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Behind the Scenes #4 A special discount and the power of reading
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This week’s Behind the Scenes is about the powerful impact reading can have.
Recently I had the good fortune to hang out with Dr Edson Burton at a reading group he’s running for the
. I’ve written about Edson’s ‘Reading Round’ for the RLF here.Edson also chaired an event with Paterson Joseph, where Paterson talked about his latest book, The Secret Diaries of Ignatius Sancho, which you can read about in The Best Book Event Ever: Behind the Scenes #3 Meeting Paterson Joseph.
And I reviewed Paterson’s book in The Craft Review #3 and for WritersMosaic.
"Sitting in a room with people talking about something you’ve just read is so beautiful."
So what happens in a Reading Round group? Essentially a professional writer choses two pieces of work, a short story and a poem, and reads them out loud to a group of people. There’s no homework or advance preparation. The participants simply listen and read and then discuss what they think and say how they feel. Each session lasts for about an hour and a half and the group meets for thirty weeks over the course of a year.
Before I went along, I spoke to Katharine McMahon, Head of Outreach at the RLF, who explained the process. She says it builds a group’s appreciation of literature, but in doing so, the participants connect in a deep and profound way and often stay in touch long after Reading Round has come to an end.
“The most rewarding part is to do with love,” Katharine told me.
Love? Hmmm. I was, I admit, somewhat sceptical. I mean, reading? Reading in a group? Really? Obviously, as a writer, I LOVE reading. But, you know, I normally do it on my own.
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Almost every photo taken of me until I was 21 showed me reading, and now, I usually have at least six books on the go (one for pleasure, one to review, one to further my craft, one for research for the book I’m writing, an audiobook and one on my kindle so I can never knowingly be without words) and yet I still complain about not having enough time to read.
“The simplicity of it is key,” says Edson. “It’s hard to communicate the power of that simplicity,” he continues. “It sounds so indulgent and middle-class, sitting in a group, reading stories. But I don’t think it is.”
We meet in a community centre in Bristol round the corner from where I used to live, before I started my wild journey in Somerset’s wilderness. I’m struck by the group as they come in, one by one. They’ve only been meeting for a few weeks, yet already they seem to be close, picking up on conversations where they left off. Someone has brought cake to share.
Call me prejudiced as well as cynical, but I expect a group of people who are meeting for an “indulgent, middle-class” occupation to be white and over fifty. This group is refreshingly varied in their gender, their age and their ethnic diversity.
“We realise that lives that look different, aren’t so different; our shared interest is in the imagination.” Dr Edson Burton
Edson begins by reading a poem, Moving Home by Sarah Maguire. It’s about a woman emptying trunks she’s stored in the loft. She finds a photograph of herself as a young girl, some letters from a man and a dress he sent her from America, “of crimson watered silk”. The poem is, at first glance, deceptively simple, and a couple of people are initially dismissive, saying the writing does nothing for them.
Edson says, “I think the most telling strength of Reading Round has been the members who’ve said I’d never have bothered with the story, or I’d have given up on the first page. It’s through discussion that every week everyone has come away quite startled with how much more they’ve excavated by spending time to unpick the density in the [writing].”
Here are the letters that you’ve never dared to read; then buried under them you find the dress…
Moving Home by Sarah Maguire. (From her collection, Spilt Milk, Secker & Warburg, 1991).
And then slowly it comes, as the group members begin to peel back the layers of the poem, what it really means, how it speaks to them personally. Edson is a gentle and quiet presence, occasionally prompting: What strikes you, what comes up for you, what does that line mean to you?
Later one of the group members tells me how profound they find this - how humbling it is to hear the perspectives of other people who are so different from themselves.
Edson agrees: “We have a sense of sitting with very different lives and it’s fascinating and quite beautiful to see how we come together in a space, and give each other space and listen, and out of that, we realise that lives that look different, aren’t so different; our shared interest is in the imagination.”
We then listen to a short story called A Family Supper by Kazuo Ishiguro. It is classic Ishiguro, understated elegance, suppressed emotions, nostalgia and the darkness of the unspoken. At first, a couple of people make assumptions about the Japanese culture portrayed in the story. Edson murmurs quietly, What do we know?
The story starts by discussing Fugu poisoning:
“Fugu is a fish caught off the Pacific shores of Japan. The fish has held a special significance for me ever since my mother died through eating one.”
A Family Supper by Kazuo Ishiguro in Firebird 2 ed. T.J. Binding, Penguin Books 1983
I am rigid with tension: as a thriller writer, I have a strong expectation of where the story is heading: the narrator’s father serves him and his sister Fugu… I bite my tongue and sit on my hands so that I don’t gate-crash the discussion. But, of course, the story is about families and relationships. I don’t think anyone else actually dies.
Another of the participants tells me afterwards that reading these stories in a group has helped him connect more emotionally: “we explore some pretty deep things together, and that brings out a tenderness in people that might be difficult to express otherwise.”
Jane Davis, founder and director of the charity, The Reader, writes in Stop What You’re Doing and Read This:
“Ours is what sociologists call ‘a low-affect society’, interested in excitement, but wary of expressed feeling. Literature offers an alternative place to recover such lost feelings; and a shared-reading group offers the community in which to do that together.”
One of the members tells me: “Reading Round calms me down; it’s the one relaxing thing I do that brings me peace. Sitting in a room with people talking about something you’ve just read, really picking it apart and being able to share that experience is so beautiful. It’s been a godsend.”
It’s slightly unorthodox, but the group meets on a Sunday afternoon. Edson says that to him it’s like the old school idea of Sunday as a day of reflection. And as I sit with the group, I feel as if too am expanding into this sacred space: of reading alone and together.
Coming up soon - the next instalment of The Process, where I write about how I create a story from a blank page to publication. We’ll be looking at creating an outline.
Next up - The Craft Review: Jane Shemilt’s All Her Secrets. Do read it in advance if you can!