| Editor's Note |
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My husband and I are helping our five-year-old son learn to read. We try; we really do. Night after night and sometimes, I admit, mornings before Dad takes him to school, we sit at the kitchen table attempting with superhuman patience to teach him to read. Sentences like “I like apples. They are red.” Books called Bill Goes to School or Hot Dog. He is distracted and visibly frustrated page one into the book. Often feigning illness and even claiming his brain has stopped working, he now looks upon our much-loved reading time with disdain.
For my son, reading has suddenly become utilitarian. Something to get him to the next level in school or to please his teachers and parents. It has become a mere practical discipline of deciphering street signs, lunch menus, and library “quiet” signs. And although I know these are helpful things, reading, as you readers know, can be so much more, so much more than just a tool to get us something we want, teach us information, or simply satiate boredom.
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In An Experiment in Criticism, C.S. Lewis says that reading should be more about “receiving.” If not, then we are simply “using” the story. We are not entering the author’s world; we are not allowing it to take us somewhere unknown or make us feel something we have not felt. We are not allowing it to take us beyond ourselves. And, in “We Demand Windows,” he says, “Here [literature], as in worship, in love, in moral action, and in knowing, I transcend myself; and am never more myself than when I do.” Reading, for Lewis, was an exercise in Christ’s command: “You must lose your life to save it.” This eleventh issue of RUMINATE has brought me great joy and joyful interludes of reading and losing myself. Our short story prize was so wonderfully judged by Bret Lott, and his choices for the prizes are both lyrical as well as captivating. He says of Susan Woodring’s piece “The Smallest of These,” The story has a kind of resonance to it; it is a quiet cameo, a beautifully rendered portrait that acts more like twin shards from some larger exquisite work that is the lives of these two women. The language is ruminative and sharp at once, and the evocation of these states of mind and spirit is quite well done. The little girl who untangles the hair of the lonely house wife next door; the son who is enthralled by his mother as he watches her leaned head in the light of dusk. The lost man finding himself under the dim lights of a bowling alley. The poignant images and the movement of each of the stories create little worlds for us to be enveloped by. A small space in our busy lives for something fresh, new, or something to be revisited and seen in a new way. Or, as for my son, a place and time to receive the joys, the pleasures, the intense anticipation of a life yet lived, yet filled with fear, can’t, and won’t. A safe place to lose and give himself to the art of reading.
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So, that’s it; I’m giving up. No more Bill Goes to School. We will digress and return to the books of his “younger years.” We will revisit some of his favorites. We’ll return to that time when both my children sat wide-eyed in anticipation as I read the next chapter of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, were giggly hearing the heroics of Skippy John Jones; we’ll pull out Green Eggs and Ham; Little House on the Prairie; we’ll read stories again; real page-turning, nail-biting stories. Please don’t get me wrong. I know we need to work on letters, sounds, phonics, word recognition, all of the technical stuff, but, honestly, what my kindergartener truly needs is a revival, a heart change, a renewed love of language and READING. And, my hope is that his love for his favorite stories and characters will inspire and encourage him through the technical discipline of reading. And we at RUMINATE hope for you a little of the same. A little revival of sorts; a space in your day to find passages worth reading and receiving, to be captivated, moved, and maybe, just maybe, changed. Peace and grace, Amy Lowe |
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