1998-Upper Level
Honorable Mention
Reading, Writing, and Rational Thought:
From Comic Books to College Texts
By Elaine A. Hakala
I wasn't interested in books when I was very young, except for an interest in comic books. Maybe that's because I was never really read to consistently. My mother claims to have read to me some when I was younger, but I don't remember it. Giving birth to five kids in seven years, and having one die at three days old, sort of cut into her time for entertaining me with thrilling renditions of The Cat in the Hat. I had to entertain myself with what I could find, and I picked up some basic reading skills from some of the kid's shows on television in the sixties. When I hit that magical age of six and went to elementary school, I was introduced to the first real books I can remember. There I learned about the world of Alice and Jerry, who played all the time and had such a wonderful life. Jerry even had a dog named Spot who sounded like great fun. I always wanted that dog for my very own. And Alice had a beautiful doll with golden hair named Betsy Lee that I wanted, too. Guess what my sister who was born that year was named at my insistence? She's hated me for it ever since, and I can tell you in all honesty, she didn't end up being a doll either.
So you see the influence of books had already begun to affect my life even at that age, even though they hadn't gotten into my blood at that point. Rather I did my own thing, and I was much happier just riding my bike, playing dolls with my friends, or reading comic books, which amounted to mostly looking at the pictures. Even before I started school, I remember riding my bike to the local gas station every week to buy a bag of penny candy and a new comic book with money I got from finding soda bottles and trading them in for the nickel deposit. Superman, Spiderman, Aquaman, Wonder Woman, and The Archies were my favorites. They had such fascinating adventures, but the pictures fired my imagination more than the text at that point in my life. Through the brightly colored images I could visualize myself flying through the sky like Superman; I even had dreams about flying that way and was convinced I actually could during part of my childhood--I just could never seem to manage it while I was awake. And I could so easily see myself in a poodle skirt and matching sweater, hanging out at the malt shoppe with Archie and Betty and all of the gang. The words there told me little. I didn't really care what they were actually talking about from frame to frame. The pictures were my inspiration simply to be there with the characters, and that was the fun of it for me. About the only thing I actually remember reading for fun during my elementary years was Mad Magazine, because reading much of anything was just too much like school to me. Reading for school was something I had to do whether I wanted to or not, and usually I didn't want to.
Part of the reason I didn't enjoy my early years in school was that I was an average student who made terrible marks in penmanship, something they graded students on back then as if fine motor skills, or more to the point--the lack of them--were a sign of your place on the scale between true intelligence and dull existence. By the second grade I consistently made D's on my report card in handwriting, which prompted my mother, who had beautiful penmanship, to force me to sit for hours practicing my letters. This drudgery didn't inspire me. It traumatized me. But she gave up before too long, just shaking her head and muttering about how no one would EVER be able to read anything I wrote. By the time I entered the third grade where they taught cursive writing, my teacher gave up on me as well after half a year of not being able to read any of my papers. She just told me to print from then on. What that did in effect, besides making me feel ashamed for being unable to do the work, and therefore lackadaisical in my approach, was make my handwriting a gnarled and nasty mix of both styles--a condition that remains today in my longhand.
Not being able to write legibly didn't exactly inspire good grades in my English classes in junior high and high school either, but luckily I had a couple of other things going for me that brought my grades up. I had always been gifted verbally, and by that time I had begun to develop the thirst for literature that permeates my soul these days. In my three years in high school, I filled at least two library cards a year, usually three. Reading became a passion. And I read so many varied things that they began to open major doors in my mind. On my own I read Faulkner and Tolstoy and Melville and Tolkein, as well as every trashy romance novel I could put my hands on.
But I still shuddered at the thought of having to write. The only things I wrote during that time for fun were long and tragic poems filled with teenaged angst, and those were mostly for my eyes only. That angst was well earned in a household where original thought was stoutly repressed, but it was also a sign that I was to recognize in later life as the first major upswing of my abstract thought processes. I'd begun to recognize that I didn't think the same way my parents did--or most of my friends for that matter. I saw injustice in the world around me, when others just simply went right on living in oblivion. They never saw the subtleties in the things they said and did. I saw injustice being done to me as well, driving me into serious depression. That deep state of emotion in turn drove me deeper into books, for they became the fantasy life that I needed to escape my realities, allowing me to immerse myself into the lives of characters rather than my own existence.
Escapism became a way of life for me. I worked hard and graduated from high school a year early in my attempt to get away from my parents, then started college five weeks after my seventeenth birthday, giving me the ultimate escape from my troubled home. But I was nowhere near ready for the experience of living in a dorm at Georgia Southern, a fact proved out by the over two point drop in my grade point average the first year. I preferred other diversions than those prescribed in the college handbook. It was the seventies, and sex, drugs, and rock & roll were the order of the day. My parents cut me off shortly after my eighteenth birthday, ending my inglorious college career, and forcing me into the care of my boyfriend at the time because it was the only place I had to live. There I found myself in a really bad situation I didn't get out of for five years. I married him, and he ran my life the entire time. There were no books or writing in my life at all when I was with him, for those were things he did not allow, much less rational thought--only one unending, surrealist attempt at escape through the serious party lifestyle of the late seventies and early eighties.
But I couldn't escape the birth of my daughter when I was twenty. That was a reality I couldn't ignore. Nor could I ignore the situation we were both in. I finally mustered the strength to make the major break two years later, and started on my quest for normalcy, career, and the American Dream. Throwing myself back into the real world, I cut my teeth on as much reality as I could, growing stronger mentally and emotionally every day, and discovering some old friends in the process when the big outside world got too tough at times--books. After all, I had to have my escape in some form or fashion. And I grew to love my escape once more, filling my shelves with old book friends and lots of new ones: Heinlein, Bradbury, Saberhagen, Donaldson, and Zelazny just to name a few. It was also during this time that I began to explore all those gray areas of thought that I'd repressed all those years after being told at home by my parents as well as by my husband that I just needed to "not worry" about it. I made my family look at me strangely when I took the conversation at dinner from what was on television the night before to how the male operated businesses we worked for mistreated a segment of their employees based on the simple fact that they were female, a topic that usually prompted my mother to reply "Well...that's the way it's always been." I made my friends look at me strangely when I argued that a statement such as "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" carried different connotations for different people, and that society in the form of government only truly protected those individuals engaging in what it considered 'normal' pursuits. And I made my bosses and co-workers look at me strangely when I took the discussion from the way a particular task had always been done to what could be accomplished in the same job by breaking with tradition and using a much more rapid and efficient method, a thought all but unheard of in many companies I've worked for. I was trapped amid middle class and mental oblivion, and none of the people around me seemed to understand what I was experiencing emotionally and intellectually. So I escaped deeper into books, letting my imagination fly with every word, and losing myself into ANY reality other than my own.
Getting my first computer five years ago finally let all that imagination trapped inside me loose for the very first time. In my career I had learned to use a word processor, taking away the stigma of that crippling handwriting of mine and making me begin to hone my composition skills for the first time in my life. I must have written a million business letters in my time, so getting a computer for my home was a natural step, thinking I could pick up a few extra dollars typing at home. I just never expected what would come with that box filled with electronics. Through my new computer I discovered a love for writing. No, love is too simple a concept--I found nirvana. I found the perfect blend of escapism and creative expression for me. Not only could I escape into a character's reality, I could dictate it as well. It was absolutely empowering, but it wasn't an easy battle in the beginning.
My first attempt at a novel became two hundred pages of text, and when I read it through after finishing it I discovered to my horror that it read like a business letter. This would not do. So I went back to my friends that had begun to fill every spare space of shelf in my home, back to my favorite authors to discover why THEY could write that way--and I couldn't. I taught myself to close-read a text, searching for clues like a detective for hours on end, and what I found inspired me and fired my imagination even more. After the second pass through on my novel, it became over four hundred pages in length, and began to be filled with richer images, deeper characters, more intertwined plot lines. I was hooked.
But there were other changes going on in my life as well. I also began to become painfully aware that I had reached a point where something in my life had to change. My career was boring me to tears, and I was sick to death of being well paid but held back by my lack of formal education. I made the big break once again, walked off my job without a single look back and came to AASU, thinking that a major in computer science was my ticket to the future. But again I was in for a surprise. Every time I sat down to write a program, I found myself wishing I was writing fiction instead. My programming professors were more than pleased with the lines and lines of code I wrote, but the work left me feeling unsatisfied. I was having more fun in the classes where I was teasing through dense thought and writing dynamic essays.
And as soon as I got home, I had to make myself do my homework first, because I was writing every day by that time. I knew if I started writing fiction first I'd discover the next time I looked up from the computer screen that it was already 4 am. It was the second revelation in a year for me when I realized that I had only one path of study that felt right for me. Writing and books were the only things that ever made me that happy. So now I have college texts instead of comic books. I still love the art that made comics special, but now I have text as well as a passion in my life. And now I have lots of new friends--Dickinson and Foucault and Chopin and so many others. Here I have so many opportunities to read for shared and new insight, and to write to my heart’s content. I’m a happy woman. It’s like I’ve come home at last.
(Elaine A. Hakala came to AASU as a Sophomore during Winter quarter of 1997. After a twenty year break in her college education, she is currently an English major with emphasis in Communications, and on the Professional Writing track. She is a Savannah native who has been published in Night and Clean Sheets, as well as six times in AASU's Calliope. She received the Lillian Spencer Award for Best Prose in 1998, the Frank W. and Lillian Spencer Creative Writing Scholarship in 1999. Upon graduation, Elaine plans to attend the University of Texas at Austin to pursue a Masters of Fine Arts in Creative Writing--with the goal of being a full-time professional fiction writer as well as a professional educator.)