Hi Everyone,
I have to admit that I am still coasting a bit here, set firmly on Holiday Mode, and I hope you all are too.
But maybe we can ease back into working with a simple question, for you to take on:
What was the single most powerful reading experience you had this year?
Let’s try to keep this to one book or story per respondent. Although….as I try to come up with my response, I see how unreasonable that is.
OK, then: let’s say three books or stories each, and maybe tell us why were they especially powerful for you, and/or describe the conditions of reading (where were you, how fast did you read it, how did it change you?).
And Happy New Year to you all. Let’s hope, as we do every year, but maybe especially so this year, that 2024 will turn out to trend, even slightly, in the direction of peace, sanity, kindness and environmental responsibility.
Well, we can dream.
We have to.
After reading Claire Keegan’s “So Late in the day” in the New Yorker, I flew to Ireland to take her three day writing class. I will never be the same.
Happy Holidays George! That's an easy question for me: The answer is Story Club. Not a book and not a story, but some of the most intuitive and heart felt reading and writing that I have ever encountered - from you and from fellow clubbers.
This has resonated for me in an unexpected way. It helped me appreciate Not writing. I had been writing regularly and having some success with it. However since I joined Story Club I have not written a thing, other than some journal stuff that might some day bear fruit and a few awesome emails that were just soooo profound.
And yet....I feel like a better writer, better reader and more empathetic and perceptive person. Story Club is such a rich experience of reading, analyzing and integrating great storytelling that I feel deeply satisfied. It’s as if my hunger to write, to strive for acknowledgement, has been sated by the stories you choose, the insight and heart with which you teach them, and the exchange of ideas and feelings that unfolds in the comments. This is huge. I don’t have to time to write. I’m too busy learning to see the world more fully.
I described it to someone as being as if I used to cook some pretty decent meals that people enjoyed. Then a great chef (let’s call him George) opened an amazing restaurant down the street, and now all I want to do is go see what he’s serving this week. And somehow I always feel like he makes his brilliant meals just for me. Or I used to be on an island, stuffing notes into bottles and tossing them into the sea, hoping for connection, then a boat load of interesting people from all over the world arrived and I became fully engaged with learning their languages.
So I am seeing the world with clarity and not flinching and I am thrilled, but I’m also sort of stunned and awestruck to the point I have lain down the pen and walked away from the keyboard....and am loving it.