I couldn’t find a pic that satisfied my personal requirement for this post.  It was this or cat pics.  I chose the lesser evil.

Anyway…

My parents were somewhat of an antonym to stereotypes at the time.  My mother was (is) an auto-mechanic, my father was a nurse, and I have memories even from early childhood of them pouring over either technical manuals or medical texts.  My father in particular would sometimes involve me in these studies, and would talk with me about various aspects of anatomy and medical procedures he found interesting.

My mother had to deal with a great deal of sexism in her field (successful female auto-mechanics weren’t exactly common in the 80’s.  They still aren’t), and her literacy in the field helped to ensure she had a place in it.  She did this by doing what those in major technical fields have come to know well:  adapting to new techniques and technologies, ultimately to advance in the field and stay gainfully employed.  To that end, she was one of the forerunners in our area to learn to repair automatic transmissions, with a specialty on repairing the then-new (and to most of the old guard, foreign), now-common versions with electronic interfaces.

Reading was also an aspect of their entertainment, though my memory of that is a bit more vague.  My mother enjoyed fantasy novels, my father liked science fiction.  Both of them liked horror and would often share books, and was a large factor in my first exposures to all three genres.  I like to think I would have gravitated toward those three genres on my own, but I probably did take a large influence from both of them in that regard, as I write my first novel involving many aspects from all three genres.

Hello, My name is Jason Lewis.  I’m majoring in English Education with an emphasis on linguistics, with the aim of possibly teaching overseas.  Eventually I’d like to finish one of a few novels I’ve started, but that’s pretty far in the future.

I tend to write fantasy, science-fiction and horror, or a melding of the three depending on the inspiration.  My reading has often taken me in similar directions, and I greatly enjoy the works of a few popular authors such as Stephen King, Michael Crichton, J. R. Tolkien, and others.  King and Crichton are particularly guilty pleasures due to their similar ideal of blending fantasy and believable scientific progress and stylistic writing, in the case of King a level of “grit” and remorseless description I find immensely satisfying, and in Crichton a way of emphasizing the gravity of minute details.

Szwed poses some interesting questions as to why I came to read the authors I choose to.  While my parents did emphasize the value of literacy to a degree, I don’t feel that I was pushed in a particular direction by them, although my first exposures were certainly important.  My father unknowingly introduced me to Stephen King when I asked him, “What’s the scariest book you’ve ever read?”  His response was “Pet Sematary.”  I asked if he had it, and he did.  I asked if I could borrow and read it, and he allowed me to, with a disclaimer that he was not responsible for any nightmares about our cat.

What I hadn’t told him was that I intended to read that book for a book report to my 7th grade English teacher for the sole purpose of irking her.  I had good reason, as I had wanted to do a book report for Michael Crichton’s  “Sphere” originally, only to be told it was “too advanced for me”, not knowing I had already completed the novel.  The most natural action in my defiant pre-teen mind was to pick the most nightmarish thing I could find and report on that instead.  To that end, I found success, as well as a new favorite author in the process.
                                             
Is petty revenge a valid reason for literacy in Szwed’s eyes?  Not likely, but it does give a good angle of insight on how varied the motivations, causes and notions about literacy can be.  Given that I read for pleasure at a fairly young age, perhaps against the norm, it certainly poses some interesting questions as to our conventional paths into literacy, usually thought of as rote memorization through grade school with structured assigned readings on a gradually increasing scale of difficulty and content.  I don’t consider myself different intellectually than most of my peers, so what changed my perspective in such an unusual way?  Why did I take to it where others found it difficult or drudging?  Food for thought.