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Theodora Abigail
Mr. Fletcher
English 1301
15 September 2014
Voyager

You never know ahead of time what something is really going to be like. What happens
when we open the box? What is waiting on the other side of that door? The places we go and
people we meet and books we borrow are all enigmas when we first encounter themthey are
merely lumps of possibilities. It isnt until we brave the deepness of their unknown atmospheres
that we can even begin to know what they are really like.
I wade. I float. I sink. I swim. I fall deep into the mush of words and they become me. I
open my identity to the unknown stories, to reading, and to literacy, and I allow myself to love it
all.
A few days after my fifth birthday, I received a massive wooden closet as a gift from my
grandmother. Instead of using it for clothes as my grandmother intended, however, my mother
and father bought wooden shelves and began using it as a bookshelf for me.
On every subsequent present-receiving occasion, I got books. By the time I turned seven I
had amassed an armada of text. My bookshelf, my pride and joy, my WMD, at its peak housed
over 150 books. These included works by Enid Blyton, J.K. Rowling, Agatha Christie, Roger
Hargreaves, and Orson Scott Card.
Every night, my mother would come into my room and ask, What do you want to read

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today, Ebby? I would climb off my bright red racecar bed, pull out a book from the closet, and
hand it to her as I made myself comfortable in the blankets. Sometimes she would read the book
to me, and other times we would take turns, one page at a time.
Reading stories is always thrilling for me because a good story is properly unpredictable.
The books that are available on our planet are the biggest stores of potentialuntil the book is
read, anything could be beneath its cover. We must open the book and give it a chance to tell its
story. Truly reading a book is not about being able to point out the literary devices its author
uses, or about identifying rhetoric. Reading is about deep immersion.
I loved reading.
On my seventh birthday, my mom gave me another gift. I opened the present andwow!
Another book! This was awesome! But then I cracked the spine open and saw that the pages
were empty and almost immediately my face went blank. My flirtation with the English language
had been until that point simply thata flirtation. I liked English, but I was not willing to
commit by writing paragraphs or stories. Ick, no thank you, Im sorry: That is not for me.
What am I supposed to do with this?, I sulked.
You write in it, Ebby.
Why?
Because I said so. Its important. Write about your day. You need to practice writing.
I hated writing.
I didnt want to keep a diary. I tried skimping on it for the first few days. But my mom
visited my room every night and sat down with me. Ebby, you need to write, she murmured.
So I wrote. When we had a blackout, I wrote. When the snow piled up in front of our door and
we couldnt go out for two days, I wrote. When the streets flooded, I wrote.

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But I still hated writing.


After about a year of journaling, I began to hit numerous brick walls. Every entry
sounded trite and boring, and I used the same adjectives over and over to describe different
events. My use of qualifiers mushroomed, growing within my diction like a quiet and impatient
cancer. I went to my mother for help, assured that my staunchest defender would certainly be
able to help me out. But she couldnt. My mother is a first-generation immigrant to the United
States and learned English as her third language. She was no comma connoisseur, and her skills
in English syntax, grammar, and diction were limited. I trudged back to my desk, defeated and
humiliated.
But I was lucky. A few months later, at the beginning of third grade, I was placed in
Writing Challenge. This was an accelerated writing class for students that had been
specifically recommended by teachers. Writing Challenge met once a week, and in it the students
focused on writing creative fiction.
On the first day of class, I was nervous as hell. I remember standing right outside of the
classroom door, afraid of my future classmates, afraid of my teacher, afraid of the extra
homework. What was waiting on the other side of that door? I read stories for fun, sure, and
relished fictional possibilities. But real people? Real situations? Was I ready for that?
I walked into class and saw that there were only two other students, both girls, in my
class. Across from them sat a dimpled, kindly-looking woman with charming reading glasses.
She beckoned me over and I took my seat in between the other students.
Im Mrs. Shephard, she said, with a bright grin on her face. Im going to be teaching you for
the next three years. Huzzah, huzzah.
From Writing Challenge, I learned that it is alright to begin with terrible ideas: mistakes

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are a natural byproduct of living a full life. In the first year of class, I wrote a twenty-page-long
story called Caspian and the Unagi, and it was awful, and it was perfectly alright. I began
applying my ardor for books to my life, and found myself slowly inching outside of my selfimposed box.
We tell stories. We tell them every day without even thinking about it. The world tosses
possibilities our way, we respond, and out of these interactions come more and more and more
stories. We are all galaxies of potential.
Writing Challenge with Mrs. Shephard helped me to love writing just as much as I love
reading. Under her tutelage I learned that there is just as much discovery in writing as there is in
reading. When I write a story, I must take time to discover just who my characters are. Where are
they from? What do they like? What do they like to do? How do they look? When I read, I must
also take time to discover who the authors characters are, using these same questions. Then I
must explore the storys plot, its setting, and its application to my modern world.
Literacy to me has always been about unpeeling possibilities. I chase after stories because
I want to embrace my tragic and touching humanity. The joy we feel when we meet a lover, the
sorrow at a loss, our anger at perceived injustice, the happiness our species is always searching
for: I want to feel all of those. I want to consume the universe and hold it in the soul of my being.
Unfortunately, I cant do that by myself. It will take me one lifetime just to discover my
own story; it would take me eons to discover all of them. But by reading and writing, I can travel
through space-time.
I wade. I float. I sink. I swim. Here in the empty space are love, joy, peace, and tragedy. I
am the stories I have read, and I am the stories I have written. Day by day, I travel deeper into

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the person I am meant to become, and as I search for the unknown stars, I allow myself to love
them all.

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