Rick Simonson

Reading, not conceding
August 23, 2007

So far as I know, the dearth of reading revealed in a nationally-syndicated Associated Press story the other day came as no great surprise to any of us out laboring in the fields. Though our working days and nights may find us amidst many for whom the book is central and vital to life, it usually doesn't take much more than a trip to a mall or to attend some big spectator sport event, to get perspective and to wonder, how many of these (aka us) people are reading in their lives?

Both Seattle daily papers gave the story play. The Seattle Post-Intelligencer ran it on the front page, and paired it with a nice piece (PI book reporter John Marshall on poet/propietors John Marshall and Christine Deavel) featuring Seattle's renowned and redoubtable poetry-only bookstore, Open Books: A Poetry Emporium.

The A.P. story derived statistical data on the number of books read and not read from an AP/Ipsos poll, and cited other recent studies, a 2005 Gallup Poll, and 2004's National Endowment for the Arts "Reading at Risk" report. This story offered anecdotes, quotes from people too busy to read and those "who read so many sometimes I get the stories mixed up."

Seattle is a place which statistically, and perhaps anecdotally, seems to strongly favor reading. I get nervous when it's the statistical accounting: if we're that strong, what is it like elsewhere? Again, some of the going elsewhere puts you in your place.

The anecdotal part, it has some grains. Board your average bus or walk into a cafe, and it could well seem that everyone there is buried in a book. Last autumn, one of the newspapers reported on some of the banter from a nationally-televised Monday night NFL football game that was played here. One of the broadcasters was trying to describe Seattle in a nutshell, saying something like, You can tell you're in Seattle when you're walking down the street and see people bundled up, sitting outside, drinking coffee. Yeah, said his counterpart, and they're reading a book.

As a soundbite summary, if you're going to be tagged, that's not bad. 

To the degree that it's true, that there is some current carrying reading here, what factors go into it? We get asked this time and again - by each other, visitors, people working elsewhere in books.

There is no one answer: the weather (dark and gray much of the year); coffee (see 'dark and gray'); feeling removed from much of the rest of the country/world (up in this corner), and therefore curious about both here and the vast everywhere else; the number of people who've asked questions of themselves and life/work in moving here from elsewhere, and thus are curious enough to keep looking in places like books. Those are a few speculative reasons.

Books as they are published and promoted these days - as objects to read but also as occasions for community - play into two mutual strands that run deep here: the desire to be solitary or alone, and the desire for being with others. Hence, the individual act of being holed up somewhere reading, but also being in book groups or in attendance at some reading (there have been nights when, among various venues, there may be 5,000 people in attendance hearing authors) both happen to serious degrees.

One of the things to be traced are some of the patterns, and then the odd, but related strand or two. Twenty-some years ago, independent bookstores hereabouts, all very modestly in their way, more as occasion for community than as 'marketing arm,' started hosting literary readings, usually by writers local or from nearby. The support of those was heartening, and led to more. In time, there came to exist, or co-exist, non-profit organizations with a more devoted interest to fostering audiences, the meeting of audience with writers, the fostering of writing and reading. Thus, the birth, twenty years ago, of Seattle Arts & Lectures. Soon after, there was Richard Hugo House. Hedgebrook, a women writers' retreat on an island near Seattle, not only focused on what happened on its grounds, but also began to mix and mingle with what happened here, with readers and audiences.

This is about to move to the other single, probably dominant instutional (and also personally-driven) force to come along in Seattle in the form of what Nancy Pearl and Chris Higashi did with the Washington Center for the Book at The Seattle Public Library when they launched the generally-acknowledged first 'One City, One Book' community-wide reading program which they did in 1998 with Russell Banks and The Sweet Hereafter. This aside isn't to take away from what they did, or have done, but to say that some of the response they received, from the very beginning, may have had some seeds from a source too little acknowledged today, though it has not been so long in real time. (All of this came about in a conversation with someone, ostensibly about something else, but suddenly was going down this road of remembering.)

In 1995, the Seattle Public School District was grasping for new leadership. It had gone through inhouse superintendents and out of house ones. The two obvious approaches had been tried and found lacking. In a kind of desperation, they selected a person who was a fairly recently retired general, a career military man who'd stepped away much at the same time as Colin Powell, whom he'd served with (and under). When John Stanford came to Seattle to run the schools, there was a lot of hope - and uncertainty - placed in his hands.

John Stanford arrived that year like a house on fire. Even people without children took notice. He was galvanizing in what he laid out, getting others to see what he was saying, to feel the urgency to act on it. His big charge was a jolt, especially to those of us 'quietly' if diligently working with books: in order for our children to fully inhabit their adult lives, to know enjoyment and fulfillment as human beings, as well as success in career or material ways, they first had to know how, and love to read. Not only was this a message for them and their parents, it was one for everyone. He meant everyone. Children modeled behavior: they need to see all adults reading. He charged companies to give employees time to read, to work with others reading. Book-buying funds were established. Talk about wind in your sails: he cast this as a cause from on high, and it was felt so. All of this had too short a run: John Stanford succumbed tragically young and soon to cancer. Yet it was the same year he passed away, 1998, that Russell Banks came to town and a whole city did, it seemed, read this book he had written. Suddenly. Things in that realm have not been quite the same since. 

Posted by Rick Simonson on August 23, 2007 | Comments (0)