Literacy Narrative: Goodnight Moon, James Merrill, and Me

One of my earliest memories — so early I’m not sure if I truly remember or if it was formed from my parents recounting the story to me — is my father sitting in a chair, reading to me before bed each night. The recurring favorites were picture books, the likes of Goodnight Moon and If You Give a Mouse a Cookie. 

My parents are avid readers, always in the audio form. Narration forms the comforting, familiar background noise of my dad’s car or the kitchen as he prepares dinner, usually a British-accented biography of some important, long-dead historical figure. My mom attributes the several miles she runs every morning to listening to podcasts or books; she recommends to me collections of essays and the types of books whose authors are interviewed on NPR. I can’t quite emulate her running habits, but I have picked up parts of her taste.

I grew up a constant reader, a tall stack of books braced against my chin on weekly trips home from the public library and an ever-present paperback propped open against my bowl during lunch in the summers. I read indiscriminately; I remember working my way through a shelf in the children’s section, books of varying quality about characters that ranged from ballerinas to mutated superheroes, petty drama and conflicts on an epic-scale. The trilogies that were popular at the time — often set in some manufactured dystopia — and long series were my particular favorites, the ability to immerse myself in an extensive world: books like Percy Jackson, Harry Potter, The Hunger Games.

My parents always encouraged the habit. With English as their second language and my first, the audiobooks that for them were easier to process formed a background for the physical copies I tore through. Growing up, I thought that they spoke unaccented English; even now, it’s hard for me to fully pick out, though I’ve begun to hear how the “l” and “n” consonant sounds are occasionally swapped. My mom was a university professor for several years when I was very young. She told me later that the teaching element was difficult for her because English was not her first language; the planning for lessons that might have been a negligible amount of work for a native speaker was time-consuming for her.

In both their languages, though, my parents are extremely literate; they discuss things they’ve learned at dinner, recommend me articles or books to read. I appreciate now more than ever the value they have always placed on stories and seeking out new knowledge, and their efforts to help cultivate my relationship with reading. 

Writing was something I liked a lot when I was younger. I could feel the hundreds of thousands of pages I’d read behind me, helping sentences to fall into place. Their contents might have been unoriginal, but the process was fun. The summer after sixth grade, my parents sent me off to a two-week camp where I produced two twenty-page short stories — to this day the longest pieces of writing I have ever created. In retrospect, one was a generic rags-to-riches story and the other bore a concerning resemblance to Big Hero Six, but I remember finding shaping the narratives enjoyable. As time went on, though, I pulled away from writing, partially because I was busy with school and partially because I felt that I didn’t have much to write about. Curiously, what drew me back in was a medium I’d long disliked. 

I resented poetry until I was sixteen. The eighth-grade poetry unit was a personal point of contention, something I dreaded during those weeks. I hated writing about myself; I thought the line breaks were arbitrary, the poems we studied pretentious, the symbols forced; I found the medium overwhelmingly open-ended.

While at home in 2020, I got back into reading, something I’d neglected for several years. I started by rereading the series I’d loved as a child, flew through thrillers that ranged from masterful to pulpy, developed an interest in the classics. I started delving into works by Hemingway, Murakami, Didion; I learned to treasure the power of language and story. I also happened across a couple of poems whose simple, deft language and startling observations were striking to me. 

A 2018 piece by Angie Sijun Lou: “I / ask Jessica what drowning / feels like and she says / not everything feels like / something else” and a 1939 one by W. H. Auden, responding to Brueghel’s painting The Fall of Icarus: “how everything turns away / Quite leisurely from the disaster.”

I started to gain an appreciation for the change in meaning line breaks could provide, the freedom of form that came with poetry; I fell in love with the potential of the medium to convey devastating emotion, clever observations, human experience. I read Yeats and Ginsberg, Vuong and Oliver. 

There’s an acclaimed poet named James Merill, who has some really beautiful work. The critic David Kalstone writes for Poetry Foundation: “He [James] has not led the kind of outwardly dramatic life which would make external changes the centre of his poetry. Instead, poetry itself has been one of the changes, something which continually happens to him, and Merrill’s subject proves to be the subject of the great Romantics: the constant revisions of the self that come through writing verse.” 

I really loved that quote — I’m not a particularly inspired writer or a brilliant poet, but I rediscovered the more creative side of writing last year as a sort of personal passion, filling dozens of documents that will never see the light of day. It became something I did for myself, to toy with language and compelling ideas, and, like Kalstone said, to almost act upon myself, to be something that changed me. On a whim, I submitted a couple of pieces and ended up winning a competition with a sizable cash prize.

When I told my dad, he was really happy — I learned that he wrote poems in Chinese when he was younger, almost surprising from someone who now seemingly eschews fiction and almost exclusively reads nonfiction. His father, my paternal grandfather, wrote me a poem on a card mailed from China for my birthday, albeit one I needed my parents’ help reading; writing for me has also come to be connected with my family. 

Reading and writing have been transformative forces in my life, carrying important values of empathy, dynamic growth, and learning. I’ve come to take a great deal of joy in the impact of a story, the beauty and power of language used well; these are values I hope to keep with me throughout my life.