The safe space between the pages
A few months ago, I talked to my class about a story I had heard from fellow graduate students back in the United States. A class had been made to read Khaled Hosseini’s ”The Kite Runner,” and had been upset. They asked why they had been made to read such a book when their classroom was a “safe space.”
It was post 9/11, a time when people constantly needed reminders that they were sharing the planet with other humans whose faiths, skin, and lives weren’t always like theirs.
“So, who here has read ’The Kite Runner’?” I asked the class.
I received blank stares. My students hadn’t even heard of the book. As the semester went forward, I would constantly receive complaints about how they were too tired to read, didn’t find it exciting, and sometimes even asked artificial intelligence (AI) for a summary when a class reading was too long for their tastes.
I felt a sadness then that I could not understand. Was it because many of my students aspire to be writers, but are in danger of being unable to appreciate, let alone write in different styles? Was it because I am a writer, and I’m watching the products of my craft being disregarded in favor of quotes, buzzwords, or AI slop?
So when a friend, also a graduate of our program and herself a published writer, asked me to be the guest author at their monthly book club meeting, I could not say no. She is part of Tasa at Letra Book Club, based in Parañaque, and the theme for this month is Quiet Horror.
My friend reads my online novel series, ”All Things Darkly Illuminated,” which tells the story of a team of researchers, seers, and priests who investigate exorcism cases in the Philippines. She loves the series, and wanted me to talk to the book club about my work as a novelist.
What made me want to start writing? The book club members asked. I told them that I loved to write because of the joy of reading. I could see worlds coming to life in my head whenever I opened Charles Dickens, Thomas Hardy, Victor Hugo, and Charlotte Brontë.
That love of reading came from being encouraged to think of books as other worlds to be examined closely, enjoyed slowly, and perused thoroughly. As a child, I spent afternoons or evenings being read to by my mom: she would speak in different voices to capture different characters, vary her tone to match the mood of the story, and talk to me halfway through the reading so that I could share my observations.
Nearly everyone in our little circle laughed, raised their hands, and agreed. Some of them had the same experience, and many of them were doing the same for their children. The book club president, a mother to two sons, even saw how reading had become a way for her to watch her boys grow into emotional maturity. Her elder son, for instance, didn’t want to read ”Diary of a Wimpy Kid” any further because there was an older brother bullying a younger sibling; he would never do that, he told her.
Reading wasn’t just conversation and world building. It was a place to build empathy.
When my part was done, we all launched into conversation about what people had read that month, and what insights they had taken away from the stories. There were books about ghosts of past lives, monsters as metaphors, children who drew creepy things, adults who preyed on the young. Nothing was literal, and fear was in the place you once trusted.
Our conversations that afternoon were animated, full of the gesticulations of those who loved to read. Hands to hearts for the stories that made our chests crack open. Hands to cheeks for the books with explosive twists. Hands thrown up in despair for books that made us groan in frustration and wonder, “Why was this trash published?”
When we ended, we were joking, laughing, and taking recommendations for new books to read. Such is the world of books; but such, too, is the kind of conversation that reading books can create. Readers can make connections between the fairytales of their childhood and today’s fiction, between their required class readings and the books they enjoy outside school, between historical accounts and today’s issues. But to make those connections, they must read, and widely.
Later, I talked to my mother about our reading memories. She added: she had read some books to me so many times that I had already memorized them. When she changed words, I would correct her.
That was what made me sad, I think, for the students who don’t read. They might have missed out on someone drawing them whole worlds with voice and gesture alone, so that one day, they would laugh at the memory. They might have missed out on the joy of reading that was so powerful that a young reader became a writer. They might now be missing the chance to escape, encounter new ideas, and find inspiration for their own work.
My lecture had been on the nature of the safe space, where one can experience discomfort without fear of penalty or judgment. It could well have been a lecture on the book as a safe space: we, the readers, could confront stories that made us cringe and cry—and, in the end, we all grew.
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A sister remembers