LAUREN: Okay. So I'm Lauren Goldstein, and this is my literacy narrative.

My earliest memory of organized religion was when I was about eight or nine. And
my dad is Jewish, and my mom converted before I was born, but doesn't practice.
She was Catholic, and she remarried a guy who doesn't like people of pretty much
any other race or religion, so he used to tell me I wasn't Jewish and tried to
change my name, even though my last name is Goldstein, which is quite obviously
Jewish. So he would make me go to church. I was really young, I went to church,
and I would ask that-- I asked the minister one time where I was listening to
the minister preach, and he said, "God has always been," and I thought,
"Huh!"--even at ten years old--"Well, everything has a beginning or an end, when
we tell stories or when we watch TV or commercials or, you know, my grandmother
tells me a story there's always a beginning." And so I remember sitting on the
steps of my grandmother's--or, of my parents' duplex in Philadelphia, and I sat
on the cement steps and I kind of stared at the cars passing by and I thought,
"Well, darkness right?" Darkness would be nothing, but darkness is something--at
least the word... at least the word means something not to get into Saussure or
Derrida or something like that. So at 10 I thought, "Okay, okay, well darkness
is something," and I tried to think about it for a couple of minutes and it was
like a--I would call it a brain twinge. My head--I just kind of hit a hit a
blank wall, and every time I tried to think about what was before God or before
creation, my brain, it felt like it just kind of stalled out. So even at 10 I
knew there was something really interesting about that.

Some years later when I was in high school, and I still--she was still married
to her second husband, I still didn't self-identify as Jewish, because he used
to tell me that I wasn't Jewish, even though I clearly was. I went to youth
group and I asked my youth group leaders, you know, why is it that when we try
to think about what was before creation that we run into this brick wall? Why do
our mind stop when we try to comprehend something that big? And they told me,
"Well, that's because God doesn't want us to know."  And maybe this is part of
the reason I'm a professor now, but I thought, "That is the worst answer to a
question I've ever heard." They also told me, those two particular youth group
leaders told me because one side of my grandparents was Catholic and the other
set of grandparents was Jewish, that technically both of them were going to go
to hell. Which I--at which point I stopped going to youth group, because those
same people said that God doesn't judge, we don't know who's going to heaven or
hell, and at this point in my life I'm not even sure what I believe about those
two places. So I realize that this literacy of organized religion is really
complicated and convoluted.

But I decided when I was in--that I had nothing to do with organized religion,
but when I got to college I had a really, really wonderful professor named Karen
Levine. And Karen was the first example of a Jewish woman that I knew that--it
was really central to her life, and she went to Temple, and she knew lots of
people in the community, and she was really a treasure of both the university
community and of the religious community and of the of the City of Omaha--she
knew so many people so many people. This was an Omaha, Nebraska. And I thought,
I want to be like Karen Levine, and I knew that our commonality--our common
interest was that we were both Jewish women. And she ended up being my mentor.
She introduced me to people in the Jewish community in Omaha. And she was very
sick. She had breast cancer that she had been fighting for 16 years, and she
would teach on Tuesday/Thursday, take cancer treatments on Fridays, recover on
the weekend, and come back and teach again. But you wouldn't know. She never
talked about being very sick. But she introduced me to many people in the Jewish
community, and I wanted to be like her. She was the first person who made me
realize that there is this part of literacy within organized religion that is
welcoming and fruitful and not preachy or hypocritical. And so she really taught
me a lot about that and she helped me through college. She was somebody who gave
me breaks when when I probably should not have had them, and she's the reason I
wanted to teach. She's the reason I'm a professor now, and she's the reason I
practice Judaism now, and that I fully embrace being Goldstein. And she
unfortunately passed away about five years ago, my first year of my MFA program,
and to this day when I--you know, I've had many people I've lost in my life, but
losing Karen still just hurts. Still just brings me to tears. And I miss her so,
so much. And she taught me a lot about about literacy, about this community,
about literacy as a community and that idea. And I think about her living
through me as I teach.

What's interesting now is, as far as literacy goes, I think of new media and
digital literacy as  somewhat close to a very religious experience. If you've
ever created something... We created. We were the beginning of this movie
project, you know, or this audio project. And we ended it. And we edited it. And
we gave it to other people. As I move through my PhD program, I get more and
more into new media, and I really see things like new media, the creation of new
media--and even I'm--I practice yoga, even yoga I see as a very spiritual
experience. And some people I'm sure would argue, but I would say that new media
and digital literacy is very close to this kind of creation and destruction and
Old Testament notion of these types of literacy communities. And so there's
many, many more. I could talk about it all day because I've had so many
influences. But in--Oh! In the same way that I think about that brain twinge,
about wondering what came before nothing, in Egypt this year during the riots,
the country shut down the internet, and the same part of my brain that twinges
when I try to think of what was before nothing tends to have a little doomsday
in it too, so I think, well if Egypt could shut down the internet, what happens
if--what happens at the end of the internet, if that was even possible, what
happens to these syllabi and courses that we hinge completely on multimedia and
multi-modality. So I also incorporate--I think it's very important to--I think
it's very important to realize that we're teaching community writing as
communication and literacy as something that also goes beyond goes beyond new
media or is in conjunction with new media, because imagine if the internet
ended, how many how much how many hours of course building we would lose. We'd
have to go back to teaching with pens and paper. So there's that kind of
duality, and that's about it for this, what I can say about literacy without
going into 20 different things? But I really, really enjoyed this opportunity,
and I look forward to seeing others' literacy narratives as well.  Thank you.