The Reader Online

New Beginnings

Get Into Reading National Conference
Friday 8th January, 9am – 5pm
Blackburne House, Liverpool, L8 7PE

This conference will be a fantastic opportunity for everyone involved with, or interested in, Get Into Reading, and to share your experiences of the project from within your organisation, area of the country, profession, or personal interest.

Speakers include: Blake Morrison (author and Chair of TRO), Susan Blishen (Mental Health Foundation), Dr David Fearnley (Medical Director and Deputy Chief of Mersey Care NHS Trust) and Dr Jane Davis (Director of TRO).

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*SPECIAL ADDITION*
Friday Night Supper
Friday 8th January 7 –10 pm

Join The Reader Organisation and some of our panellists and writers for a special Friday Night supper which will feature a conversation between TRO Director, Jane Davis and guests, as well as live music. Not to be missed.

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New Beginnings Readers’ Day
Saturday 9th January, 9.30am – 4pm
Blackburne House, Liverpool, L8 7PE

Join Tim Pears, Brian Keenan and Clare Allan and many more in thought-provoking workshops and discussions, on the theme of New Beginnings, for an inspiring day hosted by the BBC’s Roger Phillips.

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Tickets for all events are now on sale!

Book now for the full New Beginnings experience – Conference, Friday Supper and Readers’ Day – for only £100 until the end of November.

For more information about New Beginnings, please email Claire Speer or visit our website.

Don’t miss your chance to get a ticket for our ‘Words and Images’ Readers’ Day next Saturday (13th June) at the Brindley Arts Centre in Runcorn, for you opportunity to join:

• award-winning author of Poppy Shakespeare, Clare Allan;
• artist Viv Levy;
• local poet Rebecca Goss;
• and our own celebrated reading enthusiasts Jane Davis, Director of The Reader Organisation, and Angela MacMillan, Co-Editor of The Reader magazine.

The event, held in partnership with the Brindley Arts Centre, runs from 9.30am – 4pm. Cost: £20 (£15 OAP & Student, £12 Unemployed & Leisure Card Holders) with lunch included. For more information, visit our website or contact Clare Williams (0151 794 2830).

The Reader Organisation presents:

‘Words and Images’ Readers’ Day
in partnership with The Brindley Arts Centre

Saturday 13th June, 9.30-4.00pm
£20, £15 OAP & Student, £12 Unemployed & Leisure Card Holders
Lunch included

As part of Halton’s annual Literature Festival Talkwrite 8-13 June 2009, The Reader Organisation is presenting an event packed Readers’ Day.

Anyone who has attended one of our Readers’ Days in the past will know that they are relaxed and friendly affairs, intellectually stimulating and fully accessible to all, infusing the regular weekend Saturday with the creative energy made possible through people from all walks of life sharing in the delights and complexities of great books and poems. A wide range of poets, writers, and local literary enthusiasts will gather on the day and deliver a variety of workshops which will all be centred around the popular theme of Words and Images.

On the day we will be joined by award-winning author of Poppy Shakespeare, Clare Allan, as well as artist Viv Levy, local poet Rebecca Goss, and our own celebrated reading enthusiasts Jane Davis, Director of The Reader Organisation, and Angela MacMillan, Co-Editor of The Reader magazine.

Workshops will encompass a broad range of themes, including interesting discussions about the relationship between painting and literature, photographs and poetry, film adaptations and the classics, the illustration and the printed word, art and the imagination and much more – each exploring the dynamic relationship between words and images in its own unique way. There will also be a double poetry workshop led by local poet Rebecca Goss, which will include an afternoon creative writing session.

You can view the programme on our website, or alternatively click here to download a programme.

If you are interested in finding out more please contact Clare Williams (call 0151 794 2830).

Alternatively, you can go direct to The Brindley’s website to find out further details and book tickets or call 0151 907 8360 to find out more.

The Readers’ Day, presented by The Reader Organisation and Liverpool Libraries, centred around three open audience events – a conversation with Frank Cottrell-Boyce and a conversation with Beryl Bainbridge led respectively by Jane Davis, as well as a very lively session when our two celebrated Liverpool authors conversed with each other about how their own experiences and memories of their home city may have influenced their writing in different ways and at different levels.

The day’s programme also included two lots of workshops. In the morning, readers had the choice to read and discuss Frank Cottrell-Boyce’s thought-provoking short story ‘Accelerate’, enjoy a discussion group on poems about work during the twentieth century, or participate in a reading session which took as its theme no other than the popular series Mersey Minis. In the afternoon, the range of choice remained just as diverse and exciting, with workshops being offered on the stories of city seafarers (a session led by no other than Frank senior), a reading group where people were asked to bring along with them poems that they would like to have with then if they were to fall victims to that unfortunate fate of being shipwrecked, and last but by no means least, the Readers’ Surgery, with Jane Davis, Angie Macmillan, the poet Rebecca Goss, and myself all trying to provide searching readers with a poem or a novel that would on some level act as a response to their particular needs or interests.

I was very pleased to see several of our Get Into Reading members on the day and all very keen to take the opportunity to relax and enjoy themselves. One of the most positive things that resulted from the day was that it has clearly made more people aware of Central Library and also encouraged more people to come into this vast public space. At the end of the day, one lady came up to me and said, ‘Do you know, I’m ashamed to say this, but I’ve never been in this library before – I never even knew it existed! And isn’t it lovely! I will be coming back here again – not just to borrow books mind you, but because I want to be able to walk round this room again (the Picton Library) – it really is beautiful!’

So once again, The Reader Organisation provides local people with a thoroughly enjoyably literary event that is relaxed and inclusive, informal and uplifting. Let’s hope that we can hold more of them at Central Library in future!

Posted by Clare Williams

The Readers’ Day held at the Brindley Arts Centre on Saturday was a great success: it seems that guests, organisers and workshop facilitators all enjoyed themselves and found it inspiring, interesting and informative.

We started the day with a ‘Reader Recommends’ panel, where each of the panel members – consisting of members of The Reader Organisation team and local author Caroline Smailes and poet Rebecca Goss – recommended their favourite ‘Mind and Body’ read. These included ‘Janet’s Repentance’ from George Eliot’s Scenes of Clerical Life, the poem ‘Trout’ from Seamus Heaney’s collection Death of a Naturalist and D. H. Lawrence’s novel The Rainbow. After lunch was a Readers’ Clinic, where members of the audience posed questions about personal or social problems and concerns to the panel, with books and poems being prescribed as ways to assist. These sessions were great fun, helpful and really tested the memory skills of our team!

The workshops that were run throughout the day were thoroughly enjoyed by all involved and included a diverse choice of options for guests: discussions about specific texts, including Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility, Tennyson’s In Memoriam; a film/novel workshop based on the powerful The Diving Bell and the Butterfly; a journey from birth to death through poetry; how authors write about memories; an introduction to The Reader Organisation’s Get Into Reading project and much more besides.

Thank you to all those involved in the organisation and facilitation of the day – and to all the guests, some of which travelled some great distances to attend – for making it such a pleasurable and memorable day. Don’t just take our word for it though, here are some comments from Readers’ Day guests:

“I was reminded of the joy of being read to and it introduced me to new works that I hope to read in the future.”

“Great to meet other readers and to hear about great books.”

“Excellent venue.”

“There were some great discussions, I really enjoyed the workshops.”

“Make it longer!”

“The workshops are always very stimulating – I have enjoyed the opportunity to talk to others.”

Also see Caroline Smailes’ blog to read her (and others’) thoughts about it.

Hosted by The Reader in association with Archbishop Blanch High School. If you love reading then you’ll love the Readers’ Day – workshops, panel discussion, readings and a lunch. Guardian journalist Hannah Pool reads from her book, My Father’s Daughter and offers advice to would-be journalists whilst children’s writer Brian Jacques gives a lively talk about his life as a child in Liverpool and Dr Andrew Hamer humorously discusses the accents of Merseyside and the North West to answer the question; do you speak scouse? Plus, Brian Nellist investigates the law of the jungle in Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book and Jane Davis looks at why Lily Bart is a stranger in her own world in Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth. To download a copy of the booking form in pdf format, click here.

Posted by Katie Powered by Qumana

Helen Tookey

On Saturday The Reader ran a readers’ day at the fantastic Brindley theatre and arts centre in Runcorn, an award-winning venue overlooking the restored canal. As one of the organisers, I spent most of the day behind an information desk rather than getting to participate – but from what I could see, everyone seemed to be thoroughly enjoying the day. Things kicked off with a panel discussion about life-changing books, followed by workshops on a range of great books from Dickens’ Bleak House and Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre to Mark Haddon’s Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time and Andrea Levy’s Orange Prize-winning novel Small Island. The whole day was designed to be as accessible as possible to a wide range of people, not just experienced readers of ‘difficult’ literature, and it was good to hear people making comments such as ‘I haven’t read Bleak House, but I really want to give it a go now!’. At lunchtime, the bookstall, provided by local family-run Curiosity Books, was doing a brisk trade, and former Cheshire poet laureate Andrew Rudd gave a reading from his new collection. Highlights of the day were a personal and thought-provoking talk by Stuart Murray on books, autism, and the ways in which we think about and write about ‘disability’; and a reading by award-winning poet Moniza Alvi. Crossing boundaries between reality and surreality, between the comic and the poignant, and between Moniza’s two heritages and ‘homes’, England and Pakistan, the reading was an inspiring way to end the day. Our next readers’ day is in Liverpool on July 7th and also promises to be a great day for all keen readers, so if you live nearby, why not come along? For details and booking form, go to the home page of The Reader magazine.