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.

Stepfather

I cannot pick him out the air,
he is not there,

nor out the soil,
the worm was not his style.

I cannot pick him out the fire,
there’s not a cinder’s worth left.

So why do I still feel bereft
when no love was lost?

Perhaps for what might have been
had he not been.

In the coffin he seems a replica,
a terrible dummy,

still wreaking havoc,
still beating up the living.

Brian Patten

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Stepfather features in Issue 46 of The Reader Magazine and is republished here with the kind permission of the author.

If you want to read the whole story behind the poem, then make sure you subscribe to The Reader Magazine to receive the latest issue, as well as 3 others over the course of a year for a great price of £24 – 15% off the cover price.

Stay tuned to the TRO blog today for a full-taste of what’s inside the latest edition of The Reader…

There are still a few spaces available on our upcoming masterclass ‘Putting The Reader to Work’, scheduled to run on: Tuesday 24th April, 1pm – 5pm at The Lauries Comunity Centre, Birkenhead.

You’ll all be familiar with The Reader magazine. You’ll be a subscriber since you trained. You may even know that this quarterly publication was the starting point of The Reader Organisation’s outreach work, precursor of Get Into Reading project and the shared reading model. What you may not be doing is putting The Reader to work, really using the magazine as a personal resource that will make you a better reader, and a better facilitator as a result.

Join Jane Davis, Director of TRO and founding editor of the magazine, to explore this wonderful resource together. Email jessicareeves@thereader.org.uk to secure your place, or call 0151 207 7207.

If you did listen in and read along with us, you’ll know that the story is more than slightly strange. Discovering Gregor Samsa’s fate is somewhat unsettling for the listening reader – but reading the tale aloud is an even more bizarre experience…Lynn Elsdon, the voice behind the story, tells us just what it was like to give voice to Gregor:

Reading The Metamorphosis was a strange and compelling experience. The protagonist Gregor Samsa wakes to find that he has turned into some kind of man-sized insect – in my mind a cockroach or a dung beetle – overnight. It is a very stark tale, tense and often revolting, and yet, I found myself increasingly warming to Gregor, with all of his slime, stench and scuttling. His attempts to continue being human in this state swing from tragi-comic to terrifying to, at times, heart-rending; all in the very spare prose of Franz Kafka. It is fascinating. Ever thought vermin could pull on the heart strings? Let’s get together and listen to the Evening Read-In, and talk about what we think.

Surely that’s sparked off your interest to get sharing this peculiar but compelling story. Be sure to tune in for Part 2 this coming Thursday evening at 9pm.

Lynn has also shared her experiences of what it was like being involved in the very first revolutionary Evening Read-In in the latest issue of The Reader Magazine. If you’re intrigued to read more, you can subscribe to receive your copy on our website.  

Make sure you keep an eye on our Twitter page this Thursday lunchtime for the chance to get your hands on a shiny new Vintage Books copy of The Metamorphosis and other stories…

You can read the story behind the poem from Bernard himself in The Reader’s regular ‘The Poet on His Work’ feature, and a very fascinating and insightful read it is too. But now, sit back and enjoy the poem:

The Mule Duignan

Nowadays it always rains in Bristol,
and every night, trying to get to sleep,
I hear it, looking beyond to the lights
winking over the Clifden Bridge, like the lights
of the shoreline seen from the Irish mailboat.
It helps me to drop off if I go over
details from childhood, like the big key
of acrid cast-iron that shut and opened
the front door. I find it strange to still remember
that it opened clockwise, and locked the way
you’d expect that it would open. Most often
I think back to a December night
when my small sister crept into bed with me,
shivering. We listened to our father’s voice,
emphatic and quiet: ‘if the cow does die tonight,
we’ll have to sell up and go.’ We prayed ourselves
to sleep. In the morning the wind woke us
and we all went out together to the stall.
The cow was standing up, eating hay.

And then for the first and only time I saw
my parents embracing. I hate that country:
its poverties and embarrassments
too humbling to retell. I’ll never ever
go back to offer it forgiveness.
When my father died at last, the place
was empty. I went back to bury him,
then turned the key in the lock and dropped it
in the estate-agent’s letterbox
and turned my back for ever on it all.

Bernard O’Donoghue

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The Reader 45 is out now, featuring the accompanying essay to this poem. If you haven’t already, you can subscribe to receive the latest issue and future issues over the course of one year here.

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!

Now in its 15th year, World Book Day was set up by UNESCO as a worldwide celebration of books and reading. Every year on March 1st, over 100 countries worldwide celebrate the event – and this World Book Day looks set to be the biggest and best yet.

Most specifically, World Book Day is aimed at children of all ages, encouraging them to explore the pleasures of books and reading by providing them with the opportunity to have a book of their own (you may remember dressing up as a book character in your schooldays for World Book Day…).

With this in mind, we’re providing some special Reader Organisation approved reading recommendations for children (taken from issue 44 of The Reader), all of which would be perfect books to share with children of all ages this World Book Day. Also, there are a couple of special events going on featuring The Reader Organisation which are marking World Book Day – read on for more information…

A Few Good Books for Children

Aged 8 and Under

Michael Foreman, Mia’s Story
ISBN 978-1844282784

This is my favourite book to read with children of this age, it never fails. Mia is a young girl living in the snowy mountains near Santiago in Chile. Mia’s Papa works hard every day selling scrap in the city and dreams of one day being able to build a house of bricks for his family. When Mia loses her dog she goes on a journey to find him which leads her higher up into the mountains to a place in the stars where she gathers a clump of flowers that begin to transform her life and the lives of those around her.

Jill Barklem, Brambly Hedge: Winter Story
ISBN 978-0001837119

The Brambly Hedge stories are timeless and magical, and this one particularly captures the imagination. Snow has come to Brambly Hedge and deep drifts cover the windows and doors, many of the children haven’t seen the snow before and look out on it with great excitement. The mice decide to follow in the tradition of their forefathers and hold a Snow Ball; working together they create a sparkling ice hall and fill it with food, friends and family.

Michael Foreman, The Cat on the Hill
ISBN 978-1842704714

This beautifully-illustrated book grabs children’s attention from the first page and is impossible to put down. The Cat on the Hill is the story of a stray cat living in St Ives who until recently spent his life on the fishing boats every day with an old sailor. The story follows the cat through the seasons, giving the reader a picture of life in St Ives whilst showing how the cat learns to adapt to his new surroundings helped by the friends he makes along the way. This is a moving and heartwarming story that focuses on the importance of friendship.

Chosen by Sam Shipman, Young Person’s Project Manager

Aged 8-12

Jill Tomlinson, The Penguin Who Wanted to Find Out
ISBN 978-1405210850

An absolute must for all animal lovers. Otto is the first penguin chick to be born that year so he has to show all the other chicks how to swim, catch fish and toboggan but who will teach Otto if all the adult penguins seem preoccupied with other things? This is a wonderfully warm story about discovery, adventure and growing up and the cast of brilliant Antarctic animals Otto meets on the way will have you smiling long after it’s finished.

C.S. Lewis, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe
ISBN 978-0006716778

If you know somebody who has yet to meet Mr Tumnus and Aslan then remedy that immediately with this book. Escaping through the back of a wardrobe to Narnia, where it is always winter, Lucy, Edmund, Peter and Susan become caught up in the terrifying rule of the White Witch. Their lives are soon in danger and even the trees cannot be trusted. Can talking beavers and the mysterious Aslan, who is on the move, really help before it is too late? Although second in a series of seven this book stands alone as a classic.

Chosen by Patrick Fisher, Project Worker, Young People (Glasgow)

Teenagers

Jack London, The Call of the Wild
ISBN 978-0192728012

Journey with Buck, a German Shepherd-Saint Bernard cross, into the wild, frozen north of Canada. It is a compelling and fascinating read. Alongside Buck you learn about a more primitive existence which is essential in such a harsh and extreme environment. As civilization is stripped away, Buck embraces his prehistoric, wild nature, and the reader also confronts humanity’s origins. Part of the excitement of this novel is the dog violence, so be warned!

Philip Pullman, Northern Lights
ISBN 978-0439951784

Another fantastic adventure story into the Arctic Circle. I would recommend this as a book to share: read it with a group, or have others around who’ve read it. The story triggers so many deep thoughts, questions and ideas that discussion is essential. Chats about the children’s Daemons (animal companions every human is attached to) have ranged from exploring loss and loneliness, to trying to describe a relationship closer than friendship and family. Everyone brings a unique understanding to the story, it’s fascinating!

Chosen by Anna Fleming, Project Worker, Young People (Get Into Reading Liverpool)

The Reader Organisation will be reading some other brilliant books with nursery and school children at a special World Book Day event taking place at John Lewis in Liverpool One this morning. Get Into Reading Liverpool Project Manager and storytelling supremo Eleanor Stanton will be reading to Year 3 pupils from Great Meols Primary School from 10.30-11.20am, then sharing some stories with children from Liverpool Community College Day Nursery between 11.30-11.50am.

World Book Day 2012 also coincides with the launch of our Reader Apprenticeships scheme. Over the next year we’ll be aiming to raise £14,000 to employ a care-leaver apprentice to work with The Reader Organisation, helping us to develop the Reading Revolution but most importantly, to be given the chance to develop their own skills and self-confidence to look towards a brighter future – very fitting considering WBD is all about reading giving children and young people a kick-start in life.

We have some significant fundraising events in the pipeline that will contribute to consolidating a care-leaver apprenticeship position, with the first event happening on the scheme’s launch-day itself. Some of the TRO team will be shaking buckets alongside students from the University of Liverpool’s English Society around the university campus and at the Student Guild between 10am and 4pm today. If you’re around the area at that time and spot our fundraisers, any change that could be spared would be much appreciated to go towards a wonderful cause. You can also donate to our Reader Apprentice scheme at any time safely and securely through our Virgin Money Giving site or by sending a cheque made payable to ‘The Reader Organisation’.

I’ve gone for this poem published in Issue 40 of The Reader.

I would’ve said it’s a poem about being a tomboy. But then it seems to want to shake off any labels which support the idea that boys should behave in one way and girls in another.

I’ve read the poem with several groups now and the main talking point was the sense of feeling somehow other. One group member summed it up when she said, ‘When you’re growing up I think everyone feels abnormal in some way.’ We wondered whether you ever lose the feeling of strangeness in yourself.

The father-daughter relationship is a crucial part of the poem’s thinking about where identity comes from. One group member picked out lines referring to the father:

For years I abandoned him
Too busy being my own version of him.

She said she couldn’t tell whether the daughter was idolising or rejecting the father. Several people talked about cutting their parents out of their lives and others talked about things the other way round- their father abandoning them.

There was a lot of debate about gender stereotypes – the parents in the groups talked about dressing their sons and daughters differently, even when they were babies. Some people had very traditional views, saying, for example, that girls shouldn’t play rugby or football. But, just as the poem does, one person challenged this by saying ‘As long as my children were happy and healthy, I didn’t mind what they did, it didn’t matter if it was my lad or my girl.’

A Father Like Me

I didn’t want to be daddy’s little girl,
I wanted to be daddy’s son, I wanted a football,
a racing track, a power-car, a gun.

I didn’t want Sindy, Polly Pocket, Barbie, I staged
a late night heist, a hit and run involving Ken
and that white Ferrari, Barbie’s dead and Ken’s
to blame, the Ferrari’s in the car wash,
that was my kind of game.

I’d hold Sindy upside-down swirling her hair
in a puddle. What you doin? I’d hear him shout,
but I’d fight off my father’s offer of a cuddle.

One Easter all trussed up – pink frill dress,
shiny new shoes, straw bonnet hat – I went exploring,
ribbons unravelling in the wind, I went
looking for my reflection in a bucket of oil,
its silky surface I swirled with a stick
never finding the bucket’s bottom
only that pink and black don’t mix,
each fingerprint spread as I tried to wipe the last.

Oil became a thing between him and me,
I grew up, bought old bangers of cars
learning measures made by a dipstick,
that everything with a yellow cap in a Ford
could be filled up; oil, water, washers,
ignoring my mother’s new shade of pale pink lipstick.

I held my body rigid as he taught me to check tyres
and water, levels and tread, my back’s axle aching.
When I pulled out the fuse for the wipers
instead of the flip catch for the bonnet
he made a comment about women and cars
and my heart was punctured.

He took my sister’s boyfriend to the scrap yard
searching for spares, as the car turned the corner
of our road, I was left a part
only a front door key on my fob,
to him I was still his little girl,
he wanted me to meet a nice lad, settle down,
have babies I suppose.

He doesn’t know of the army pants in class 3’s
dressing up box, shoving them over my skirt,
he, my father doesn’t know that I was always the dad
while other girls fought over clip-on earrings and
dragged five-sizes-too-big-heels across the orange
carpet, their toes in the points of 1986 stilettos,
I was busy being like him, rolling paper
pretending it was a cigarette, sitting in the chair
watching the news on a cardboard telly,
he didn’t know I’d spent years basing myself on him.

Suddenly I find I’ve grown up all wrong,
Oedipal instead of Electra, got my wires crossed,
circuit board fused, systems shorted.
I was a physics paper problem where you decide
to close AB or DD to get EE, the lighthouse
to light so the boat can see sea.

My walk his, my talk his,
my voice an echo arguing with his,
for years I abandoned him,
too busy being my own version of him,
until I meet this woman who tells me
I’m not him, I’m me and that’s fine.
For the first time I notice as I change gear
my hand actually does look like a woman’s.

And this woman says having crossed wires
is a good thing – she finds them interesting
and this woman comes to know in me
something I never knew existed
this woman teaches me
to know my father as myself.
So, now each year, as we all grow older,
I find I do want to be my father’s daughter.

Emma McGordon

Click to listen to Emma McGordon reading A Father Like Me

Newcastle Library - one of the Libraries We Love

Today is National Libraries Day and to mark this occasion, we’d like to bring your attention to a feature that’s been running on our website for about a year, but many blog readers may be unaware of: Libraries We Love.

The idea of Libraries We Love is to focus on the things to love about libraries, and not just in the UK but all over the world. So far we’ve featured this diverse selection, which offer something unique and brilliant in every case:

Walsall Central Library, UK

Stoke on Trent Library, UK

Burnley Library, UK

African Library Project, Africa/USA

The Travelling Suitcase Library (based in Leeds, UK)

Woodchurch Library, Wirral, UK

Halton Lea Library, UK

Oswestry Library, Shropshire, UK

Seattle Public Library, USA

Newcastle City Library, UK

Read all about why we love them on our website.

We’ve asked actor David Morrissey, who is interviewed in the forthcoming issue of The Reader magazine (issue 45, March 2012), to tell us about the Library (Libraries) He Loves especially for this feature:

I had spent many happy hours in Liverpool Central Library when I was growing up. And when I moved to London I couldn’t believe there wasn’t just one central place I could walk into. A tutor at RADA told me about the British Library reading room at the British Museum and I went to check it out. I had to fill in various forms and also get verification from RADA before being allowed in, but once I had my pass, there was no stopping me. I was amazed by the low lighting and green leather tops on the tables. The wood and brass. It was like some grand gentleman’s club. It was different from Liverpool central library in design but the feeling of hushed collective learning was just the same. I now work a lot in the New British Library (not that new any more I grant you!) and am so thankful for its existence. When I travel up and down the country I often visit local libraries, it is never about the books they can provide, but the peace and calm they provide for my ever ticking brain. It’s a place to totally concentrate.

If there’s a library you love that you’d like to see us feature, please contact us and tell us about it.

The True Tale of the Monster Billy Dean by David Almond
(Puffin, 2011)

Billy is an illegitimate child, born and kept in secret. In justification of his confinement, he becomes the subject of a moral experiment to create a human untouched by the evils of the world. His only human contact is with his parents. But after the disappearance of Billy’s father, Wilfred, he is released from the room in which he has been isolated for thirteen years.

Billy’s very focused fascinations – with birds, blood, stars, angels, hair… –bloom out into the newfound boundlessness of the universe.

Billy is not like any child and yet he is just like every child – he still has to learn about God and to have the birds and the bees (‘the mistry of the fish and the eggs’) talk with his mother and he still has to learn to walk and write – hence Billy’s poor spelling throughout. It is only that Billy’s is a belated and very sudden process of discovery in which his childhood is squeezed into his teenage years. This compression of his coming of age is a continuation of his physical compression, growing weak and frail in cramped conditions. Billy’s ‘world’ had been four walls, a closed door and a window. He is entranced by the square of sky he can see. On just one occasion his mother accidently (on purpose?) leaves the window open and he gets a taste of the outdoors:

‘For the first tym in my life I felt rane farl down on me. I turnd my fase to it. I felt the sharp swete isy ping of drops of warter on my skin. I lickd it wer it fel upon my lips and cheeks.’

This is Billy’s baptism into the world he has never known.

Like any child learning to make sense of the world, Billy must come to terms with where, or who, he has comes from. Most of the time it all seems a bit much. Looking at the stars Billy wonders:

‘How could they be so big and fit into such a little windo? How cud they fit into my eyes? How cud they fit into my little hed?’

His interest in space is perhaps a consequence of his own lack of space. Whilst he is contained, Billy’s bafflement is amplified, and his default reply to any question or line of thought is ‘I don’t know’, but upon his release his responses become varied and wild and imaginative: ‘ “What you doing Billy?” laffs my mam. “Turning into a sugahed” I say’. The ‘sugahed’ is this wonderful child, growing up and away from the suppressed, ‘emptyheded thing’ of his captivity.

The book plays with repulsion. Like when Billy amalgamates animal corpses to form his hybrid ‘mowsburd’:

‘I got the scissors and I cut little holes in the sholders of the mows. I got the wings of the burd & stuck them into those holes….the blud of the mows trickled down my fingas & the stink of the wings mixd with my breth but I had made sumthin new & speshul…’

Billy’s destruction of the dead animals is his power of creation. His impulse is experimental and ambitious rather than depraved and so our disgust is neutralised. It is grotesquely aesthetic.

Billy has the abilities of a mystic, and he becomes renowned for being able to communicate with the dead. He wonders whether he will encounter his absent father during his sojourns into the afterlife but Wilfred turns up in real life, set on some kind of reckoning…

This is a book for thinking about parents who have done more harm to their children than good; about child development and the stilting of it; and the renewal of life, through reproduction and creative energy.

An extract from The True Tale of the Monster Billy Dean is published in the latest issue (#43) of The Reader magazine.