I want this paper to:

Help me understand why I am who I am; why I am so (to use a recently learned word) damned polyvalent. I want it to help me discover why I am in measures both a pained and dark individual, as well as a naturally kind and happy person. I want to understand why I feel so passionately about the things I believe in, and what makes me want to spread that passion on to others. Maybe I can even learn something about myself. I want this paper to show what my world is like. Not my life, but where I came from, and how I have became who I am. It was a unique place, as is every other person's world, and sharing it creates an interesting challenge.
Finally, I want it to be good. Not "get a good grade" good, but something I can read and know I made as real as I possibly could.

Sorrows:
Father died when 11
Parents divorced at 8, only saw father ever other weekend
Mother remarried, took years to ajust to step-dad
twin brother died months after our birth, caused mother lasting pain
father had low paying job, but tried to care for me. Often had terrible relationships
father was an alcoholic in early years, parents would fight all night in a small, one floor house.
often argued with mom, too much alike
Mom's pregnancy, step-dad working in fields so much we didn't see him for days
grandma's grief turned into bitterness towards everybody

My living space was a cult-de-sac surrounded by farmland in the countryside of a town of 9,000 people. I feel like it made me appriciate nature, but also left me longing to live in a city to experience more of a social environment. Made me friendly, polite, and slightly unnerved by the business and crowds of citys.

Ecomomies of my town would be considered working class and upper lower class mostsly, as well as as few very rich individuals. Very few middle class, but so many upper lower class we thought we were middle class. This made me content, I saw the trailers and shacks some lived in, and was greatful.

Was surrounded by amazingly odd mixture of farmland, woods, and neighbors. just a few acers away from a city lake, Twin Lakes. Often went fishing, played often in the large yards, had bond fires and swam in pools and lakes. Made me love the stunning beauty of nature and the quiet and tranquility of the woods. Loved Gary Paulsen, he spoke of these same things. Lots of huge trees in my yard, would turn beautiful shades of orange and yellow and red.

Brainstorming
father torn apart from my bitter grandma during his life, now I'm pushed away from her as well
great aunt is like a grandma to me (father's dad's sister), grandma thinks she is stealing me because she has more money
when youth minister became minister, I found myself becoming a diest (which I am) because I felt betrayed

Eagleton:
"Like religion, literature works primarily by emotion and experience, and so was admirably well-fitted to cary through the ideological task which religion left off. Indeed by our own time literature has become effectively identical with the opposite of analytical thought and conceptual enquiry: whereas scientists, philosophers, and political theorists are saddled with these drably discursive pursuits, students of literature occupy the more prized territory of feeling and experience. Whose experience, and what kind of feeling, is a different question. Literature form Arnold onward is the enemy of "ideological dogma," an attitude which might have come as a surprise to Dante, Milton, and Pope; the truth or falsity of beliefs such as that blacks are inferiour to whites is less important than what it feels like to experience them. Arnold himself had beliefs, of course, though like everybody else he regarded his o wn beliefs as reasoned positions rater than ideological gogmas. Even so, it was not the business of literature to communicate such beliefs directly - to argue openly, for example, that private property is the bulwark of liberty. Instead, liturature should convey timeless truths, thus distracting the masses from their immediate commitments, nurturing in them a spirit of tolerance and generosity, and so ensuring the survival of private property. Just as Arnold attempted in Literature and Dogma and God and the Bible to dissolve away the embarrasingly dotinal bits of Christanity in to poetically suggestive sonorites, so the pill of middle-class ideology was to be sweetened by the sugar of literature. "

Freire - The truth is, however, that the oppressed are not "marginals," are not men living "outside" society.

Viswanathan - Clearly such a statement suggests that it is not the mortality of literature that is at issue, but the mental capabilites of the reader.