What is RMSYL?

Read Me Something You Love is an online podcasting project. But it is also, hopefully, an offline experience.

People who love the written word read me a short story, an excerpt from a novel, or poem that excites them in some way, and then we wholeheartedly discuss the piece in question.

WHY DID YOU START DOING THESE?

I’m almost certainly channeling Deborah Treisman’s New Yorker Fiction podcast and Curtis Fox’s Poetry Foundation podcasts here. I have always loved these podcasts, but also the way in which Deborah and Curtis lead their readers through the experience of talking about the work they love.

I thought it might be fun to do something similar myself and make the experience of reading aloud and talking about what we’ve read available to anyone and everyone (you too, please), not just New Yorker fictioneers or published poets.

I am also very much inspired by something called Reader Response Criticism, which was big in the 60s and 70s, but is not practiced that much anymore. I first found out about this kind of reading by participating in The Reader Organisation’s Get Into Reading groups: a deeply personal and person-centred way of engaging with literary texts and other people.

I really do believe that this is the best way to get the most interesting & fun stuff out of a text as well as each other, and that’s what I’m trying to do with this project.

HOW WE DO IT:

Ideally, the reading itself should take no more than about 15-20 minutes (a short story of less than ten pages, or a poem or two would be perfect). Then another 25 minutes to talk about what we’ve read.

So let’s say an hour in total.

Whatever we read, I usually split it up into about three parts, allowing us a bit of time after each chunk to chat comfortably about anything that interests or moves us during the read-aloud. Equally important for the RMSYL experience is time to drink tea and eat biscuits.

The kind of talk I’m hoping for is something quite relaxed and informal. You can take as long as you like to think about what you want to say, staring in silence out the window, dunking a biscuit into a cup of tea whilst you wait for an inner voice to supply the words. You can fudge a line whilst reading, or stutter and say “um” a thousand times (I do) as everythings gets edited down in a way to make us sound pretty good afterwards.

There’s no need to be “on show”, just present and happy to talk and read.

Where RMSYL slightly differs from other literary podcasts is in that flow and immersion are really much more important than a particularly proficient reading or being able to saying anything clever or original about what we’ve just read. Rather, the aim is to have an interesting and enjoyable conversation: human reading being to human reading being, supported as closely as we can be by ideas and feelings to be found in the text.

It’s also about discovering something together, so although I read the text you’ve chosen beforehand, I don’t come prepared with any questions or fixed ideas about what I want to say or ask you. This all emerges as we read.

My recording gear is highly portable, we can do our reading almost anywhere, but it’s good to have somewhere that’s fairly quiet: an office, a living room, a park.

So, after all that, if you would like to Read Me Something You Love, please contact me using this email address: readmesomethingyoulove AT gmail.com, or through Twitter (https://twitter.com/#!/RMSYL).

I hope to hear from (and listen to you reading something you love to me) soon,

Warm wishes,

Steve

(To find out a bit more about me: http://www.mindfulmatters.co.uk/p/about-steve.html)

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So far, the following people have offered to Read Me Something They Love (also available on iTunes):

1. Megg Hewlett: reading me ‘Away To Moonlight‘ by Darcy Niland [LISTEN]
2. Gabor Kovacs: reading me ‘The Owl Critic‘ by James Thomas Fields [LISTEN]
3. Rachel Stroud: reading me ‘The Universal Story‘ by Ali Smith [LISTEN]
4. Claire Shanahan: reading me ‘Star-Gazer‘ by Louis Macneice [LISTEN]
5. Bernadette Russell: reading me ‘The Nightingale and The Rose‘ by Oscar Wilde [LISTEN]
6. Nicky Harman: reading ‘A Loud Noise‘ by Han Dong. [LISTEN]
7. Etgar Keret: reading me ‘The Amen Stone‘ by Yehuda Amichai. [LISTEN]
8. Rosalind Harvey: reading me ‘Voices Lost in Snow’ by Mavis Gallant [LISTEN]
9. Chantal Murrell: reading me ‘The Company of Wolves’ by Angela Carter [LISTEN]
10. Nikesh Shukla: reading me ‘You Know How To Spell Elijah‘ by Dave Eggers [LISTEN]
11. Joss Rossiter: reading from ‘No, I Don’t Want To Join A Bookclub’ by Virginia Ironside [LISTEN]
12. Vanessa Gebbie: reading me The Ledge by Lawrence Sargent Hall [LISTEN - PART ONE] [LISTEN - PART TWO]
13. Nicky Harman: reading me two more poems by Han Dong. [LISTEN]
14. Katy Darby: reading me some Wilkie Collins. [LISTEN]
15. Gus Ginsburg reading me ‘On The Nutritional Value of Dreams’ by Etgar Keret [LISTEN]
16. Alex Preston reading me ‘Incarnations of Burned Children’ by David Foster Wallace [LISTEN]
17. Ann Morgan reading to me from An African In Greenland by Tété-Michel Kpomassie’s [LISTEN]
18. Jean Kwok reading me ‘I Stand Here Ironing’ by Tillie Olson [LISTEN]
19. Rohit Talwar reading me ‘The Day The Saucers Came’ by Neil Gaiman [LISTEN]
20. Saskia Vogel reading to me from Netsuke by Rikki Ducornet [LISTEN]
21. Janina Matthewson reading to me from The History of England by Jane Austen [LISTEN]
22. Ted Hodgkinson reading me ‘The Gun’ by Mark Haddon [LISTEN]
23. Edward Espe Brown reading me ‘Story Water’ by Rumi [LISTEN]
24. Jane reading me Tim The Terrible Tiger by Tessa Potter [LISTEN]
25. Sarah Salway reading me ‘Winter Wood’ and ‘Intellectual Gathering’ by Kenneth White [LISTEN]
26. Wayne Gooderham reading to me from Tender Is The Night by F.Scott Fitzgerald [LISTEN]
27. Laura Boudreau reading me ‘How To Keep Your Day Job’ by Rebecca Rosenblum [LISTEN]
28. Alexander MacLeod reading me ‘In The Waiting Room’ by Elizabeth Bishop [LISTEN]
29. Tania Hershman reading me ‘Believe Me’ by Ali Smith [LISTEN]
30. YOU reading to me Something You Love?