Among the many highlights within Issue 46 are:

• An extract from Tim Parks’ latest novel, the unnerving and insightful The Server (Harvill Secker, May 2012)
• New poetry from Julie-ann Rowell, Neil Curry, Caroline Price, Marina Sanchez and David Attwooll
• Sue Colbourn interviews Matthew Knight, a clinical psychologist with Berkshire Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust, who has been using poetry in therapeutic settings since the late-nineties, with some staggering results – including a wonderfully moving account of a man who spoke after four years of silence upon reading Wordsworth  – the power of whose words is further explored by Gillian Clarke, Stephen Gill, Bernard O’Donoghue and Raymond Tallis
• Brian Patten features in the regular Poet on His Work feature, writing a no-holds-barred account of the inspiration for his poem Stepfather (which is this week’s Featured Poem on The Reader Online)
• New fiction in the form of an absorbing short story, The Magpie by Mark Godfrey

The joy of Wordsworth’s words is also revelled in by Jane Davis, who ponders over the pleasure of Lines Written in Early Spring whilst being amongst nature; more stories from the Reading Revolution from Penny Markell, who takes us through a day in the life of the Get Into Reading London Project Manager, and Casi Dylan talking about how good mistakes can be made in endeavouring in the adventure of shared reading; and an exclusive preview of the latest Reader Organisation anthology, the utterly enchanting A Little, Aloud For Children, introduced by its editor Angela Macmillan.

Perfect summer reading if you’re lounging around poolside somewhere more reliably sunnier or just on the lounger in the garden.

If you’re already subscribed, you can expect Issue 46 of The Reader to land on your doorstep anytime soon and if not, then what are you waiting for - subscribe to receive your copy today.

One of the official Olympic poets for 2012, Lemn is also associate artist at the Southbank Centre and was awarded an MBE in 2010. He recently became a patron of The Reader Organisation and will be appearing on the panel discussing ‘Literature and Children’s Wellbeing’ on Day One. As someone who spent 17 years growing up in the care system, Lemn is passionate about improving the lives of Looked After Children through initiatives such as our own Get Into Reading project.

He will also be appearing in conversation with TRO’s Jane Davis at Day Two of our conference, a day exclusively designed for those who have completed our Read to Lead training.

Here’s a preview of his thoughts:

What is the last book you read that moved you?

A Love Letter from a Stray Moon by Jay Griffiths

Why are you interested in what The Reader Organisation does?

The Reader Organisation releases the true life changing power of the intimate act of reading. 

To hear more from Lemn Sissay and our work with young people, book your place now for The Reader Organisation’s National Conference, 17th-18th May 2012, British Library, London. Visit our website to register and for more details about the programme.

This week’s star is Erwin James, writer and journalist, who also happens to be one of our new patrons. Erwin, a former prisoner, believes that reading and education changed his life, and today he is best known for his Guardian columns and his contributions to the debate on the role of prisons in our society.

He is appearing at our National Conference, 17-18th May, in a panel discussion on ‘Why Shared Reading Works in Criminal Justice Settings’, providing a unique personal perspective on the issues involved.

Here’s what he had to say when we caught up with him recently:

What is the last book you read that moved you?

‘Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled Self’ by Claire Tomalin, an exquisite insight into a complex life. By the end of the book I felt I knew this man so well, I felt that Tomalin’s almost forensic narrative had allowed me the privilege of sharing his life’s trials. 

Why are you interested in what The Reader Organisation does?

TRO promotes and encourages reading as a shared rather than a solitary experience. Most of my reading I’ve done in forced isolation, but when I was able to read with others and share and discuss what we had read, I found I got so much more out of a book. It’s for that reason especially that I am interested in the work of TRO.

To hear more from Erwin, as well as all our other exciting speakers, come along to The Reader Organisation’s 3rd Annual National Conference, 17-18th May, British Library, London. For information on which day is for you, and how to book your place, visit our website.

To give you a little taster of what you can expect, we’ve asked some of our guest speakers and the TRO staff appearing alongside them to give us their thoughts on their current reading and the upcoming conference itself.

We’ll be posting their answers on the blog over the next few weeks, so keep your eyes peeled.

Our first is from Jonathan Rose, Professor of History at Drew University (New Jersey, USA) and author of The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes. He’ll be appearing in conversation with TRO’s Director Jane Davis on Day One.

What is the last book you read that moved you?

Sex Before the Sexual Revolution: Intimate Life in England 1918-1963by Simon Szreter and Kate Fisher (Cambridge University Press). Using the methods of oral history, the authors persuaded the last surviving members of that generation to talk about a side of their lives that they had always considered deeply private. The resulting collective memoir is at once touching, surprising, and stunningly honest. It turns out that our grandparents were, in their own way, more loving than we ever imagined.

Why are you interested in what The Reader Organisation does?

I admire and support The Reader Organisation because it protects and nurtures an endangered species – the serious reader.

For more information about the programme and how to book your place, please visit our website.

The actor and director David Morrissey is interviewed about being the dark and ‘locked in’ Bradley Headstone in the television adaptation of Dickens’ Our Mutual Friend, a role he reprised in December for our Penny Readings here in Liverpool. He also talks about playing Macbeth in the Everyman theatre and his how his childhood love of libraries continues to this day.

 There are two unsettling new short stories by Drummond Bone (late of the University of Liverpool) and Olivia McCannon; and a rattlebug of beautiful, bite-size poems by Carolyn Waudby, Sean Elliott and Richie McCaffery. Have you ever read a poem that actually looks like a tiny little bird, hopping among the hedgerows? Mark Leech’s ‘As a Wren’ embodies this precious, tough little thing –its trilling and peeping come alive when you read this poem aloud.

As ever, tales from The Reader Organisation give much to think on: Casi Dylan on the balance and play between prose and poetry in Get Into Reading groups; Beverley Laroc and Eleanor Stanton’s discussion on reading with older people and the place of libraries in the current climate; Lynn Elsdon on harnessing technology via TRO’s first online Evening Read-In (the second, reading Kafka’s Metamorphosis, starts 8^th March); and Natalie Evans’ elegant thought-piece on reading Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie and its prescience to her and, more broadly, today’s youth unemployment crisis.

And that’s not all: Monday’s Featured Poem here on the blog will be from this issue’s ‘Poet on His Work’ – the wonderful and insightful Bernard O’Donoghue.  Pop back on Monday for this tantalising taster, or, better yet, get ahead of the game and subscribe now!

I knew I’d picked the right seminar at the TRO conference when the first slide in the Libraries We Love presentation was of an old man wielding a guitar, impressively close to doing the splits:

That old man is, in fact, Keith Richards busting out on his trademark Telecaster. Richards was guitarist with The Rolling Stones from the early 1960s up until their demise in… no, incredibly they’re still creaking around… anyway, it has come to our attention that Richards is a big fan of libraries. Well, my two great loves are books and rock ‘n’ roll so I thought I’d have a look and see what involvement Richards has had, and could have, in the future of public libraries.

The first thing I found was a video of a long interview with Richards at the New York Central Library.

If you click along to around 8 minutes 50 seconds in, you will hear him talking about his love of libraries as a child growing up in Kent. I was struck by Richards’ response to the interviewer’s initial question about libraries - he smiles and says ‘Sure’ with quiet relish as though it’s his special topic on Mastermind. For a boy expelled from school, it is interesting to hear Richards speak of his willingness to obey the rules of libraries and that he valued them as places of civilisation.

In a BBC interview with Andrew Marr, Richards agreed that his childhood was Dickensian and that he was ‘one of the reprobates’, something which clearly continued into adulthood when he was jailed in 1967 on drugs charges. There is something about strict routine and regulation which connects prisons with Richards’ perception of libraries. The idea of ‘thou shalt not’, perhaps. Nevertheless, that libraries operate around their own internal laws (no talking, no food and drink etc.) was somehow appealing to Richards; strangely the institutionalism of his library was the thing he enjoyed, perhaps giving a sense of order to what became an otherwise hectic lifestyle. It certainly makes you wonder how we could achieve a balance between relaxing rules to make libraries less intimidating but also preserving rules so as to maintain the comfort of clarity and stability for library users.

Next, I came came across a short article in The Times, ‘It’s only books and shelves but I like it’. The article reports on the career Richards might have chosen had he not become a musician…

Last year Richards released a book himself, Life. I haven’t read it yet but reviews of the autobiography suggest it is a warts n all type of thing. I searched online for a taster and found a digital version of it, available here.

(You might need to press on the + button to make it legible.)

During the conference seminar, we had a long discussion about which titles should be in our libraries and who should choose them. Maybe Life ought to be among the stock on our dream library’s shelves – it is life we need to breathe into the public library system, after all.

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The Reader, reaching 42, has had a bit of a makeover. You’ll be seeing a rainbow of colours coming your way as each issue arrives through your letterbox – making your collection of readers even more stimulating.

Inside this issue, we promised you that a couple of things would be available online, so here they are:

The full interview with A B Yehoshua.

A third poem, ‘Lemons’,  from John Levett.

What was the best television programme ever made?
Is this a trick question? There has never been any dispute about what was the best TV programme. It’s Top Cat. Pure and simple.

Read the interview in full here.

This time, the idea came to him as he and Jane chatted on a train to London to meet the publishers Walker Books a year ago.

“I have this notebook which is my ideas notebook, and I had three or four really good, what I thought were really good ideas for stories,” says Frank.

“And on the way down to London on the train, for some reason I just started talking about this girl, Misheel, who’s a real girl.

“Jane said, ‘that’s the story I want in the book’. And I went well, it’s not actually a story, it’s just something that happened. I’ve got these other really great stories that I’ve worked out.

“But she said ‘no no, that’s the one’.”

Read it in full here.

Here is a photo of Frank, with Fiona McDonald from Walker Books, just after the contracts were signed for Our Read:

Unfortunately we cannot post any of her poems here for copyright reasons but the interview is well worth hearing.