Shome Dasgupta has an excellent blog, The Laughing Yeti, in which writers talk about the act of reading and what it means to them. Here's my short contribution, which went up yesterday. I'm also including a link to the posts of other participants including Aimee Bender, Stephen Elliott, Matt Bell, Kyle Minor, Kevin Sampsell, Bonnie Jo Campbell, Susanna Daniel, and others.
On Reading:
I'm taking note of breaths, phrases, lists and their components. I'm looking out for disjunctions and associations, the pattern of thinking in a paragraph. I'm steeped in the work of the senses: the scrape of a knife against a plate, the smell of mulch dropped on the ground. Sometimes I'm not even taking in the facts I'm supposed to be taking in, the stuff of plot or cause and effect. But I'm inside a current, definitely. I'm a particle in a stream of sound, a wave pushed this way and that. How often does it come to us? Once, twice in a year? But I pick up new books in the hope of getting that back, that raw state where we're simultaneously escaping the world and feeling more present in it.
3 comments:
interesting. i can't help but think about the reading my students do (and don't do) as well as reading pedagogy. the divide between what a struggling high school reader can read and what the writers at The Laughing Yeti can read is almost too wide to traverse. yet....
on a more uplifting note, students in my first semester creative writing class talked about the voices in their heads when they read. a couple said they adopt foreign accents as they read.
I love this notion of the interior foreign accent. I guess the point is that there are so many different ways to read, and I know that my description here is just one of my many modes.
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