In addition to putting up with a live interview via Google chat, Ryan also submitted the following written answers to a few of my interview questions...
A) Can you dig back to your very first, primal literacy experiences? Honestly, it was when my Mom picked me up a set of Illustrated Classics. They were these 4"x4" sized paperbacks with an illustration on one side and the very abridged text on the other. I must have been about 8 when I first got a few. Looking back on it, I was probably the only 8 year old who knew the general outline of Moby Dick (I remember Fedallah scaring the piss out of me at the time), the Count of Monte Cristo, A Tale of Two Cities, The Oregon Trail, Last of the Mohicans, etc. Was reading encouraged explicitly and materially (was there plenty of stuff lying around to read? did you go to the library or bookstores?)? My parents definitely encouraged reading. I can remember my Father reading the paper nightly, and my Mom was always reading a paperback. They weren't highly educated (my Dad had an AA in computer science and my Mom was a high School graduate), but they still read quite a lot. It wasn't "big serious literature" but they set the example. Also they always encouraged my sister and I to read- I don't think they ever denied a book purchase. What do you remember about learning to read and write? I really can't remember much. I do remember sitting around in a circle in parochial school 2nd grade and taking turns reading; I believe we were learning how to sound words out. Were their particular people who encouraged you to read and write, stoked a spark into a flame? I had some good teachers, although there were a few that did not like me at all. I was a little difficult by 10 until 13- I guess I wasn't engaged enough in school, so I usually just stashed a paperback in my desk and surreptitiously read instead of doing in class work etc. When I got to high school, there was enough there to interest me academically and the teachers there didn't know about me being a difficult kid in late grade school and junior high. I have to say that there were a few high school teachers that really encouraged me. Or, in contrast, was there anything/anyone you found that retarded your literacy growth or dampened your interest?
Can you recall a watershed literacy experience? It would have to be when I read both "The Sun Also Rises" and "One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest" as a sophomore. Both books pretty much blew me away in that they addressed some pretty heavy topics that weren't being written abut in the books I had read in school before. Actually, I think that if the school board re-read most of Hemingway's work that is in the curriculum they would pull it. Hemingway led to the rest of the moderns- Fitzgerald, Faulkner, Woolf, Joyce, etc and Kesey led to Kerouac, Burroughs, Ginsberg and Hunter S Thompson. From there, it basically spiraled out to most of the British and American canon that I've tried to read through since then. Lately, I've been rereading a lot of the Greek and Roman writers- Polybius, Herodotus, Plutarch, for example. There's been a great hue and cry lately in the political sphere that is approaching just plain silly. I find the Greeks and Romans, and also Shakespeare, truly exemplary in explaining and describing the human condition and human action. If you want to understand political factionalism and naked ambition, read Sallust's "The Conspiracy of Cataline" or Shakespeare's "Macbeth". I suspect that in the race to ace the standardized tests, most schools are passing on trying to teach anything in depth. My brother in law teaches English in the same town we grew up in and he states that if it isn't on the NCLB tests, he basically has to do a drive by. Can you imagine trying to cover Hamlet or Macbeth in a few days? I once referred to the female ringleader of an opposing faction at a prior job as "Lady Macbeth" and none of the younger staff knew what the [starts with f] I was talking about.
B) How would you characterize your school experience with regard to literacy? Overall I would say that it was a net positive. Reading was pretty stressed and since math wasn't my strongest subject, I needed something to excel at. What about out of school? I read pretty much all the time outside of school. I wasn't all literature and some of it was popcorn reading, but I almost always had a book I was reading. Did you read on your own / write on your own? Did the not-for-school stuff radically diverge from what you read/wrote in school, for school? I have to confess that I wrote some pretty atrocious Beat style writing and some equally as bad Hemingway stuff. Thank Christ that has all disappeared by now. My in-school writing was the standard book report / literary / history papers. I actually believe that having to write those standard style essays and papers actually went a long way to making me a pretty decent writer professionally. I consider myself a decent, workman type writer and some of my co-workers can't write a basic 3 paragraph essay to convey a coherent thought. There was one white paper I had to review and edit, I actually had to sit down with my co-worker and explain basic grammar such as subject-verb agreement. I think it was both the first time someone explained those basics to her and also criticized her. After our session, she looked like I had just shot her dog. She's a few years younger than I, so I wonder if that's the end result of the self-esteem centered education system. I had nuns as teachers until I was 10, and they didn't give a flying [starts with f] how you felt about yourself, only if you could read, write and were mathematically competent for your age. I really can't think of anything about my literacy education that I didn't like, other than having to read some really lame anthology selections before we were"advanced" enough to read novels. If I could offer a suggestion to the educators of America, I would say that if you have a kid or to reading way above the rest of the class, let them read on their own. Don't bore them.
D) What do you make of the argument that teaching writing through literature about doesn’t really serve university students in terms of the writing they need to do in other curricular areas and in the real-world? I think that is such a falsehood. How can your learn to write well if your not reading quality writing. I mean no one expects someone learning music to learn all the notes and technical performance steps and techniques, but then not listen to Beethoven? Also, I find that literature in general helps you understand and get through life. I hate to keep circling back around to Shakespeare, but there is quite a lot in his works than can help you navigate life. Most other authors worth reading can offer this as well. I'm not an indian living on a reservation, but Sherman Alexie or even Jim Harrison can help you understand both a piece of that life and how certain things are universal. I'm a French-Canadian from the northeast and yet Faulkner gives me one hell of an insight into the culture of the South; someone like Louis Alberto Urrea helps me understand Mexico a bit and recognize that the migrants crossing through my back 40 overnight aren't some nameless brown horde, but individuals with their own identity and their own ambitions. Professionally, both reading and writing have been key to my success so far. I tend to end up working in engineering heavy environments and anyone who can write well and articulate a concept clearly is going to do well. I think that we tend to specialize too much in higher ed. How many engineers have written a history or lit paper as undergrads? I think that a return to the old style "classical" education would be beneficial to a lot of people. Do you think reading literature and then writing about it was valuable to you? Did your lit major in some way help you with minor in military science? I really can't say. Military science for a cadet is really focused on small unit leadership and learning how to take command and lead. There may be some over lap there, but it eludes me at the moment.
E) Has any of the literature you’ve read helped you understand the military better? I believe that war is such a universal human experience, that literature can only help one understand it, if it is indeed possible to understand. Looking back, I think that Homer, Hemingway, McCarthy, Shakespeare and some non-fiction writers like Mark Bowden, really keyed in on it. I don't know how McCarthy could have written "Blood Meridian" without having seen the elephant, but his character of The Judge truly is war personified in all its horror. There is that insightful line in "Blood Meridian", where the Judge declaims that "it makes no difference what men think of war... before man was, war waited for him. The ultimate trade waiting for its ultimate practitioner". There are some days I don't believe that, but I'm 33 and I've spent a third of my life involved in wars in some form or fashion, either as an officer, married to an active duty spouse or as a contractor. Someday I'd like to go build schools.
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