Excerpt from an interview with Cyrus Samii.

Q: What are your earliest memories of reading?

A: My dad used to read me stories before bed. He’d read to me in Farsi, Persian kid stories. There was one story about a mouse’s tail that gets chopped off and he goes searching for it so he can sew it back on. In another one, a kid sleeps all the time so his mom tricks him into going outside and locks him out there. That one scared me for some reason. And there was one about a goat…

[When my parents read to me] I would memorize the lines and say it as they read. My dad would pause and I’d say the next line.

I found the idea of mass produced literacy images intriguing. Those with literacy difficulties are almost always portrayed in negative ways in our social sphere. Hamilton talks about not being sure how this overall negative feeling towards the less literate has been achieved, but it certainly exists around us.

“…but we were not sure how this negativity was achieved or how to go about constructing alternative, ‘positive’ images.”

Changing the way an entire culture views literacy sounds nearly impossible, especially in our culture where images are constantly put in front of us, often without us even noticing. Media, of course, is a major factor in the way many of us think about ANYthing, including literacy. The idea Hamilton gets at is that the idea of literacy has been constrained. That we have a very narrow and limited view on what it means to be literate. Changing that view is one of the first steps to putting it in a more inclusive positive light.