Jim Porter's Literacy Interview
Porter, James

>>JAMES: My name is Jim Porter and I was born in the 1950s in Williamsburg, Virginia but my dad just happened to be in the army there - Korean era. So I actually grew up in Cleveland, Ohio and spent all of my youth there.

>>SPEAKER: What part of Cleveland?

>>JAMES: That's a very important question. For Cleveland there's the East side, I grew up in East Cleveland and lived not far from my grandparents. Most of my family lived on the East side in Cleveland or in East Cleveland. Later I lived in Shaker Heights, Ohio. 

>>SPEAKER: Since Cleveland has had some changes in economies and stuff, how would you describe your neighborhood at the time?

>>JAMES: In East Cleveland it was definitely working and middle class. We were in Christ the King Perish; that was very important what perish you were in at that time and what church you went to. In Shaker Heights that was a different class; that was more of an upper class suburban type and upper middle class type of area. 

>>SPEAKER: Maybe we could go forward with you talking about what you remember about your family's literacy practices.

>>JAMES: Well of the things I remember most prominently was that books and reading were always a big part of the family. My dad read to us every night when we went to bed. At the time it was my brother and myself; my brother Tom was three years younger. My dad would get us ready for bed and we would go through the whole sink and bathroom routine, I won't go into details about that. Then we would go to the bedroom and my dad would read us a story and that was one of the high points of the day was getting that story. It was often a story that he had read as a boy and enjoyed. I remember when we were like five and six and seven he was reading us stuff out of his high school readers so we were getting like "The Mystery of the Speckled Man" from Sherlock Holmes when we were five and that was a pretty scary story for a five year old so we would go to sleep right away after that. "The Ransom of Red Chief O'Henry" stories, there were a lot of comedy and action stories; he liked knights and stories of noble and honorable behavior so we got a lot of those kinds of stories. So that was an important early experience. The other part of it was that my dad was a lawyer and he was always reading a writing at home. He worked very hard and he worked at night a lot. He was writing briefs and he had yellow legal pads and he wrote with a pencil; he would sharpen a bunch of pencils and line them up and he was writing and rewriting and editing to death his briefs. We would come in and sit with him but at five and seven he wasn't reading briefs to us. I was just sitting there having my milk and he was working at the table and muttering as he was writing so it was just like writing was there and reading was something that was always enjoyable. 

>>SPEAKER: Those are stories of you dad; do you remember your mom in relation to reading or writing?

>>JAMES: Definitely, I remember being in the summer reading group, not just the summer, and my mom would take us to the library every week and my brother and I would collect a pile of books and take them home. The weekly visit to the library was a habit that we always had. In the summer there was a reading group and I'm not sure this is the best model for reading but there was a race to see who could read the most books in the summer and you got little stars next to your name and it was posted publicly in the library. The librarians were checking to make sure you had actually read so you would sit down with them in the library and do a little book report with the librarian to verify that you had read the books. Tom and I always thought this was really cool and we always tried to be the top reader but we could never be the top because right above us always were like ten or twelve girls who were always first in the summer reading group and we were always like the first boy in our age group; so we had to settle for that. 

>>SPEAKER: What stories or books did you like to read? Do you remember any of your favorites?

>>JAMES: Early on, I can't remember the series title but the boy's name was Henry and he lived in a small Ohio town and there was a series of stories there that were kind of like six, seven, or eight year olds. Later I remember very clearly reading sports biographies, Lou Gehrig's story, Babe Ruth's story, and there was another series that we had.

>>SPEAKER: You're still reading those.

>>JAMES: I'm reading the older versions now. [Laughing] Then the Hardy Boys, my dad read the Hardy Boys and I read them as well. My brother and I probably had a collection of forty Hardy Boys books, some of which were my dad and uncle's books that went back to the early thirties. "Hunting for Hidden Gold" I know that was one of the early Hardy Boys books. We were reading in that book series and we kind of jumped then to other book series as well. So by seventh and eighth grade I was reading Agatha Christie mysteries because my mom was reading them. Yeah, somewhere in there, I would say seventh or eighth grade, I started reading mysteries. 

>>SPEAKER: Where were your memories of writing?

>>JAMES: Writing at home, there were thank you notes, they enforced thank you notes; you must sit down and write your grandmother a thank you note. So we would sit down and write thank you notes and we didn't know what to say other than "thank you, we like these slippers you got us for Christmas." That was that note and then we did cards, my brother and I would make our own Christmas, Birthday, and Easter cards; we would do a little decoration and a message. I brought a couple of those and I'm going to download those to the archive. We would get construction paper or we would get the white cardboard paper that came with my dad's dry cleaned shirts and pull that out; that was great construction paper and we made great book covers out of those. We would flip them across the room at each other, we could play Frisbee with them as well so they were very versatile pieces of paper. What was your question?

[Laughing]

>>SPEAKER: I was thinking of asking of moving towards school a bit and what you've written.

>>JAMES: Oh yes, school.

>>SPEAKER: You wrote in the computers a composition piece, "The Cyber Writer's Tale", you wrote about Catholic School and writing, maybe you could talk about Christ the King.

>>JAMES: Yeah, well I brought my report card to scan in, not report my grades, but because the category system for literacy I thought was very interesting and that is that there were four different subjects: language, writing, reading, and spelling were four different things and I had grades in each of those core areas. I was always very good in reading and spelling and sort of B-ish in language and writing but writing meant hand-writing.

>>SPEAKER: Penmanship.

>>JAMES: Penmanship, exactly, in the Catholic school penmanship was extraordinarily important and they spent a lot of time in the first two grades on penmanship and as I said in the article it was connected to character. If you had a good hand you were obviously a together, stable, moral person and if your hand was a little shaky or rough there was something questionable about you; at least that was sort of the attitude that was conveyed in the instruction but there was a lot of time spent on that. 

>>SPEAKER: Were you encouraged to write stories and imaginative pieces?

>>JAMES: Not at all, never in my grade school, you never wrote stories. There was never even any long answer response in writing. Writing was always copying, there was a lot of copying letters or writing answers to questions and filling out the worksheets and then eventually reports and book reports but it was more reporting rather than imaginative stuff. I brought a science report I did I think in the fifth grade and it's got a dry cleaned shirt book cover which serves as a model of several things. 

>>SPEAKER: Well I'll tell a tale of you being interviewed for a second, in danger of being interviewed by somebody new.

>>JAMES: [Laughing]

>>SPEAKER: "Jenny and the Pope", did you write that for school or just on your own?

>>JAMES: That was on my own and I don't know where, I know I wrote it, but I don't know where it came from or what motivated it except that the Pope was visiting. It was a story about the Pope's visit and the Pope would have been John Paul the 23rd I think anyways. But I think that could have been pre-first grade or first grade based on the spelling.

>>SPEAKER: So it sounds like you knew how to read and write before you got to school even.

>>JAMES: I knew how to write phonetically so my spelling was very bad and then I got to school but you didn't actually produce any stories in my school until - well ever I guess. I don't know that we ever wrote an imaginative story but as I said it was mostly reports. In terms of reading I was reading a little bit by the time I got to first grade and then we had the reading groups and in our school in those days they were not trying to hide who was in what group; there was first group, second group, third group, and so on. I was always thrilled when we got a new reader and I would get the reader and I would sit down and I would zip right through it and I would read ahead when it wasn't my turn to read and I would read the whole reader and then I would have nothing to do because I had killed the story. I'd have to sit there and wait until the class kind of went through the whole reader. Then we got a new reader and then I got excited again for a while. Reading was slow in school, it just took a long time to get anything read and so that was kind of frustrating whereas at home I could go through two or three books in a day and it was fun. 

>>SPEAKER: Did that change in high school for you?

>>JAMES: It did, somewhat in high school but definitely in college where the reading load tipped the other way which meant there was more reading than I knew what to do with. Not all of it was enjoyable but it probably explains why I gravitated toward an English major in college because you got to read a lot of mostly interesting things as opposed to reading textbooks which is what you did in the other subjects. So given my love for reading, that was kind of dragging me in that direction. The other thing that I should mention is that reading at home - I'm dating this from when I was in high school up until college - it was always very comforting to read because I could take a book and that was kind of my number one relaxation which was to go take a book and go sit in the chair in the living room or in the basement or some place in my own room and just read a book and read it from start to finish and kind of get away from things for a while. So I did that a lot I'd say in high school especially.

>>SPEAKER: Do you think you still do that? Do you still retreat and read?

>>JAMES: Not so much, no, not during the days so much. The day is too busy to do that but at night I will read to go to sleep and that's sort of the main recreational reading that I do now and that's a weird way to read because it usually works, I go to sleep quickly so you don't really remember what you've read so you have to go back. So in the old days when I would read a lot of stuff, now it takes me forever to read one thing because I'm reading it at night while falling asleep and then having to start over.

>>SPEAKER: What about professional reading?

>>JAMES: Professional reading I used to do going back now ten years and more. If I was reading in an area I would pile up a bunch of books and articles and just plow through them like I used to read recreationally. So I think one of my strengths as a scholar was that I could get through a lot of stuff quickly and sort of adjust it and do stuff with it and that was fun, I enjoyed doing it. What has happened with the internet is that I do very little of that kind of reading anymore. Now it's more reading online and now it's lest piling stuff up than sort of tracking stuff through links. So I'll go over and read one thing and I'll go into the footnotes and find the link to something else so then I'm doing this trail that I don't even know what the trail was when I started but it's a very interesting trail and I'm kind of keeping a record in my notes online about the trail and I'm doing the bibliography and taking notes and learning stuff but it's a very different kind of reading I used to do with scholarly works. Maybe it's not now that I think of it because I used to - although I knew what I was going to read and would pile them all up to trail through them as never determined and I'd pick a book up and find a footnote in the book that would make me then have to pick up another book and it reminds me of something that a colleague at Purdue University told me years ago, "Hypertext reading, that's overrated. We've been doing hypertext reading forever with books and that's just scholarly reading and that's what everybody's always done." I think he had a point, it's just through print. I don't know how I got off on that.

[Laughing]

>>SPEAKER: Is your writing any different now than it was on paper?

>>JAMES: I talked about this a little in the computers and composition piece. I had sort of the same experience as Hidey, I used to write out everything long-hand and then use the typewriter to print the paper and then gradually I made the transition into the composing on the keyboard but the keyboard I first composed on was the typewriter.

>>SPEAKER: Maybe to thinking about digital technologies of literacy, when you're working with pen, pencil, paper, and then typewriter, when did you really first start working with computers?

>>JAMES: Well my dissertation, I was going through a period of torturous revisions on my dissertation, like a whole year worth of revisions and I had just gotten to Indiana, Purdue and Fort Wayne and a colleague there was university editor and he was in the process of putting all the print materials for the university handbook on all computers and digitizing them. He had this computer, it might have been the only computer in the university used for word processing, and he said, "Why don't you do your dissertation on that?" And I said, "Sure." So we let me use is TRS-80 model 4 computer to enter my dissertation and I did all the edits and revisions that way and it saved me a ton of time. A year later maybe I bought my own and at that point I was doing word processing. I had already before that been composing on the keyboard but now I just switched to composing on the computer keyboard. 

>>SPEAKER: How do you think, jumping ahead a little bit, your laptop, how has having a laptop changed your reading and writing practices if it has?

>>JAMES: Well I got my first laptop in '99 and I think twenty minutes after I had it I was done with desktop computers and I never had one sense and I hardly ever worked on one unless I had to because the laptop freed me from having to read and write any specific place and be able to take it anywhere and I could sit in the living room and do it or be in a coffee shop and read and write. The access to reading and research material and information, that's just amazing. I cannot believe - I don't what we did in 1982 when we were trying to get information. It was torturous, you walked to the library, I mean by the time you did step one you've already got the information on the internet. The level of quality of information - people are constantly trashing the quality of information on the internet - I didn't think the quality of information in the library was ever that good to begin with. I don't think the internet is any worse, it's always the question of you evaluating and sifting through and figuring out what you can use and what's worthwhile and what's not, it doesn't go away.

>>SPEAKER: You talked about your when you first went to computers because of your dissertation, it was your own need. Did that ever invert, where it was you pushing yourself into technology, have you ever had an experience where your employment has been what's pushed you?

>>JAMES: Absolutely, going to Purdue University in '88, I really particularly pushed Indiana Purdue because nobody was using computers to teach writing there. I go to Purdue and they just opened up a brand new computer lab for professional writing students and they're going to put me in it to teach. So that got me moving and thinking very quickly and right next to my new office when I got to Purdue was Gale Hawisher and my new colleague was Pat Sullivan and computers and composition was half centered there in Michigan tact. So suddenly I was in the hot bed of computers and writing. The graduate students were all learning this stuff and I just stepped right in with them Thereon Howard and Bob Johnson and Nancy Allen and Jenny Daughterman and other folks like that. 

>>SPEAKER: Is that still happening for you? I mean are there some more recent examples where you sort of had to keep-

>>JAMES: It doesn't happen consistently where there's like these sort of lucky moments where I sort of step into a place in a time and a person when everything gels and they're doing what I need to know or want to know and it all works and then at that point my technology skills go somewhere and I learn a new set of skills but then I just kind of bump along until that next moment kind of happens. It's really helped when you're in a situation with really good colleagues and really good graduate students working on projects and have some resources to kind of help you do new things. It's getting harder as I get older to learn new technologies, there's no question about it. I was up to speed on the web authoring in 1999 and by 2002 I was at the back of the class in reading group six in terms of web authoring and that happened really quickly. I thought I could skate for a while but not for very long. So I had to call on some colleagues, a graduate student Dough Ayeman in particular helped me learn the sort of CSS based HTML and CSS based web authoring but it was harder than I remember it being the first time I learned web authoring, which was straight out coding and there was not Dreamweaver when I learned web authoring. So that was a hard bump and then the second place I know I've needed to go is digital video and digital video recording and I just happened to have a wonderful partner who taught me at a time when I needed to know it, there was this great need on my part and she had the knowledge and I was ready to hear it and we had a session, it was about a 45 minute session I think, and it was just an incredibly empowering moment. I had done video editing classes ten years ago, six years ago, three years ago, and they never took. I was like, "Ok, I learned something but it didn't stay with me because I didn't have the need to know it and the moment wasn't right in terms of my development as an author." So it's also that timing thing that's very important in terms of learning. I made my first movie this past week and loaded it to the web and everybody who is under the age of thirty is like, "How lame is that?" But that was a big deal for me so thank you.

>>SPEAKER: I have a question thinking about knowing the type of the right people at the right moment at the right time. What can you talk about with your children whether working meetings with them when they were little or working with them now, for example when Thomas picked up texting, could you talk about how your children have influenced your literacy practices?

>>JAMES: Yeah, when I was working on the computer at home, like my father working with his legal pads, I was working on the computer at home and the kids would come in and get interested and want to play on the keyboard and they were sitting on my lap while I was working and want to play with the keyboard or I would get them programs. I'm trying to think of the drawing program Thomas had, KidPrint or something like that, it was a real early one where they just made objects and images online but he was fascinated with it. So he was using my computer early on and Jamie and Cathleen too but Thomas was really using the computer much more. So they just became computer users and all three, Thomas, Jamie, and Cathleen were all using computers to do papers and their still using them. At some point in there they moved ahead of their dad in terms of computer use and it was somewhere around late high school. With Thomas it was about fourth grade but others it was late high school I would say where suddenly their doing social networking and I'm asking them how that works and what was going on there and my kids all definitely got into text messaging before I did. My oldest, interestingly, did a lot of email when she was in college and that was our main form of communication with each other. I was thrilled that she would write me in the middle of the night and ask me questions and I would not be up in the middle of the night but I would be up at six in the morning and I'd answer them so she'd have the answer by eight o'clock when she got up so that was interesting. Somewhere in there email died for kids of that era and text messaging came in. Jamie is 27 and is still an emailer but the other two at 23 and 16, they do text messaging so they pushed me into text messaging so now I text message them and hardly ever email them. So they sort of taught me how to use that technology. Which I'm still not sure that I like it but that's the way you're going to communicate with your kids at this level and it's kind of a combination of you text message back and forth and then at some point a phone call happens to fill in the gaps and then you text message some more so we communicate that way. Meanwhile the oldest is still writing long emails. So it's definitely a form of family communication and I guess that ties back with the letter writing that I did with my relatives. I mentioned the thank you notes but what I didn't mention was when I went away to graduate school I would write extended family members, uncles, aunts, grandparents long notes and so that's how I taught myself to compose on the typewriter keyboard writing them notes and telling them what was going on because I had moved out of town at that point and they just wanted to know what was happening so this was how I kept in touch with them. How are we doing on time?

>>SPEAKER: We're doing good. We have got left the question about if there is anything you haven't answered that you would like to say? 

>>JAMES: I think we've covered everything that I wanted to talk about. We've covered school, work and family. Do you have any questions?

>>SPEAKER: Actually I have one more just to follow up with what you were talking about. The communicating long emails and now you're texting, how is that different? What can and cannot be said in those different forms because I think that this time period is a really interesting moment in history where texting is part of one generation but not another. So you're a person that is right on that cusp and so I'm wondering what is gained from it, what is lost from it, what can you say in texting?

>>JAMES: Well let me go back to the letters that I composed in print, I would tell stories in those, I would have little scenarios and tell stories and there were long letters and my favorite length was eight pages single-spaced so that was a fair amount of stuff in there. I compare those to the letters that are in my family archives and file cabinets and all the notes that people wrote when they were away and they would write two or three or four hand-written pages on note paper telling a story if they're away. Now you can do that on email and that's how my daughter and I would have long talks on email and you could share an experience. With text messaging you can't do that, there's no long, elaborate detail or development of an idea, you've got to compact it and condense it to an unbelievable level. You've got to compact it into this six word note that you might have the opportunity to unpack later but the advantage of text messaging is sort of the quickness, the immediacy, the spontaneity. My son actually writes fairly long text messages meaning thirty to fifty words if he get chatty. That would just take me too long, I mean I'm not that good with the thumbs, I do maybe ten or fifteen words and then I'm afraid I'm going to lose it or my cell phone service will die and so I send it. You're limited in terms of time and space. 

>>SPEAKER #2: Are we done?

>>SPEAKER: Yeah, thank you.

>>SPEAKER #2: Well done, James.