugh and he would smile and that was pretty fun to me. So I think that for me, reading, writing, sharing,  I think words are about two things. They're about power, I wanted that power. And they're about love, you know. The people I love the most, my gift to them is to share my writing with them and ask them to share their words with me, whether it's email, or a letter, or whatever. A couple of years ago in grad school when we had to do a literacy autobiography. I realized that some of the books I read as a child, (4:22.0) affect the way I write today. I begin a lot of sentences with "and" or "but", just like she did. And people say "Oh you can't..." "Well yes you can" And it feel very normal and natural to me because those were some of the earliest chapter books I read. What else did I read, what do I read now? Well I'm still in graduate school so I still read a lot of research. I read writers. I just finished Anne Lamott's "Bird by Bird", and I was like "How did it take me this long to read this book, very fun." But, and one of the things I do as a teacher is to be a coach to try to get people to write down their stories. And shape their stories. Because I think that when we shape our stories, we have a little bit more control of our lives. We didn't get to control what happened to us, but we get to create, how, the character's in our stories. Who's the good guy, who's the bad guy? One last story about reading. In this old farmhouse I lived in, the bedrooms you would kinda have to walk through one to get to the other in that old fashioned way. Well my bedroom, so my parents had to walk, we actually had a little hallway outside my bedroom. And my parents would walk by and I would hear them coming up the stairs, I knew I had to turn the light off, and the switch was broken on the light so I had to use pliers to get the switch. The pliers under the pillow to turn the light off, and then they would go walk by into their bedroom, and I would hear them snore, and then I would turn the lights on and read again. And these weren't always wonderful things, sometimes they were like milder sisters, kind of soft porn novels that were under the bed, Harold Robbins or something, I'm 8 years old reading that (chuckling). So really I would turn the lights off so my parents don't know I'm up til 4 o'clock reading that. They don't even know what's happening in the book (laughter). So that's my final story.