Compressed by an opera house

That’s a quote from Katherine Rundell’s book Impossible Creatures: There was a crushing in his chest , as if he were being compressed under an opera house. Compressed? An opera hosue. Of course Rundell couldn’t repeat the word ‘crush’ in a sentence, so she chose another word, close in meaning but not quite the same.

Rundell’s younger readers will have little or no idea what compressed means, or what an opera house is or looks like. But BOOM, these words set off mini explosions in the mind. I’ve been in an opera house so an extaordinary image flashes through me of lying under a heap of red velvet and gilt and bricks and a cacophony of orchestra and voice. But still I race on to the next sentence. Meanwhile an eight year old reader, with less experience, will also race on, with those new words clinging to their mind, and next time they encounter them a little pipe will play, a connection will be made…

Of course words matter to me as a writer. I know that words are powerful and you should be respectful of them and the impact they have on the reader - often unintended. But in my working life, for the last decade I have been responsible for training writers to set up a very special type of book group called Reading Round, where groups gather for thirty weeks to explore prose and poetry, chosen and read aloud by the writer. The reading aloud matters - everyone has a copy of the text, so both the hearing of, and the seeing of the words is shared. The choosing of the text matters - the writer lovingly selects texts that will provoke, enchant, enrich their group. And the subsequent discussion matters, because in that space, talking about those shared words, there emerges a very special type of love, based on the growing understanding that the person sitting next to me has insights and reactions to share that I would never have noticed on my own. The writer is skilled at supporting the conversation so that the text holds the group in a safe but exhilarating space.

We only run twenty Reading Rounds a year, based on where a writer happens to be living. My own ran in Watford, at the Palace Theatre. But they are truly the most wonderful experience for the writer who leads them, because they are a living witness to how stories, poems, essays can move us, shift us, make us stronger.