Bibliotherapy: the power books have to heal you

"Bibliotherapy – the prescription of books as a remedy to ills – has been around since 2013, when the Reading Agency charity published a list of books that GPs could offer to patients, tackling topics from depression to dementia to chronic pain. Since then, 1.2 million readers have borrowed the scheme's books from libraries. 

It's so successful that it's about to be extended to children as well. Winifred Robinson discusses how it works with Professor Philip Davis who studies the effects of literature at Liverpool University. He's the author of a book called Reading for Life, having researched its effects on dementia, depression and worked with reading groups in prisons and homeless shelters."

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p083x2r1

Book challenge- Day 7

I have accepted a challenge to post seven books that I love, one book a day, no exceptions, no reviews, just covers. 

Day 7 - The Earth from the Air - 365 Days by Yann Arthus-Bertrand

Book challenge - Day 6

I have accepted a challenge to post seven books that I love, one book a day, no exceptions, no reviews, just covers. Let’s promote literacy and a book list. 📚 💕

Day 6

Book challenge - day 5

I have accepted a challenge to post seven books that I love, one book a day, no exceptions, no reviews, just covers. Let’s promote literacy and a book list. 📚 💕

Day 5

Book challenge - Day 3

I have accepted a challenge to post seven books that I love, one book a day, no exceptions, no reviews, just covers. Each day I will ask a friend to take up the challenge. Let’s promote literacy and a book list. 📚 💕

Day 3

So Many Books, So Little Time - BBC Radio 4

Since my Mum is a retired Librarian and my Dad is a self-declared book hoarder, it is hardly surprising that I am also fond of books. One of the things I was most excited about when moving into my current flat, was the possibility of being able to have a bookcase on which all my books could be united and housed. I took great pleasure from gathering all my books together, measuring them and designing my very own bookcase in which they would fit (with a little room for expansion, of course!) 

I am drawn to the book as a physical object, hence my decision not to have a kindle or other electronic book device. I have many books that are more than their contents, there is a story behind getting the book - such as if it was bought for me and has a note inside. There's something about owning a book, being able to look back at it, refer to it when you have forgotten something, or being reminded of the time of your life when you first read the book.

Yet I hold my hands up high and admit that there are many books on my bookcase that I have yet to read. But I intend to read them.

I enjoyed listening to Mark Hodkinson discuss his relationship with books and the act of collecting books in this Radio 4 programme, 'So Many Books, So Little Time'.

Mark Hodkinson ponders the nature of our personal book collections, why and how we gather books, what it says about us, and how we ever expect to find time to read them all.

Author Mark had just moved house. By far the most difficult task was carrying, storing and alphabetising his collection of 3,500 books. It made him stop to think. If it took, say, four days of solid reading to finish a book, he’d need 38.3 years to go through his collection. He would have to make his way through 315 million words. And that’s if he didn’t take time off to sleep, eat and have the occasional night out.

Clearly, it was a challenge too far.

So Many Books, So Little Time is an autobiographical, impressionistic audio odyssey. Mark considers that he might be afflicted by bibliomania and visits consumer psychologist Lisa Edgar to see whether owning thousands of books is normal. He calls at his local bookshop and meets its owner, George Kelsall, who has ten times as many books as Mark and has bought a large house solely to accommodate them.

He visits fellow writers, such as Austin Collings who tells Mark he is in grave danger of becoming merely an aggregate of all his books and will eventually lose his own writing voice. Trevor Hoyle tells Mark that he views books as time capsules and, pulling copies down from the shelves, he can tell Mark when he bought them, what was happening in his life at the time. Joanne Harris, the million-selling author of Chocolat, tells Mark she has filled her house full of books because she can’t bring it upon herself to throw any away.

Practical concerns are not forgotten – Mark visits a carpenter, Ashley Deakin, who previously made a bookcase a week but now does one or two a year. ‘‘People don’t want to put books on their walls any more. They just want these bloody huge televisions,’’ he says. Ashley then remembers that he built a shelving unit just a few weeks ago.

"But it was for shoes,’’ he says.

A 7digital production for BBC Radio 4

Only Artists - Writer Tracy Chevalier meets ceramicist and author Edmund de Waal

I came across a fascinating conversation between the writer Tracy Chevalier and the ceramicist and author Edmund de Waal when catching up on older episodes of the BBC Radio 4 programme, Only Artists.

Tracy Chevalier has written eight novels including the international best-seller Girl with a Pearl Earring. Her latest book 'A Single Thread' is set in Winchester Cathedral. 



Edmund de Waal is a ceramicist and author. His book 'The Hare with Amber Eyes' is a family biography about the loss and survival of art objects through time. His porcelain installations often respond to history, museum collections and archives.

 

The conversation took place sat at the potter's wheel in Edmund de Waal's studio. As de Waal demonstrated the process of making a small cup, he spoke of the importance of touch and the connection with the material.



Chevalier agreed and the two authors discussed how, when writing they use pen and paper as opposed to using a computer because their mind is connected to the hand which is connected to the paper, and they think at the pace of writing, not typing. Chevalier also noted how she likes to be able to see the 'road maps' of edits - the bits that she has crossed out, the mistakes and edits. Although 'track changes' does a similar job, she finds these hard to follow. Both shared the importance of feeling what they are doing without overworking it; for de Waal this is in clay, for Chevalier, this is in words. 

Chevalier spoke about the importance of authenticity, and remarked that she can't write about something well unless she has done it herself. 

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m00094hg

NewBridge Books has moved!

NewBridge Books has found a new home in the heart of Gateshead Town Centre!

Location: The NewBridge Project: Gateshead | 232-240 High Street, Gateshead, NE8 1AQ
Open: Wednesday – Friday, 12-6pm

The unique NewBridge Books artist bookshop has moved out of its premises in BALTIC 39, and moved to High Bridge, Newcastle upon Tyne. 

NewBridge Books offers a selection of diverse, original and hard-to-find national and international contemporary art publications, fostering critically-engaged creativity in the region by providing both a resource and outlet for artists, writers, critics and researchers.

The shop is unique to the North East of England providing a platform for independent publishers and artists who self-publish. Some of my published books are sold at NewBridge Books along with a variety of artists’ books, zines, writing and magazines. The bookshop also hosts a programme of regular events and exhibitions related to print culture. I look forward to attending some of these, and potentially doing my own events there too!

Writing for the page and writing to be read aloud

Last night's BBC Radio 4 Front Row programme examined the difference between writing for the page and writing to be read aloud. This is something I have thought about when deciding whether a work is a spoken word piece or if it is to exist on a page to be read. It is also a topic I have discussed with my colleague Jennifer Richards with whom I am organising an event to debate such issues.

Audible is launching three new podcasts featuring original short stories written exclusively for audio. Ben Okri, Booker prize-winning writer of The Famished Road, and bestselling author of Chocolat, Joanne Harris have both written new short stories for Audible. They discuss the particular challenges and joys of writing to be read aloud, and consider the impact of the increasing availability of audio content on the popularity of short-form fiction.





Ben Okri explains that he tends to write with more intensity and clarity when writing for the ear.

He believes that the ear and imagination are more closely linked than imagination and words on a page. When Okri writes, he uses his inner ear to listen to the words internally. However, Joanne Harris reads her writing aloud as she writes. Everything she writes is for the ear and everything is supposed to come off the page.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b09y6z5p

Storytelling: how reading aloud is back in fashion

Following my blog post yesterday about Jenny Richard's lecture, 'Voices and books: a new history of reading', I came across this article in The Observer, published in 2013.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/jan/06/storytelling-back-in-fashion

At a weekly book club, Elizabeth Day has found that even in an age of social networking, the direct, oral tradition can still reach out to a new audience


"The last time someone told Thomas Yeomans a story, he was a child. Last week he wandered into a storytelling session for adults without quite knowing what lay in store. "For me, reading has become more formal over the years; it's something I do on my own," explained Yeomans, a 26-year-old artist. "So I swept into this at the last minute, not knowing what to expect."

Yeomans happened to find himself in one of the weekly storytelling sessions that I have been running over the past month in an art gallery in central London. When I developed the idea with gallerist Simon Oldfield, the premise was simple: we both felt that the tradition of reading aloud and sharing stories with each other was something that had been lost in modern times. In an era of social networking and electronic gadgetry, when friendships are conducted via computer screen and culture is increasingly savoured in isolation through a pair of noise-reducing headphones, we have neglected the pleasures of direct experience.

Many of us used to be told stories as children. But as we grow older, we seem to lose the knack. Yet there is undoubtedly an appetite for it: revenue from downloaded audiobooks has risen by 32.7% since last year, while The Reader Organisation, a charity that aims to engage people through the shared reading of great literature, now has 350 weekly shared reading groups across the country.

"What happens with shared reading is that people experience a very intense thing together, but everybody has their own personal, private, inner response to it," says Jane Davis, founder of The Reader Organisation. "A lot of people don't understand how poor literacy is in our country. For many, reading aloud gives you access to things you would simply never read otherwise."

Like Davis, it struck me that, while there had been a welcome resurgence of book groups and literary festivals over the past decade, there was little chance for adults to engage in group reading without some sort of self-improving literary discussion at the end of it, or a nagging sense that one should really be buying the author's newest work as part of an unspoken commercial transaction. Which is how I came to be reading Anne Enright's short story, Here's To Love, in the week before Christmas when Yeomans wandered through the door. "What I liked about it was that this was an informal setting and a gentle, welcoming environment where my defences were down," Yeomans said after the session. "It really pulled at my heart strings. I felt like a defenceless child again."

Helen Ervin, a 38-year-old marketing executive from New York, agreed: "There's an intimacy that happens when you get a whole bunch of people together… There was a moment in today's story where I thought I might cry. There's an emotion brought to the surface when you're reading aloud because it's being performed."

Another attendee said he had come because "the idea of reading is hard work to me. I'm dyslexic, so I prefer to listen to radio plays and things like that. I was completely sucked in today. It was really engaging."

For Doris Julian, 70, the experience "took me right back to being a child and being read to in the library. I like to listen to le Carré audiobooks and things like that, but there's nothing better than the real version. It's very descriptive and I love it. I can't think of a nicer way to spend an afternoon."

By this time I'd been running the storytelling sessions for a month and had been bowled over by the response. More and more people came in each week to listen to short stories by authors as diverse as Dorothy Whipple and Jon McGregor in a room hung with striking works of contemporary art. Local businesses were keen to get involved: Majestic gave us free wine to serve and a rug company, Bazaar Velvet, loaned us a beautiful Anatolian carpet for everyone to sit on, engendering a real community feel and invoking the true childhood spirit of Jackanory.

A handful of regulars came to every session. It seemed to tap into something – a kind of long-forgotten tradition that we still felt in our bones. Reading aloud has a noble history. Before the invention of the movable-type printing press in the 1430s, oral storytelling was a means of cementing community bonds and passing folk narratives on to the next generation. In medieval times, storytellers were honoured members of royal courts. From 1500 storytelling continued to be popular in an era of widespread illiteracy, when books were still too expensive for the common man.

"Often a neighbour would have a Bible and would read aloud from it," says Jennifer Richards, a professor of early modern literature and culture at Newcastle University. "Or there would be rhetorical training for boys at grammar school, [but] the appeal of reading aloud is not about education; it's about being social, part of a community."

In the 18th and 19th centuries, reading aloud continued to be a form of entertainment. "People didn't have recorded music or films or television, so books had to be everything; they needed to be dramatic, entertaining, comic and sentimental," explains Dr Abigail Williams, a lecturer in English at Oxford University. "One of the things about reading aloud is that you have to do it in small bits. You can't just do it for hours on end, so that brings out qualities in the text you might otherwise miss. People become the characters in a way they don't if you are reading flatly for yourself. You get more of the comedy and the dialogue works differently because it becomes the spoken voice, rather than a transcription of the spoken voice."

But none of this can entirely convey the intensity and intimacy of the experience. I was surprised by how many people who came to the storytelling sessions were visibly moved by the experience – I would glance up from the text and see someone's eyes gleaming, on the brink of tears. Others would look away, lost in their own private universe. One man came up to me afterwards and admitted that he thought a character in one of the stories was suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder – a condition that he too had been diagnosed with.

It is a sensation familiar to Davis, who runs reading groups for a cross-section of society – from young doctors without the time to read, to prisoners or groups of pensioners in economically deprived areas. "These little private bombs go off in your head, something strikes a chord [because] with the shared reading experience you are not an observer or discusser; you're going through the experience with everyone else," she says.

"There are a lot of people out there whose connection to the world is through TV and things like I'm A Celebrity. Lots of people don't have a chance to have a serious, intellectual, meaningful experience, and that's what humans are for. We need that… A book provides a wonderful anonymity for personal feelings and responses."

The Reader Organisation has case studies on its website that pay testament to the power of shared reading. A woman in her 60s from Birkenhead is quoted as saying: "For many years I have had a lot of pain in my body, but when I am in the group the reading and sharing of stories helps me to focus my mind away from the physical pain and forget about it for a couple of hours... It kind of lifts you out of the pain."

A survey by the same charity of 214 people who had attended storytelling groups found that 96% enjoyed meeting people they wouldn't normally meet, while 80% left feeling "more positive" about life.

I can't speak for all those who came to our sessions, but I certainly left feeling more positive about lots of things – about the power of literature to engage, the special kind of intimacy gained from a communal experience and the ability to communicate with so many different people without any kind of ulterior motive.

We weren't trying to sell anything. We weren't pretending to improve anyone's mind. All we wanted to do was to share a story. And in the end, it was not just about reading out loud, but also about reading ourselves."

Voices and books: a new history of reading - a public lecture by Jennifer Richards

Voices and books: a new history of reading

Jennifer Richards, Joseph Cowen Professor of English Literature at Newcastle University delivered last night's public lecture, exploring the importance of the physical voice – breath and tone – to reading.

She explained how the recovery of the lost reading voices of the past, as well as the art of listening, can help us to re-imagine the books of the future.

It is not uncommon to regard reading as a silent action, and although it is often represented as being so, silent reading is a relatively recent practice. There is a history of books being heard as well as seen. Jenny Richards began her lecture by exploring how the printing process contributed to the rise of silent reading.

"Writing moves words to a world of visual space"

Print organises information e.g. contents, chapters, index to make information easier to access.

The format of the book, and indeed the format of a text, shapes the way that it is read.

In The Gutenberg Galaxy, Marshall McLuchan states 'the reading of print puts the reader in the role of movie projector'.

But Richard argues that the physical voice adds meaning to text, and brings the words off the page. She concluded the lecture with a brief introduction to the work she is doing with Professor Michael Rossington (English Literature), Professor Magnus Williamson (Music), and Professor Paul Watson of the Digital Institute at Newcastle University.

"This project is titled Animating Texts at Newcastle University (AtNU). Over three years we will be exploring how the digital can complement rather than replace the print edition, exploring different ways of understanding, explaining, and experiencing text as mobile, variable, adaptable, performable, while also helping us to re-imagine the reading experience."

In terms of my own work, it emphasised the importance of choosing a style and a means of visually presenting my text in a fashion that will guide the reader in how to read it.

I couldn't help but think of the work of Samuel Beckett, particularly the text 'Not I' which i find nearly impenetrable when presented visually, but, when performed, is one of the most powerful pieces of monologue that I have experienced.

http://www.ncl.ac.uk/elll/staff/profile/jenniferrichards.html#research

http://www.ncl.ac.uk/events/public-lectures/

Meeting with Unstapled Press 9099

As I may have mentioned, I have recently begun writing short texts, somewhere in between prose and poems. The texts have their origins in personal experience, but I want for them to move away from the specific towards the general. I want the audience to be able to relate to them in some way.


I am thinking of different ways that the texts could exist;

together as a collection in a publication,

separately on individual sheets,

as postcards,

as audio works to be listened to,

read like subtitles across a screen,

performed as a monologue,

vinyl text on a wall,

and so on

There are many options!


With all these in mind, I contacted Unstapled Press. 

UnstapledPress is a publishing house that was "set up by seven artists with an aim of publishing creative work involving text. Founded in May 2014, UnstapledPress works in collaboration with: artists, architects, musicians, writers, thinkers, performers, speakers, and linguists, anyone who has a passion for text. Producing books where there perhaps were none before."

http://unstapledpress.com

We met and discussed ideas and got excited about possibilities. I told them about what I have been doing, showed them some of the texts and proposed that we work together to get the texts in an engaging form (or forms) suited to the text. They were very keen for us to work together. I gave them access to all the shorts texts that I have written to date, and we agreed to meet again.

Simulacrum by Dawn Felicia Knox

Donned in waterproofs, hiking boots and a head torch, along with a group of other art adventurers, I boarded the minibus destined for Walltown Quarry, where we would witness a commissioned performance by the Noize Choir as part of Simulacrum, the latest work by artist Dawn Felicia Knox.

After a day of torrential rain, it finally stopped just in time for the outing. In what seemed like the middle of nowhere, the sky was clear and dark. The group gathered together to begin our journey to the installation. Hundreds of little firelights created a winding path leading to the structure built of over 8,000 obsolete books. On the way, we stopped to enjoy a couple of performances by Noize Choir who performed "a site-specific sound composition drawing from diverse narratives of the project layered into a rich sound-scape." In the final performance the choir were inside the sculpture, hardly visible apart from the light emitted by the fire lanterns they were holding. Gradually the performers emerged from the structure made from books, and read from some of the texts included in the installation.



Dawn Knox says of the installation, "The structure echoes the precision and geometry of the Roman defensive structures found along Hadrian’s Wall in contrast to the subsuming natural environment. As designed, the sculpture began to decay almost immediately – the rain has permeated the pages, the sun has cracked the covers and insects and spores have begun to colonize the books. This mirrors the act of ruination of the ancient monuments themselves, be it at an accelerated pace. Along with the notions of impermanence and preservation, the work explores the ideas of language, migration and the materialisation of knowledge and experience through the written word."

The journey to and from the artwork really added to the wonder of the piece. The passageway of lights was magical and helped visualise the lead up to the installation.

The fact that this was a one off event in a remote place at night had the effect of making my experience seem all the more memorable.

http://www.hexham-courant.co.uk/features/----Sculpture-books-its-place-in-history-of-Wall----404e372d-8e14-4dd1-8bc7-52f90ab83420-ds

 One felt valued to be 

This project was created in partnership with Hadrian Arts Trust and funded by the Arts Council England and Northumberland National Park.