Lost Literacies
Buck, Amber

>>AMBER: Alright, so my name is Amber Buck and this literacy narrative is about, I guess I'm going to call it "Lost Literacies". So I helped collect these narratives at Four C's so I had been thinking a long time about what I might say for my own literacy narrative and I always assumed that I would talk about technology since I research literacy and technology. But this story was actually kind of inspired by technology but isn't about technology itself. So this week I've been listening to - today actually, I've been walking around campus and listening to "This American Life". The podcast for this past weekend was about - it was called, now I'm blanking, I don't remember what it was actually called - oh, "Things I Used to Believe". So it was based on the NPR radio show "This I Believe" and Ira Glass had the guy who does that show on, I can't remember his name right now, but he was talking about the four years of the show and how it's ending. He kind of asked Ira Glass, "Well how come you've never been on my show?" And he said, "Well, you know, I don't really - this is sound really bad - but I don't really believe anything." They had a long conversation about this and it came around to the conclusion that because he believes things change so frequently that everything's so transient he has a hard time moving with a solid belief and his own show is a lot about change but how things come out from under people and how things can change so drastically. So that show was all about things that people used to believe in and something changed. So I was thinking about that today and a couple of days ago I got one of those recent little forwards that's been going on Facebook, it was twenty questions but it was twenty questions for the literary geek or something that it was called. So I tagged in someone's note and I looked at it and the questions were things like, "Which author do you own the most books of? Which literary character do you most identify with? What literary character did you have a crush on?" And I looked at the list - I didn't get all the way through it - but I looked at the list and I realized that I really couldn't answer many of those questions anymore and I had this strange kind of moment about my own identity as someone who considers myself very concerned with those kinds of things because when I was a kid that's what kind of led me into English, it was my love for books like "Little House on the Prairie" and "Anne of Green Gables" and "The Secret Garden" and "Charlotte's Web" was a favorite and also "A Wrinkle in Time" and that was my childhood. When I think back to my childhood I think of those books that I used to love but I also think about - and that's what led me to be an English major in college because in high school that was the class that didn't feel like work to me. I was like, "Oh, I get to go in there and read a book. How awesome is that?" But towards the end of college when I worked in a writing center and I decided I wanted to go to graduate school in rhetoric and composition, my feeling about literature, once I got into that graduate program, changed a little bit. I was much more interested in other people's writing practices, other people's literacy practices and now I'm putting together, I'm preparing myself to take my comps which are in two and half weeks and I'm concerned now about, I've really been reading a lot of theory, really thinking about people's literacy practices as embedded in particular contexts. I've been so interested in that that I've kind of lost this other self that just liked to sit down and read a book and really get immersed and has this kind of love of literature. I guess I kind of think about literacy in my research more writing than reading I guess. So I've kind of lost that identity of myself as a reader and a lover of literature, I guess you could say. So I don't know how that happened, I don't know if it's such a bad thing but I guess it's just a - I try to make time for that kind of stuff in the summer but it's just, I think, kind of a literacy that I perhaps lost a little. So that's my story.