15 Brooke Briner – Literacy Narrative
Brooke Briner is a second-year student majoring in Technical and Professional Writing. This is her Literacy Narrative she completed for her Reading, Writing, & Inquiry W131 class last year for Dr. Kelly Blewett. Professor Kelly Blewett notes “Brooke’s literacy narrative is a lovely account of her experiences with writing and longstanding desire to be a writer—and I love the way it’s written!”
Literacy Narrative
Undoubtedly, writing has always been my passion. I think my life experiences have always been showing me that my ultimate goal is to be a writer. The book Writing About Writing states, “Writing is Impacted by Identities and Prior Experiences” (p. 12). This Threshold Concept of writing is explained as:
“How and why you write, what you think about writing, and how you make sense of texts when you read are impacted by all that you’ve done and experienced. Your experiences with literacy (reading and writing) are part of who you are, part of your identity.” (Wardle & Downs, 2017, p. 12)
Each experience in life that I have had thus far has only deepened my passion for writing, sustaining my goal to one day be a writer.
If you were to ask me, I would say I had the ‘’typical’’ school experience. I believe I was awakened to my love for writing in the first grade when I won first place for my grade in a competition for a story that I wrote about going to Disney World with my parents. This was a story where I drew illustrations along with my words. The kids who won this competition in their particular grades were in the town’s local paper. I remember the excitement I felt at the time I won for my grade. While in the second grade, I participated in the spell bowl, which was an after-school club where we practiced spelling while preparing for spelling bees. I was also always writing stories throughout elementary school, so many that I probably couldn’t and still can’t keep count of how many there were. Many times, I would write stories with my friends about our friend group and the different adventures we would have, some of which I have printed and stored in a folder to this day.
They are like gold to me. My favorite story (and one of many) that we wrote was called “The Weird Custodian,” a story about a mummy that posed as a janitor at our school that stalked us in and outside of school.
For the majority of my time in elementary school, I was more interested in writing than I was in reading. What ultimately changed that was my best friend Bing. While we were quite opposites personality-wise, we became very close. We were attached at the hip. It was always “Bing and Brooke.” If someone needed to find one of us, they looked for the other. She was extremely smart. She read a lot of books. I think she had a lot of time to read because she was always at the library or her parent’s restaurant after school until closing with nothing much to do besides answering phone calls here and there and taking orders. She had started reading the Harry Potter books which, for some reason, seemed uninteresting to me. I didn’t even want to give the books a chance until one day at the lunch table in fifth grade, she and some other kids from our class were talking about how great they were. Not only did I hear those comments quite often, but at that time the commercials for the first movie were all over television. So, I decided to give the first book a try. I became addicted to the series and still am to this day. Those books opened up the world of reading to me in a broader sense. The act of being able to create something so special and then seeing it brought to life in the form of a movie was so amazing to me. I became someone who, if I knew a movie was coming out, would have to read the book first as the book was the original form and I wanted to make sure the movie remained true to the book–If it didn’t, I was very upset.
Going into my middle and high school years, I wasn’t writing as many stories as I had in elementary school. Bing had moved away to New Jersey in the seventh grade and for a little while, I became unhappy. Maybe in hindsight, this contributed to my lack of writing during this time. Fortunately, we were able to still communicate by writing letters to each other. Not long after that, we became able to communicate by computer. I am grateful that we were able to maintain our friendship, although we did slightly drift apart because of the distance between us. She was even a bridesmaid in my wedding.
My love for writing never went away though. Throughout high school, I believe something that drove me to love writing even more, as odd as it sounds, was television series. At first, it was just a fixation on the look of the show, the feel, the characters, etc. Then I learned that ‘Screenwriters’ existed, the people who put the whole story together. (This would be a dream job for me to this day.) Knowing that you can create a story and see it come to life is still amazing to me. Something that is “yours” that you get to share with so many people, and while there will be people that don’t like your work, many will, and that would be a moving experience.
Towards the end of high school, I remembered thinking, “Nothing is interesting for younger people to read in the newspaper.” My parents would always have a newspaper delivered every morning, and I had an idea that there should be something that younger people could read in a newspaper and be able to relate to. I decided to write to someone who worked for the NWI Times, the main newspaper of Northwest Indiana, where I grew up, and told them that I thought they should consider having an article in the newspaper dedicated to teens where they would write in about issues affecting them in their everyday life. To my surprise, they answered me saying that it was a great idea. They started the article with me being the first person to write a piece for them for this particular section of the paper. I was excited to have that opportunity. I believe I wrote a few articles for them, along with other teens, and even went in to get my picture taken to be placed next to my article. A sweet coworker of my husband’s at the time even cut my picture and article out of the paper to hang in their office.
This article eventually stopped running a couple of years later. I’m not exactly sure what ended up happening, but I am proud of it. I think if I had had some guidance or taken more time to think about it, I may have pushed to try to get some type of entry-level position at the paper but at that time, I was focused on being newly married and on the job that I did have, so my pursuit of writing fell on the back burner for the time being.
It was as if writing was lying dormant inside of me and would come to life once I thought about it again, and I did think about it again and again. It occurred to me that I needed to pursue this as a career, it’s what I wanted. I visited a school in Chicago that I had wanted to attend to pursue being a Screenwriter possibly, and I loved it, but then I found out that I was pregnant. At the time, I thought that was the end of having any kind of writing career.
My priorities then became all about being a mom. What I thought was the end of having a writing career turned into the happiest thing that ever could have happened to me. Little did I know, it did not mean the end of having a writing career. It just helped me learn more about another side of myself, someone who didn’t exist until I became a mom. I gained a new best friend, my daughter, who would later come to love so many of the things that I do. Years later, I had another little girl and my devotion to my kids continued to grow. I decided to take those years to spend with my kids and raise them, to form special bonds with them, and that is something I will never regret. I knew I could come back to writing again.
I have tried to be a literacy sponsor for both of my girls. Of course, I have introduced them to the Harry Potter books and the movies. They both have a love for it, as I do (especially my oldest). I always encourage them to read and to explain how fun reading can be. My oldest even shares my love for the television shows that I love so much, the shows that opened up my eyes to other worlds, characters, stories, etc. Both of my girls even have the middle names of two of my favorite fictional characters from my all-time favorite series who were best friends in the show, which is very meaningful to me.
This notion of being a writer always comes back and has been nagging at me for years now. My journey very much resonates with the threshold concept I spoke to on page one, my experiences with literacy (reading and writing) are a part of who I am, part of my identity. I feel like it’s time for me to return to my passion and figure out how to do what I love. To quote one of my favorite movies, relatable to my narrative, Luna Lovegood, in Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, says, “My mum always said things we lose have a way of coming back to us in the end. If not always in the ways we expect” (2007). My path to becoming a writer has been a bit up and down along the way, but it never really left and is here to stay.
References
Yates, D. (Director). (2007). Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix [Film]. Warner Brothers.
Wardle, E., & Downs, D. (2017). Writing about writing (4th ed.). Bedford/St. Martin’s.