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Surprise and delight in a Shared Reading session reading A. J Alan’s short story 'My Adventure in Norfolk'...
We had been talking about ghosts. We had been reading a ghost story. It was A. J Alan’s My Adventure in Norfolk in which a man travelling alone had encountered a mysterious woman whose car had broken down.
We had been discussing her motivations for being on an isolated stretch of road. We had gone through a list of the usual things you might think. Had she committed a crime? Was she on the run? Was she escaping something, or someone?
Suddenly, something in the conversation triggered a memory for one of the participants about a time when her car had broken down. She was on the way to a baby clinic in the 1970’s. She had her baby daughter with her. Her reflection on this inspired the whole group to remember the baby clinics. These were places across Australia staffed by nurses where you could drop in and have nurses check your baby.
Joy broke out on group members faces as this time in their life came flooding back. “I would dress us both up and leave the house.” Said one participant. “It gave us purpose, somewhere to be.” Another woman told the story of how she had met friends that had become friends for life at such a centre.
“It saved my life.” She said. “It is so lonely and isolating being a mother of your first child.” The fondness with which these centres were remembered allowed everyone to experience a spontaneous sense of joy at recalling their memories.
This is something that often breaks out in a Shared Reading session. Some seemingly disconnected element of a story will inspire people to reflect on aspects of their lives. Usually this is something that other people in the group have also experienced. Rich discussions are then had that take people on a journey back into the past.
Sometimes people have not thought about such things since they happened, and sometimes the memories are extremely special and precious. One woman recalled with a rapt glint in her eye, when reading the story Tea with the Birds by Joanne Harris, how she had been walking through a market place in Germany and had stumbled across beautiful carvings of fruit.
“You could hold them and they were transparent, so they let the light in and you could see different colours in them. You could look through them too and the world would look different.”
The smile on her face was as if she was reliving the experience. “Wow, I have seen some things.” She said, with a look that seemed to understand that her life has been worthwhile.
That is the beauty of such discussions. They remind you that life is worthwhile. It makes meaning out of this collection of random situations that we all live through. The stories we share knit us together. They ‘create ties’ to use Antoine de Saint-Exupery’s eloquent phrase. And they inspire joy in the moment.
Many times in a session we will wander off track from the through line of the story to some remote part of someone’s memory or imagination. A facilitator guides the expedition through the story, but people are encouraged to explore the parameters of the story for themselves, using their own minds.
Each session is a journey into story, a journey into self and a journey with each other. Whatever we are discussing people will have a point of view, and they will remind themselves that they too have something to say in the world. Some small kernel of wisdom, some essential part of the puzzle.
I was running a group in an employment service and a woman there began to share her experience as a drug user and how it had led at various points to homelessness. She talked about her anxiety now at living in a home. “You always think at any point that it can be taken away.” She also discussed how difficult she finds living amongst people. This is something that the rest of the group shared. It led to a discussion of anxiety that allowed people to profoundly understand that they were not the only ones suffering.
These real discussions take centre stage in groups often. They are the heart of what we do. “It reminds us that we are not broken” said one group member, a man who had recently experienced multiple heart attacks.
These discussions take us away from the story and allow us to explore life from a different angle. Sometimes that is exactly what we need.
Whether we have been talking about ghosts or babies or anxiety or heart attacks, the response is always the same. Someone, at some point will look up from the discussion, like they have awoken from a dream, shake their head and say “How did we get here?” The only possible answer is “I have no idea.”
You can read A. J Alan’s 'My Adventure in Norfolk' online here
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