The Reader Online

Founded at the University of Liverpool in 1997, The Reader Organisation became a charitable trust during 2008. Our aim is to bring about a Reading Revolution. Why? Because reading matters to everyone.

‘Can’t you stay a bit longer? I want to find out what happens in the story.’
Looked-after child, Wirral Children’s Service

‘Now I take the time to read every word. Before I just skim read everything. I’m starting to enjoy all the beautiful description in the books I read. I didn’t even notice it before!’
Bibby Line Group employee

‘It moves you, I mean it hits you where it meets you and means something.’
Dementia sufferer on reading poetry, Mossley Hill

‘It’s been great this - a real boost. I loved this at school but I haven’t looked at a book in fifteen years. It makes me wish I hadn’t thrown those years away, because I’d forgotten what it feels like when you read something like this, the power of words I mean’.
Client at the Kevin White Detox Unit

‘I saw many people fight their demons by stepping onto that stage. It made some of us feel, for the first time, ‘Yes. I can do this’.’
Participant in Community Shakespeare, Wirral

We’re holding a launch event at Bibby Line Group HQ, on Friday 7th November, 4.30-5.30pm - in the building that once housed Liverpool’s first public library - as part of Shipping Lines Liverpool Literature Festival.

At the launch, author and screenwriter Frank Cottrell Boyce, a long-time supporter of The Reader Organisation, will read from his work - a treat not to be missed. Director of The Reader Organisation, Dr Jane Davis, will discuss the necessity for a Reading Revolution - great books reaching everybody - in the UK and beyond. Tea and cake will be served.

This is an invitation only event but if you would like to register your interest please email info@thereader.org.uk.

Posted by Jen Tomkins

We have varying physiological responses to Shakespeare, depending on whether we are reading or listening to works of the Bard, using and engaging different parts of the brain in each of these activities. Join Professor Philip Davis of the University of Liverpool and editor of The Reader magazine in a talk about the unique ways in which our minds respond to Shakespeare.

Friday 21 November, 1.00 - 2.00pm, Liverpool Everyman. Cost: £1.50 when booked with a theatre ticket for King Lear (starring Pete Postlethwaite). Contact the Everyman (0151 709 4776) to book a ticket.

The first event of the Liverpool Literary Festival is on this Monday 3rd November at the Bluecoat at 12noon. Rebecca Goss is hosting a two hour workshop over lunchtime about women’s poetry, so bring a packed lunch and join other readers and writers to discuss poems that explore key stages in the life of women.

Rebecca and the group will read and discuss poems addressing key aspects in women’s lives, taking in the poignant and the pleasurable. This will lead to a writing exercise, drawing on sensory experience and nostalgia.  No previous writing experience is necessary. This workshop is limited to 20 places and we still have some seats left.

Rebecca Goss taught creative writing at Liverpool John Moores University and is now a full-time poet. She reads nationwide and has work published in The Reader, Mslexia and Ambit and forthcoming in anthologies, The Poet’s Perspective and In the Telling.

Rebecca recently appeared at the Chapter And Verse festival at the Bluecoat alongside Paul Durcan in a lively, entertaining and heartfelt event to a packed-out audience. Although their styles were very different, it was wonderful to see two poetry readings about personal experiences and moments brought to life in such a memorable way.

There are two other workshops at the festival:

Jorie Graham is appearing in a discussion group with poems submitted by workshop attendees, and we nearly have a full session already. Many people have submitted a wide range of poems and it is shaping up to be a very interesting group. Saturday 8th November at 10am at the Bluecoat.

Ailsa Cox will be leading a creative writing workshop on short stories, one of the most demanding and yet rewarding of forms. It’s not going to take as long as a novel but it is going to ask you to be succinct. Budding and experienced writers are invited to join Ailsa Cox for a workshop which will introduce some basic concepts and give you a chance to develop your skills. No experience necessary. Sunday 9th November at 4pm at the Bluecoat. Ailsa Cox teaches creative writing at Edge Hill University. Her stories have been published widely, and have been shortlisted twice for the Stand International Short Story competition, for the V.S. Pritchett award and The Bridport Prize. She is the author of Writing Short Stories.

Remember that students can £1 tickets for all events … please visit our website www.liverpoollitfest.org.uk.

Shakespeare’s famous sonnet of realistic expectations is both an expression of earthly knowledge and a declaration of irrational, inexplicable feeling. What makes this poem an intensely personal one is its ‘pay off’ in the final couplet; the ordinary lover becomes remarkable through the poet’s affection. This sonnet is an unravelling of the very language of love poetry in all its artifice and insincerity and yet at the same time much of its drama comes from its persuasive force. Even so, I would not recommend using this approach in the bars of Liverpool.

Sonnet 130

My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun;

Coral is far more red than her lips’ red;

If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun;

If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head.

I have seen roses damask’d, red and white,

But no such roses see I in her cheeks;

And in some perfumes is there more delight

Than in the breath that from my mistress reeks.

I love to hear her speak, yet well I know

That music hath a far more pleasing sound;

I grant I never saw a goddess go;

My mistress, when she walks, treads on the ground:

And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare

As any she belied with false compare.

As part of BBC Radio 3’s Free Thinking festival (31st October - 2nd November), which sees the likes of Tony Benn, Will Self and Ian Paisley descending on Liverpool, The Reader Organisation is hosting two free and fabulous ‘Book at Breakfast’ events.

Award-winning writers Clare Allan and Mark Haddon join us for this year’s ‘Book at Breakfast’ events - reading and discussion with coffee and croissants - to which you are welcome to come!

1. Book at Breakfast with Clare Allan:

Saturday 1st November 10.00am - 11.30am
at BBC Radio Merseyside, Hanover Street, L69 1ZJ
Clare Allan in conversation with Jane Davis

Join us for coffee and croissants in the company of Clare Allan, winner of the first Orange/Harpers Bazaar Short Story Competition and author of Poppy Shakespeare for a talk about her work (an extract from the novel will be sent to read in advance). Clare Allan was the winner of the first Orange/Harpers short story prize.

‘Poppy Shakespeare has that rare quality: the feel of a book that needed to be written … It is bitterly, brutally funny and extraordinarily moving.’ Telegraph

‘Catch-22 meets One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest … an electrifying debut … surreal, raucous, infuriating and very funny.’ Guardian

2. Book at Breakfast with Mark Haddon

Sunday 2nd November 10.00am - 11.30am
at BBC Radio Merseyside , Hanover Street, L69 1ZJ
Mark Haddon in conversation with Jane Davis

Join us for coffee and croissants in the company of the multi-award winning writer Mark Haddon, author of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time  (winning many prestigious awards, including the 2003 Whitbread Book of the Year) and A Spot of Bother, for a talk about his latest work, a chapter of which, ‘The Island’, will be sent out to read in advance.

‘Haddon’s style is a reader’s bliss. He writes seamless prose. The words are melted into meaning… Haddon’s gift is to make us look at ourselves when we think we’re looking away, being entertained’. Tom Adair Scotsman

‘Haddon’s last, spectacularly successful novel, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, found a brilliant way to make the mundane strange and the strange mundane, choosing a narrator for whom the world is so perpetually strange that it can never be truly surprising’. Telegraph

Tickets for these Book at Breakfast events are limited and going fast. If you would like to attend either (or both) events please email info@thereader.org.uk or call 0151 794 2830 and we will send you a ticket and the extract for reading.

Posted by Jen Tomkins

Over the summer I was thrilled to meet all the lovely people in the Scottish Poetry Library (SPL) who work tirelessly to spread the message of reading revolution across Scotland. So when Juliet Rees, the Education Officer for the SPL, proposed a joint venture, I eagerly agreed to Bibby Line Group’s involvement. With funding from the Scottish Arts Council and Glasgow City Council, this year the SPL organised poets’ workshops in schools and workplaces across Glasgow to celebrate National Poetry Day 2008 and its theme of ‘work’. On Wednesday 8th October, Bibby Financial Services Glasgow hosted one of these workshops.

The idea that everyone should down tools all in the name of poetry is quite an unusual concept. I’ve found that it can be difficult to get people into poems even when they’re away from their desks. Consequently, I was ever so apprehensive about the challenge of engaging people whilst they remained in front of computer screens, and next to buzzing phones.

And yet, last Wednesday, six employees in the Glasgow office warmly welcomed the Glaswegian poet Gerry Cambridge for the afternoon. We chatted about different poems we loved – and hated – by writers as diverse as Robert Graves, Philip Larkin and Robbie Burns. Gerry then exhibited some of his nature photographs and explained that for him, a poem, much like a photograph, can do a great job of providing new or unfamiliar ways of looking at seemingly common subjects. Gerry read a selection of his poems to us, some of which are written in dialectical Scottish. Field Days is particularly memorable and is reproduced here with Gerry’s kind permission:

Field Days

Old Davie still did much farm work by hand.

Tae thin neeps, ye gae up an doon thae rowse.

Leave jist yin each six inches, sae it growse.

The thought of lunch was a breeze-fanned island,

What is the time? our common famous question.

The shrinking patch of field still to be weeded

was joy and thought we’d be no longer needed.

He’d blow through his lips: Gerad, ye’re the best yin

O thae young uns that come here!

                                                   Or biggest fool

I sometimes thought, those languid days

After the last exams, when I skipped school.

But no jam pieces nor hot tea’s tasted more

Significant than that field’s, and strongest praise

The two green pounds each day’s end, my limbs sore.

During Gerry’s reading of this poem, the office phones rang, rang and rang again. Focusing on the poetry was difficult, to say the least.  Then a member of the sales term abruptly answered the persistent caller, responding with a curt ‘No, I’m in an important meeting’.

For me, these six words were revolutionary. Poetry had been recognised as ‘important’! And (dare I say it?) more important than work, perhaps?

Posted by Ella Jolly

Read more from Ella at booksatbibby

A sobering if not worrying read. Gripping in the usual le Carré manner with believable ‘nasties’ doing their establishment jobs, in-fighting for personal prestige, group prestige and with nowhere an ethic to be seen. Ethics are for outsiders and underdogs of course. Set this time in Hamburg, port of illegal immigration, it focuses on intrigue involving manipulation of the Islamic ‘terror’ scene to cover up the entirely up-to-date huge business of carpet-bagging, East-West (Europe of course), and contents laundering; never mind ‘class’ upper or lower, money glue sticks anywhere, nor the suffering of the little people. Without the little people there would no scabrous political causes and no-one to get in the way. Le Carré is cross and doesn’t mind showing it. Bravo to an octogenarian writer with his finger truly on the pulse, racing with a fast-moving passionate script curbed only by the background beat of bitter realism. After watching Channel 4’s “Oligarts” nothing surprises.

Posted by Maggie Goren

Roger McGough is appearing at the first event to sell out at the Liverpool Literature Festival, but luckily he is appearing twice over the weekend.

In our Liverpool Poets series, Roger is hosting Liverpool Poets Two at the Bluecoat. ’A trickster you can trust’, he is one of Britain’s best-loved poets for both adults and children. He was awarded his O.B.E. for services to poetry in 1997 and a C.B.E. last year. He was recently honoured with the Freedom  of the City of Liverpool.

In May this year the Liverpool Playhouse saw Roger McGough’s ‘Tartuffe’ a sell-out success and receive rave reviews. The Daily Post said ‘There are times when a critic is redundant and last night was one. There is absolutely nothing to criticise about Tartuffe at the Liverpool Playhouse’.

The Reader festival office has had many people enquiring about his events at the Liverpool Literary Festival, and obviously Liverpool folk can’t get enough of him.

Although his event at the Bluecoat has been sold out, the good news is that Roger McGough is appearing twice! He will be hosting a panel discussion and poetry clinic with other festival writers (Sunday 9 November at 4pm) and it will be a fantastic opportunity to see and hear him in this close-up interactive event in which the audience asks the panel to select poems for particular occaisions, seasons and reasons. So get your thinking caps on and come along to put this panel of experienced writers of poetry through their paces by finding instant recomendations for your particular purposes.

This should be lively and entertaining hour indeed! Please see our website for event details, updates on panel members and information on how to book tickets. Even my five year old daughter is excited about the prospect of Roger McGough coming to Liverpool as she’s learning his children’s poem called Gruesome for school!

I was sitting in the sitting room
toying with some toys
when I saw a door marked GRUESOME
and heard a gruesome noise.

Cautiously I opened it
and there to my surprise
a little Grue was sitting there
with tears in its eyes.

Oh little Grue please tell me
what is it ails thee so.
I am so small it said
the other Grue’s don’t want to know

EXERCISES are the answer
each day you must do some
and do you know what
the very next day he GREW SOME.

And don’t forget all the other great Liverpool Poets attending the festival: Brian Patten, Paul Farley, McKendrick, Peter Robinson, John Redmond and Deryn Rees-Jones.

Please see our website www.liverpoollitfest.org.uk for full details.

Sir Thomas Wyatt is not much read now outside of the seminar room, but the musicality of this poem deserves a hearing. Wyatt is known as one of the poets who introduced the Petrarchan sonnet to English, but he also had a career in the court of Henry VIII and was imprisoned in the Tower of London more than once. He was suspected of being one of Anne Boleyn’s lovers and was also close to Catherine Howard. Perhaps surprisingly he succeeded in dying of natural causes in 1542, aged 39.

The Lover showeth how he is forsaken of such as he sometime enjoyed.

They flee from me, that sometime did me
seek,
With naked foot stalking within my
chamber:
Once have I seen them gentle, tame, and meek,
That now are wild, and do not once remember,
That sometime they have put themselves in danger
To take bread at my hand; and now they range
Busily seeking in continual change.
Thanked be Fortune, it hath been otherwise
Twenty times better; but once especial,
In thin array, after a pleasant guise,
When her loose gown did from her shoulders fall,
And she me caught in her arms long and small,
And therewithal sweetly did me kiss,
And softly said, ‘ Dear heart, how like you this?’
It was no dream; for I lay broad awaking:
But all is turn’d now through my gentleness,
Into a bitter fashion of forsaking;
And I have leave to go of her goodness ;
And she also to use new fangleness.
But since that I unkindly so am served:
How like you this, what hath she now deserved?

Posted by Chris Routledge

Now that issue 31 of The Reader is out, readers may be interested to follow up the activities and events of the writers featured in the magazine. 

Can you make it to the Liverpool Playhouse this October? Frank Cottrell Boyce, writer of the brilliant short story ‘Accelerate’ in the current issue of The Reader, has his first play Proper Clever on at the Playhouse this Autumn (3 Oct–25 Oct, 7.00, evenings.) The play is about the school lives of teenagers, and is directed by Everyman and Playhouse associate director Serdar Bilis. 

‘Claire and her gang are proper clever… and they know it. They’re friends… and they’re sure of it. They’re watching from the sidelines… and they have a plan. Then Bex, stumbles into their virtual world. Sad and desperate she’s the perfect test for their experiment, one that will bring down the most popular girl in school.’

Jeffrey Wainwright’s new collection is Clarity or Death (Carcanet), and you can read about it here. 

Howard Jacobson’s tenth novel, The Act of Love (Jonathan Cape, ISBN 978-0224086097) is a raunchy read about a husband’s desire for marital infidelity. The twist is that the perfectly ill-named Felix longs for his wife to have the affair.

We will remind you again closer to the time, but those of you with very busy lives might like to note down somewhere safe that Janet Suzman will be directing Antony and Cleopatra at the Liverpool Playhouse in the Autumn of next year. 

Posted by Sarah Coley

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