How is our writing transmuted by “hungry” readers? How can a writer empower his or her readers? What are the ways in which failure to respect the reader’s role can weaken our work and its reach? Using Randall Jarrell’s storybook, The Bat Poet (illustrations by Maurice Sendak), as a guide to the communion between reader and writer, we’ll look at how the process unfolds in a middle-grade novel (The Underneath by Kathi What’shername) and a YA (Trouble by Gary D. Schmidt).
OPTIONAL ADDITIONAL READING: Proust and the Squid, The Story and Science of the Reading Brain by Maryanne Wolf, is an accessible, eye-opening look at the “unnatural” act of reading from a scientist/booklover. (If you have time for only the first third of the book, it will be worth your while.) The Gift, Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property by Lewis Hyde, is a famous examination of art as a gift, not a commodity. (Those in a time crunch will profit — pun, intended –from the second half of this special study.)