This is my origin story...
In the summer of my eighth year of life, my cousin Christina came to stay with us for two months. I spent countless hours imagining all the games we would play and the adventures we would have, so I was less than thrilled when it became clear to me that my cousin would rather spend her time reading some book that I was determined to hate because it was monopolizing her attention: Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban.
I would not accept that whatever was occurring on the page could be more interesting than climbing the neighbor's tree again, but finally, when Christina was sick of my whining, she asked me if I had read the Harry Potter books, hoping I would understand her need to devour the words, but at that point in my young life Junnie B. Jones was the only book character I was well acquainted with.
"No," I spat, arms crossed and brows pinched in my best attempt to look grown and angry.
As if we were at drama camp, her face fell slack, and her jaw dropped. But she recovered quickly, picking it up and dragging me to my mom.
"Titi Trina, can we go to the bookstore?"
My mother, who was more likely to tell us a story about playing stickball with the neighborhood kids than she was to read us a fairytale, arched a single eyebrow. "Sure."
She drove us to Target, which is technically not a bookstore, and Christina darted for the book section. She searched the shelves and quickly found the first Harry Potter book.
"You're going to love it," she said, plucking the book from its spot. "This boy finds out he's a wizard and goes to magic school and learns spells and flies on a broom," she explained, picking up the second book too.
Her grin was wide, but, at the time, I seriously doubted I'd love it, and I thought it was overly ambitious of her to think we'd get to the second one. We weren't going to have time to read two huge books with the summer I had planned, but later that night, under a blanket fort with a flashlight tucked under her chin, Christina read the first chapter aloud to me and my brother, and my world tilted.
Christina was a showman, changing her voice and facial expressions to fit different characters and adding in sound effects wherever they fit, but the funny thing was, she didn't need to be. I would have loved that book just as much with or without the theatrics because the story itself was magical.
I remember, even at eight, thinking how absolutely mad (yes, I went through a British slang phase after starting these books) it was that something as simple as the arrangement of letters and words could create an entire world and breathe life into characters that felt as real as my cousin and my brother. My brother was Ron, and Christina was undeniably Hermione. I was usually Harry in our games after that, but I didn't want to be Harry in real life. I wanted to be J.K. Rowling.
Obviously, I don't aspire to be Rowling anymore given that her morals and ideals are vastly different from my own, but reading these books was the first time it connected in my mind that words have the power to create something truly epic from absolutely nothing, and I wanted desperately to be able to wield them. I wanted to create worlds, birth characters, shape emotions, and take people on journey. I wanted to be a writer.
I spent years trying my hand at writing. My first story was a four-page knock-off of aTotally Spies episode that my friend Emily loved. The next thing I wrote was a fifty page "novel" about a teen love story that I was brave enough to show to my cousin Christina. Her excitement about it and enjoyment made me keep going. I even wrote a novella for my best friend about us running away to LA, something we talked about doing often. I gave it to her for her fifteenth birthday, and she loved it.
Aside from being a creative outlet, my love of words drove my educational and professional pursuits as well. I acquired a bachelor's in English from Kennesaw State University with a minor in professional writing and worked as a technical writer for a time, but that wasn't the kind of writing I was passionate about. I wasn't building worlds or even creating something new. I was simply repackaging content, creating bulleted lists that described the color temperature and ideal use for certain lightbulbs.
Bored out of my mind, I left the world of technical writing behind and set my sights on a master's degree, specifically the Master of Arts in Professional Writing also from KSU. My concentration was creative writing, but my support area was in Rhetoric and Composition because I was accepted as a Teaching Assistant. This position brought me into the fold of the Writing Center, where I became Remus Lupin (for you non-Potter heads, this was Harry's best teacher at Hogwarts). As a Teaching Assistant, I improved my own skills dramatically, and I learned how to teach others to wield words effectively. The KSU Writing Center became my Hogwarts, and I realized that Writing Center work was the work I wanted to do.
That epiphany brings me here to this PhD program in Rhetoric and Composition at Georgia State University where I plan to focus my research on Writing Centers and how I can continue to make sure they are a place of learning, comfort, safety, and home, all in one.
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