A literacy narrative is simply a collection of things that explain how you learned to read, write, and compose. This collection could include a story about learning to read cereal boxes and a story about learning to read theater. Some people will want to record their memories of bedtime stories which their parents read to them, jokes they watched in the newspaper, or their first library card.
Famous Examples of a Literacy Narrative
1.The Writing Life by Annie Dillard
“Why are we reading, if not in hope of beauty laid bare, life heightened and its deepest mystery probed? Can the writer isolate and vivify all in experience that most deeply engages our intellects and our hearts? Can the writer renew our hope for literary forms? Why are we reading if not in hope that the writer will magnify and dramatize our days, will illuminate and inspire us with wisdom, courage, and the possibility of meaningfulness, and will press upon our minds the deepest mysteries, so that we may feel again their majesty and power? What do we ever know that is higher than that power which, from time to time, seizes our lives, and reveals us startlingly to ourselves as creatures set down here bewildered? Why does death so catch us by surprise, and why love? We still and always want waking.”
In “The Writing Life,” Annie Dilliard uses short essays to explore her journey through reading and writing. Using her unique style, Annie helps you explore how you are a writer and why and it can be a fun and exciting journey. She follows that writing can be traumatic and overwhelming at the same time.
2. Literacy Narrative by Kiki Petrosino
“I wish to put my blackness into some kind of order. My blackness, my builtness, my blackness, a bill. I want you to know how I feel it: cold key under the tongue. Mean fishhook of homesickness that catches my heart when I walk under southern pines. And how I recognized the watery warp of the floor in my great-grandma’s house, when I dreamed it. This is what her complaining ghost said: Write about me.”
Culture and writing and how culture affects writing as explored in “Learning to Read,” an article written by Kiki Petrosino. Kiki uses her experience as a black woman and her history to show her relationship to words. She explores how her African American heritage carries on her writing and that, through her journey through descriptive poetry she combines her poems with her race to create a compelling work.