Today I bring you the second half of Naomi’s story. You can read the first part here.

By Naomi Clark, PhD

Taking Ownership of My Literacy

Leaving the Fold

A few years after finishing high school, I moved with my family to western Oklahoma. In keeping with the tradition, I was ein großes Mäd who kept house and helped raise my younger siblings, biding my time until my 21st birthday when I would be of age and could leave home. The reality that I was already of age at 18 was not recognized in our family and without the means to earn an income and live independently, leaving home any sooner wasn’t an option.

During these young adult years, I read voraciously and began asking questions about our theology, beliefs, and practices. I was greatly inspired by the accounts of early Anabaptists, and their commitment to following truth wherever it might lead. Yet what would unsettle me most wasn’t the answers I was given; it was being told to stop asking questions that I raised in good faith. In contrast to what I had been taught my whole life about the importance of an individual relationship with God and about the need for personal convictions, now as a young adult, I was being told I didn’t really need to know what the Bible taught about a given issue. Instead, obedience should be a sufficient reason to follow the party line.

Internal contradictions such as these not only shook me to my core, but also shook my confidence in my elders and the tradition they represented. Shortly after my 21st birthday I moved out and joined a small evangelical fundamentalist church in Oklahoma City. That move was every bit as fraught and difficult as one might imagine. My family was sure I was joining a cult. And, yet, they were the ones doing everything within their power to close every possible exit, to prevent me, a legal adult, from leaving home.

I was determined to leave with my dignity intact and give a minimum of grist for the inevitable rumor mill. I didn’t want to give anyone the satisfaction of later discrediting me by calling me a “runaway.” (Although 26 years later, my advice now to someone in that situation would be nevermind the rumor mill; do what you need to do!) To my parents’ credit, I was eventually able to move out in broad daylight and give my family members a proper goodbye–but not without causing us all incredible heartache. My leaving was a greater sorrow to my parents than if I had died.

Once in Oklahoma City, I worked in retail purchasing for several years. Eventually, I began to recognize many of the same elitist and controlling tendencies popping up in the evangelical fundamentalist church I had joined. Initially, I thought the Beachy Amish churches weren’t legalistic about the right things. Now that I was experiencing a sense of deja vu, I began to realize that legalism itself was the problem.

College at Last

Burned out with my job and the church, I was ready for a change. I decided to move back to western Oklahoma and attend Southwestern Oklahoma State University (SWOSU), a regional state school that was affordable, near my family, and where I could rent a house with a friend who was herself in the process of leaving the Beachy Amish church.

I still felt lost when it came to college, but by this point (nine years after finishing high school) I had the life experience to know that one step at a time could get me there. I called the Admissions office and this started a chain of events where I ended every conversation with University staff by asking, “So what do I do next?”

As an avid reader who did not feel nearly so confident in my math and science skills, I gravitated toward the humanities, majoring in English and minoring in Spanish. Not that I was exactly prepared to be an English major either–in high school, we read missionary biographies and books about Creationism rather than Shakespeare or F. Scott Fitzgerald. In these ways, my high school education left many gaps in my learning. However, Deborah Brandt would remind us that despite the barriers we encounter, our backgrounds also equip us with unique literacies that we can leverage for our own purposes. In this case, having spent a childhood reading and memorizing passages from the King James Bible, I had an advantage when it came to studying Medieval and Renaissance literature. In fact, during that first semester of college, my advisor must have had a lot of faith in me because he encouraged me to enroll in a third-year British literature course. In my English courses, I learned how to do a close reading of a text and interpret it from multiple perspectives. I learned to recognize allusions, subversive messages, and ideologies as they evolved across the centuries. Along the way, I discovered that our histories and world cultures are far more complex than suggested by the dogmatic fundamentalist views I absorbed growing up. At the end of my first year of college, the English department awarded me their annual prize for excellence in British literature. I breathed a sigh of relief; despite the barriers, limitations, and self-doubt, I actually was capable. I could do this!

While earning my English degree, I got married and after graduating we moved to central Missouri. While in Missouri, I explored different options and ended up enrolling in graduate school, earning both a Masters and PhD in English, specializing in rhetoric and composition.

 

My thirties were a bottleneck of trying to catch up professionally while also starting a family. I don’t recommend this path, but now that I’m on the other side, I’m grateful for where I’ve ended up. After grad school, I was offered a tenure-track job as an English professor at a small liberal arts school in Iowa where I teach writing courses and direct the writing center. I love what I do and the people I work with.

For much of my professional life, I’ve done everything in my power to pass as “normal” especially in academic circles. I’ve seen myself as desperately trying to catch up, to make up for the impact of the educational barriers I’ve experienced. More recently, though, I’ve started to think about how these years of struggle may have also equipped me to help others who are overcoming educational barriers. To that end, my cousin Marilyn Rebecca Coblentz and I have started a podcast called Uncovered: Life Beyond. It is an advice podcast for first-generation, nontraditional students who have experienced educational neglect and are recovering from high-demand religion. (Curious? Listen to our recap of the Symposium here.)

When I think back to my perspective as a teen, college felt like a far-off world with a mysterious portal that was hidden from me. My hope is that through this podcast, my two decades of academic experience can help uncover that portal and demystify the process for others who are trying to find their way through similar barriers. We want to encourage anyone who is feeling trapped and out of options that they don’t need anyone’s permission to take ownership of their literacy.  Their dreams and aspirations are worth fighting for, no matter how their sponsors may have worked to constrain them.

In conclusion, while we can’t undo the impact of our literacy sponsors, we aren’t doomed by them either. If we can find a way to leverage the knowledge we have gained thus far in life in order to open up new options for ourselves, we might one day find ourselves on the moon after all.

Works Cited

Brandt, Deborah. “Sponsors of Literacy.” College Composition and Communication 49.2 (1998): 165-85.

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