In this article, the author shares the lessons she learned from the theories and practices of Louise Rosenblatt with respect to teaching reading to young people. According to Rosenblatt, "Every reading act is an event, or a transaction involving a particular reader and a particular pattern of signs, a text, and occurring at a particular time in a particular context. Instead of two fixed entities acting on one another, the reader and the text are two aspects of a total dynamic situation. The "meaning" does not reside ready-made "in" the text or "in" the reader but happens or comes into being during the transaction between reader and text." In this view of reading, the individual reader assumes responsibility for producing an interpretation of a text guided primarily by the language of the text but also by the associations, cultural experiences, and knowledge that the reader brings to the interpretive task. One of the things teachers must preserve is the value of individual interpretations without seeming to support the "anything goes" philosophy. Teachers must be responsible to all of the elements involved in the process: reader, text, and context. As teachers, they must understand the theory, then be prepared to implement their understanding in the classroom. Practice without theory is blind, and in these dark times, they need all the light they can get. Finally, teachers must constantly provide their students with opportunities to read widely and deeply, enable them to rewrite texts within the contexts of their lives so they may continually rewrite their lives in the light of those texts.