WAKE UP & Read

Who We Are...

From the 50's until today there has been an enormous turn toward electronic entertainment - video games, social networks on the Internet, chat and texting on phones, and increasingly immersive home television experiences including 3-D.

Imagine the interactive thrill of reading aloud to a close friend, family member or lover... creating characters, feeling the actual feelings of the people in the novelists' conversations, delighting in the tongue-exhilarating turns of rhyme, pattern and exotic meaning created by wildly imaginative poets.  Can you?

By reading aloud we step into a wonderfully self-imagined world – drawing upon our own unique vision of the book worlds as we "flesh out" the men, women, children and imaginary beings created by their writers

.  We partner with authors and poets, and create a living RE-creation with our listeners.  Make anew the living world of poetry, essays and books.  Wake up and read.

Little did we anticipate that one President would almost totally define the "end of reading" as a recreational pastime for a new generation.  Whatever he did with his spare time, it seemingly did not include wrestling with text... let along with its deeper meaning or the nuances of its feeling, especially as read aloud.  The outcome was unfortunate.

We do have to give him some credit for trying.  He was almost interrupted during his one showcase by an invasive attack upon our second largest city.  Almost interrupted... but determined, he was not swayed from his task.  Fortunately a teacher helped him straighten the book before he got underway.  (It is too bad he doesn't actually like to read aloud... that this was just an "official chore" to get through.)

"a girl got a pet goat.  She liked to go running with her pet goat. she played with her goat in her house. she played with the goat in her yard.  but the goat did some things that made the girl's dad mad."

The real hero of this story is the little girl to the President's right.  She loves to read, and is proud of it.  You can see it in her face.  May there be many more like her in the generations to come.