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

What I'm reading

I am really looking forward to getting stuck in to the latest additional to my personal library; Diary Drawings, Mental Illness and Me by Bobby Baker.

In 1996 the artist Bobby Baker was diagnosed as having borderline personality disorder. Her subsequent struggle to overcome severe mental and later physical illness lasted for 11 years, and was unknown to anyone outside her close family, friends and colleagues. The book contains 158 drawings and watercolours that were selected by Bobby from the hundreds more that she created daily as a private way of coming to terms with her experience.

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

Against Everything - Mark Greif as part of Reading for _____ at The NewBridge Project

On Monday, at the first of what is intended to be a regular series of sessions at The NewBridge Project, Daniel Russell selected Against Everything by Mark Greif as the text to be shared and discussed.

"Against Everything is a thought-provoking study and essential guide to the vicissitudes of everyday life under twenty-first-century capitalism. He challenges us to rethink the ordinary world and take life seriously."

Dan chose to focus on the first essay within the book, Against Exercise because he had noticed a similarity between the behaviour and mentality applied when going to a present-day gym and that of production line employees in the industrial society. Has our change of working conditions i.e. less manual labour, had an impact on the way we want to exercise? Are we nostalgic about factory work?

Rather than operating the conveyor belt, we turn to the gym to walk on the conveyor belt.

We employ a personal trainer to punish us in order to liberate ourselves.

We track progress by focusing on numbers - output = kilometres walked, weight lifted, calories burned etc

We criticise those who don't partake in the gym culture

The need to go to the gym is another example of the desire to be productive, doing something worthwhile with our time and even manage to do two things at once at the gym, workout while catching up on the latest television, listening to music etc.

The gym is a public space where private activities are carried out. Acts that previously would be regarded as private actions are now done in front of others, we puff, pant and grunt as we put our bodies through hard labour.

And the reason for these efforts? Greif argues that our actions are intended to prolong our lives, yet argues that in doing so, we are forgetting how to live.

I do not necessarily agree with this argument. He fails to consider the enjoyment that many people yield from participating in exercise and the social aspect of going to the gym.

A lot can happen in a day! - Reading Group, Spoken Word Workshop & Performance with Helen Shaddock

A lot can happen in a day

Reading Group, Spoken Word Workshop and Performance with Helen Shaddock

Saturday 22nd July 2017

11am - 8pm



TURF Projects

Gallery, Workspace & Studios

Keeley Road

Croydon

CR0 1TF




FREE!

Booking required

DESCRIPTION

READING GROUP (1.5 – 2 hours approx.) 11am-1:00pm

The reading group will focus on the publication, ‘A lot can happen in fifteen minutes’, and will include a question and answer session with artist Helen Shaddock.


WRITING & SPOKEN WORD WORKSHOP 2-5pm

Participants will engage in writing and spoken word exercises, and develop a text in relation to some of the themes discussed in the reading group. Working individually or in groups, participants will develop a spoken word performance based on their own writing or using a text from the ‘A lot can happen in fifteen minutes’ publication.


SPOKEN WORD PERFORMANCE EVENING 6-8pm

In the evening, members of the Spoken Word workshop will present individual and/or group spoken word performances that were developed during the day’s workshop.



To register for the event (ideally all day, but the different aspects can be attended separately), visit

https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/a-lot-can-happen-in-a-day-reading-group-spoken-word-workshop-performance-with-helen-shaddock-tickets-35460169321


https://www.facebook.com/events/242095779609157/?acontext=%7B%22ref%22%3A%2222%22%2C%22feed_story_type%22%3A%2222%22%2C%22action_history%22%3A%22null%22%7D&pnref=story

For more information please contact Helen Shaddock

http://www.helenshaddock.co.uk/contact/index.php

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/

Reading list on pinterest

At the Pecha Kucha event a few days ago, Duane Harrison and Jamie Sutherland talked about a couple of pinterest boards that they have created, namely 'Reading list' and 'The Bookshelf'

The Bookshelf is a place for people to recommend books that others should read, and make their case for why the book should be read.

Read a book, summarise the book, and share it with others = genius idea!

My life is so hectic that I rarely get to sit and read a book, and so the thought of someone else reading a book, the summarising the key points and sharing this with others is brilliant.

Reading list consists of design books that may be useful to read in relation to the topic of design.

You can follow these lists at the following websites:

http://pinterest.com/reynanshimada/reading-list/

http://pinterest.com/duaneharrison/the-bookshelf/

Will Self Friday Event

Today I was lucky enough to attend the first Friday Event of the 2012-2013 academic session. The speaker was Will Self who introduced and read from his new publication "Umbrella", which is on the shortlist for the Man Booker prize.

Cinema 1 at The Gft, Glasgow had a full audience, which the speaker likened to a "field of mushrooms".

Self did not disappoint, his talk was informative, intelligent and entertaining.

Quote of the day courtesy of Will Self
"semi colons are the coalition of punctuation"