STREAM: Reading Runs Through It

“How has reading flowed through your life and enhanced your education and career,” asks Read Aloud West Virginia in their new S.T.R.E.A.M.: Reading Runs Through It awareness campaign. Here’s #mySTREAMstory.

I spent a lot of time alone as a kid, with my nose in a book. Not because there wasn’t a loving family around me. I think it was partly by choice and partly by circumstance. I was the youngest of three children, and there was a decent-sized gap between each of us. My brother is four years older than me, and my sister nearly eleven. She was married and out of the house by the time I was eight. So we weren’t exactly peers.

I was also what we used to call a latchkey kid. Dad was a sergeant with the Division of Natural Resources. Mom worked in medical offices. So I was usually on my own for a while after school. (I’ll add that they never failed to come home and prepare a hot meal for us, something of which I didn't realize the magnitude at the time. I used to get excited on the rare occasions we’d order takeout. Now at 35, I’m excited on the rare occasions I actually come home from work and cook. But I digress.)

I wasn’t much into sports. My brother did the basketball and baseball thing. I’d sit in the stands with a book. I blamed my disinterest in athletics on a lazy eye and a lack of depth perception, but I think I just sucked at them. And I wasn’t into hunting, the other popular Browning family pastime. With a father in the DNR, you tend to be surrounded by hunting. Guns and bows and venison and squirrel gravy were everywhere, but I wanted no part of that. (I did go hunting once. I unwittingly made lots of noise, and they never took me again.)

I tell you all this to illustrate how and why reading has flowed through my life from early childhood. Books became my escape from the walls of my bedroom and from the mountains that fenced me into that little hollow. I may not have connected with my father in a tree stand, but I vividly remember him reading aloud to me stories like the Little Golden Books version of The Wizard of Oz or A.A. Milne’s poem Puppy and I. I couldn’t get enough of those two.

That early exposure developed a love of reading that has never faded. I was the kid who read for pleasure, not just by assignment. I remember my brother being assigned To Kill a Mockingbird for class and asking me if I’d read it. (I had.) And I was blessed with a string of teachers throughout my education that valued reading aloud during class, even well into high school. “How about a little Harris and Me?” Ms. Baisden would ask our 11th grade English class before launching into a chapter. (I have no recollection of what Harris and Me is about, but I can hear her asking us that question as if she were standing beside me.)

I guess with all that reading I was doing, and the reading aloud that was going on around me, I was destined to become a writer. And also destined to help spread the word about the importance of reading. That’s why I’m thrilled to tell you about an organization like Read Aloud West Virginia and their S.T.R.E.A.M.: Reading Runs Through It campaign. Studies show that children from homes with lots of books score up to 33 percent higher on tests than their peers from homes with few books. That’s just one statistic, though. They have plenty. And the literacy stats in West Virginia alone are eye-opening and often alarming.

So to learn more about the S.T.R.E.A.M. campaign (and, if you’re local, to grab a ticket to the upcoming Read-A-Palooza fundraiser happening in March), please visit the Read Aloud West Virginia website.