Reader's Autobiography

My name is Nancy Knowles. I hold a BA East Asian Studies from UCLA, an MA in English Literature and MA in Teaching Writing from Humboldt State University, CA, and a Ph.D. in English Literature from the University of Connecticut, Storrs. My hobbies are hanging out with my family (husband, daughter, two dogs, and one cat), reading, exercise, teaching, writing, photography, and when I have the chance, horses, skiing, soccer, and softball.

I have always enjoyed reading. I don’t remember learning to read, so I must have learned young. I do remember reading Dick and Jane books in first grade. When I was in third grade, I made a film strip about a book called Champ the Gallant Collie. I was a sucker for horse and/or dog books. I also read all the Nancy Drew books.

In Mr. Soderberg’s fourth and fifth grade classes, we got to pick books to read for silent reading time after lunch. Mr. Soderberg would get out the big pillows, and we would all lie around on the carpet reading whatever we wanted. Savage Sam was my favorite. I even remember the kind of musty smell that book had.

In Mr. Soderberg’s class, I made a book float for a science fiction book, maybe Door to Another World, although I think the float had a space ship and planets depicted, and that book didn’t really have any outer space scenes that I remember. Mr. Soderberg would sometimes turn off the lights after lunch and read aloud from a book. This book was about some boys who went into the Andes and encountered piranhas. I was so entranced with the story that I didn’t realize I was sticking my pencil in and out of the side of the book float, and it was squeaking. After awhile, I noticed that Mr. Soderberg had stopped reading, and the class was quiet. When I looked up, he was standing behind me with his finger between the pages, smirking.

When I got to sixth grade, I told my reading teacher I had read all the books on his list for the year except Moby Dick, so after I finished Moby Dick, he had me read whatever I wanted and write up study questions for him.

Outside of school, I visited the public library often. When I was little, we had a book mobile that would come to the Alpha Beta grocery store parking lot once a week. I remember looking at the spines of the books for the science fiction symbol. Then, my architect parents designed a library building, and I would spend hours there in the young adult section. I determined to read all the books from A to Z, but I don’t think I made it that far. In high school, I wrote an essay that won a scholarship about how visits to the library were like journeys into adventures. I thought it was neat that the first annual scholarship went, without intending it, to the daughter of the building’s architects.

In high school, I found out that you didn’t have to read everything teachers assigned. I did read most everything, including plenty of Shakespeare because my teacher Mrs. Jackson had a crush on Laurence Olivier, but I remember getting an "A" on a paper about Crime and Punishment even though I’d read only two of the five sections in the book.

I really liked the play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead by Tom Stoppard. I decided I would write the AP Literature exam on that play, no matter what the prompt. The prompt turned out to be perfect—write about the impact of the title of a literary work—but I had gotten myself so overexcited about the play that I couldn’t write very clearly about it. I got a four out of five, and Mrs. Jackson said she thought I could have done better.

Even though I loved books, I didn’t plan to study literature in college. I wanted to be a writer, and I thought I needed something to write about, so I entered the Foreign Service School at Georgetown University, planning to become a diplomat and travel the world. My complete inability to do economics foiled that plan, but when I transferred to UCLA, I just wanted to finish school, so I completed an East Asian Studies major, taking all the literature electives I could get.

Only after I’d been working in accounting for a few years did I realize I needed to go back to school and really study literature. Of course, I still thought I was going to be a writer and that master’s level study would give me time to write. It wasn’t until I stepped into my own classroom during my third year of master’s work that I discovered I wanted to teach reading and writing because I enjoyed talking about ideas with others.

Now, as an instructor of literature, I read and reread a lot. For example, I’ve probably read John Updike’s "A & P" 100 times since I first taught it in 1994. It’s such a great story! My favorite kind of reading is still science fiction and fantasy. Currently, I’m finishing Robert Jordan’s The Eye of the World, and I often teach one of my favorite speculative fictions, Sheri S. Tepper’s Gate to Women’s Country. I would also like to read more "serious" literature, but when I’m tired from teaching too much, SF and fantasy is a refuge. In my small chunks of spare time, I am writing my own fantasy novel.

My family enjoys reading. My father is currently reading everything by Cormac McCarthy, which he enjoys for the style of writing. My husband is a writer and tends to read books that will inspire his current project. Right now, he’s reading first-person novels because he is working on a first-person-narrated novel of his own. My daughter is six. She can read pretty well but prefers to be read to. We read Calvin and Hobbes every day. I think she likes Calvin’s rebelliousness and the irony with which he is depicted. We’ve also been reading Coraline by Neil Gaiman and a book called Butterfly Meadow. She also likes the Magic Treehouse books, and we’re in the middle of Summer of the Sea Serpent.

Sample ENGL 104 Quote-Response Assignment

I really like the way John Updike’s wording in "A & P" captures the character of the first-person narrator. Updike writes in Sammy’s voice, "The sheep pushing their carts down the aisle—the girls were walking against the usual traffic (not that we have one-way signs or anything)—were pretty hilarious. You could see them, when Queenie’s white shoulders dawned on them, kind of jerk, or hop, or hiccup, but their eyes snapped back to their own baskets and on they pushed" (Updike 16). The words that convey Sammy’s character are "sheep," the way he restates ideas like "or anything" and "kind of jerk, or hop, or hiccup." The sheep comment indicates that he separates himself from conventional housewives; he’s male, he’s younger, he sees girls as more attractive, and he would of course never do anything sheep-ish in terms of conforming to social norms. His restating also conveys his masculinity and youth. He is casual and irreverent. These qualities are why the girls impress him so much. In addition to being pretty or at least charismatic, they buck the system by doing the unexpected, coming in very casually dressed in bathing suits, and they seem to enjoy the attention they get. That’s the quality he admires most in himself, rebellion, and that’s the reason he decides to stick up for them by quitting. In the end, it’s his youth that has betrayed him because he doesn’t understand that society pressures adults to stay within the bounds of social norms. He can rebel and quit, but the world doesn’t have to admire his rebellion. As the ending of the story suggests, the world from then on was going to be difficult.

Summer Reading

I've read a number of good books this summer. One I really liked was Deerskin by Robin McKinley. I also reread Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card. In honor of Oregon 150, I also read Craig Lesley's Winterkill and Molly Gloss's Jump-Off Creek, both of which are set in Eastern Oregon. I really enjoyed recognizing places, particularly downtown La Grande in the early 20th century.

Now, I'm reading a book by Robert Jordan called The Eye of the World. I've never read anything by Jordan before, but I've heard good things about his writing. It seems pretty traditional sword-and-sorcery fantasy so far. I tend to read more women fantasy writers than men because I get tired of the traditional women's roles in fantasy, but I'm enjoying Jordan's story and characters so far. It's a very thick book with plenty of description, so maybe I won't finish it for a few months, especially if I'm reading for classes, too. Here is a link to information about the book on Jordan's blog: I also pulled the book cover image from this site.

ENGL 104 online

I'm creating an online ENGL 104 Introduction to Literature course for Fall 2009, and I want the course to be interactive and have a real-world connection. So, I'm thinking that maybe asking students to use and maintain blogs about their reading would be a good way to address these goals. I like that the blogs are personal, we can include photos, and students and friends can comment. I'm a little concerned about teaching students to use blogs at a distance and about the time commitment required of us all to maintain and read the blogs. But, I would be assigning reading journals if the students were on campus, so perhaps this is a good substitute. I'll play around a little more with this and see what I think...