day 7 - a picture of someone/something that has had the biggest impact on you.

That's right, it's Shakespeare. I promise this is not a cop-out...Shakespeare seriously has had a huge impact on my life. I remember vividly reading my first Shakespearean play. It was Measure for Measure, one of Nan's old blue cloth-bound copies, and I was in sixth grade. Of course, I didn't quite grasp the finer (or coarser) points of the language yet, but I knew there was something magical there. I continued to read through his comedies through middle school, and in I think 7th (or maybe 8th) grade I asked Mom to let me do a Shakespeare course for school - you can do that when you're homeschooled. Accordingly, she bought me a book called Brightest Heaven of Invention: A Christian Guide to Six Shakespeare Plays...again, we were homeschooled. Even though now I'm pretty sure there wasn't an evangelical Christian agenda behind all of Shakespeare's plays, working through the book did two things for me; it opened up a new world of close reading for me, and it made me decide to be an English teacher. I remember my twelve-year-old-self sitting at my wooden desk/dresser drawer and deciding that I wanted to teach English - I never changed my mind. So yep, Shakespeare had a pretty big impact on me - I'm excited to go see Macbeth on Thursday!