About 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, a few pages from an essay or some other piece of nonfiction, or maybe a 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, Michael Silverblatt’s Bookworm, and also a kind of literary bibliotherapy I guess. I have always loved conversations where readers use literature in a Rorschach-y way to reveal something new or interesting to themselves.

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 and then leading 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 page or two of prose (fiction/nonfiction), or a poem 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://stevewasserman.co.uk/