Literacy Narrative

The Traveling Library

When I was fourteen years old, I was forced to leave behind my library, personally financed and curated by me over the four years since I first became interested in reading. Prior to the age of ten, I was adamantly convinced that I would never, COULD NEVER, enjoy the act of reading. If things had continued as they were, I might have been correct, but as fate would have it my life would be changing drastically shortly after my eleventh birthday.

When I was just a year old my mother and father decided to pick up and move from Denver, Colorado to Ghana where I would grow up for the next ten years of my life. During this time, both my older sister and I were homeschooled and our family frequently moved houses. As a result, my sister and I grew to be really close, largely representing each other's main interactions with members of our age range (she is two years older).

In 2010 my family decided that we would be returning to the United States, and that the first step of this process would be sending my older sister ahead to start school. After she left, I was forced to face many pieces of myself that I had never even considered before. Having never been separated from her prior to this event, her departure caused me to consider who I was without her. How many of my thoughts and opinions came from my own brain and moral compass, and how many I had downloaded as the younger sibling? How much of my personality was organic to my personality, and how much was cultivated as the counterpart to someone whose upbringing had been inseparable to mine? Most importantly, I had to answer what I would do with the abundance of free time that my new situation provided me. Reading became that answer.

As it happened, the activity that used to invoke dread and boredom became the solution to nearly every dilemma I was experiencing at the time. Reading allowed me to address my newly developed identity crisis by presenting me with stories and ideas that I never got to experience and challenged me to think critically on my own about these new concepts I was being presented with. Most importantly, it provided me with the tools to stave off my ever-growing boredom as I sat at the house day after pedantic day.

At first, I only read what I could immediately get my hands on: I read a series of informational animal and insect books for a while before moving on to reading passages on Native American myths that were dispersed throughout a book on various Native American cultures. Fiction quickly rose as my favorite genre, and with most of the books in our home belonging to either my parents or being from my childhood, I quickly ran out of reading material. In my most desperate hours, I even crept into my older sister’s recently vacated room and read her Candy Apple books, a glittery series full of hot gossip aimed at prepubescent girls, with titles like “Boy Next Door” and “Miss Popularity.” Eventually, I came to the realization that my parents would be thrilled to fund my new obsession and got them to buy me books more directly aligned with my interests. From there I got into the Animorphs series (which I read with no sense of sequential order, nor did I complete the series), the Five Ancestors series by Jeff Stone, the Alex Rider books by Anthony Horowitz, The Fire Thief series by Terry Deary and on and on.

Most of these beginning books were a part of the collection of books I mentioned at the beginning, with me eventually spending my own money to buy the rest of the books in these series.

When I left my books behind at fourteen, I was under the impression that I would be returning to them within a month’s time: in truth, it would be nearly 5 years before I saw them again, and even then not all of them returned to me, and of those, not all survived in the best of shape. So what happened? As fate would have it, my family’s return to the United States also brought about the end of their ten-year marriage, and in the ensuing months, my family would be caught in a Cold War of divorce. The divorce process began shortly before my freshman year of high school, which was also going to be my very first year attending a brick-and-mortar school. By the time I finished the school year, my father was awarded custody of my siblings and I, and we moved in with him and his new partner at the time. That summer, my dad announced to us that we would all be leaving for a month to go visit my grandmother in Atlanta– we never returned. At the end of our month-long vacation, my father sat my siblings and me down and explained to us that we would be staying in Atlanta, as fate would have it that would only be true for another year.

During that year I went through the second period of isolation. Though I was no longer physically without friends, I had left most of them at my last school and still wasn’t the best at making new ones, and the hour-long drive to school and back ensured that my social life wasn’t the easiest to cultivate.

In the four years I had been in America by this point, I had maintained my love of reading, but had remained adamant in my dislike for writing. Despite this, my attraction to literature had cultivated my writing ability, so when I was presented with a class project that required us to produce a creative project, my chosen avenue for creation was through the written word. The subject of the project was the classic Greek play Antigone, so I decided to write an epilogue from the perspective of Ismene, Antigone’s sister who survives the play. It was originally supposed to only be a handful of paragraphs, just enough to fulfill the assignment, but as I progressed the story continued to grow until I had written fourteen pages. When my teacher read it, she was thrilled, and her excitement inspired me to soften my oppositional stance on writing.

As the school year drew to a close, my father came to his kids with some more ground-shaking news: he was engaged. The woman he would be marrying is my current stepmother whom I now love very much, but also someone that I had not met prior to this announcement. Furthermore, we learned, we would be moving to Denver, Colorado to live with her.

Having more shallow roots in Georgia than I did in California, this time the sudden move was much easier, but that still didn’t make it easy. For a while we lived as five people in a small two-bedroom apartment– my older sister had left once more, this time flying around the world as a part of a performance group, leaving me, my father, my younger sister, my new stepmom, and her daughter. One day, my father came to me and gave me two options for schooling: I could either attend a school centered around math and science, or a performing arts school. I have always been more inclined to the arts and humanities than I have in math or the sciences, so I chose to attend Denver School of the Arts, though I hardly knew what the choice would mean for me at the time. The school I had attended my freshmen year had also been a school for the arts where I had done dance, theater, guitar, and visual art, doing well in the first two, and okay in the last two. Despite my abilities in dance in the theater, I didn’t like the idea of having to perform constantly so I decided to take a chance on being a creative writing major.

In the years since that decision, I have become much more focused on my skills and abilities as a writer, and have tried numerous styles and approaches, and grown immensely. I managed to recover some of the books I was forced to leave in California, and they now represent the cornerstone of a much larger and growing library I have started at my home in Denver. I am currently working as a bookseller, giving me both intellectual and physical access to the most recent books and conversations around them, and I hope to continue to collect as many books as possible: to read, to share, and to explore all the corners of the world I can’t reach from my bedroom.