We’re all writers. Take a moment and think about the writing you do each day — a caption for your Instagram photo, a text to a friend, a work e-mail. See, you’re already writing to tell stories, build relationships, and plan your future.
Expressive writing helps you channel what you already know how to do. You have permission to discard the rules, play with words, and discover new and powerful insights through its imaginative process. And it’s good for you, like yoga for your mind. In fact, a robust body of peer-reviewed research proves it (benefits like enhancing mood and improving physical health, setting life goals, reducing PTSD symptoms, easing stress, and sparking creativity).
And what better way to spark our writing than reading poetry out loud together? First we hear it – its tempo, rhythm and cadences; then we see it – its images in the mind’s eye; finally we sense its possible meanings – metaphors full of delicious ambiguity. We don’t need to come to any conclusions as long as something stirs within us.
Whatever we discover through our reading and writing, sharing it with others is to engage, to connect, to be heard, and to hear. We loiter in the gaps as well. There’s no perfect communication, but as we linger in each other’s metaphors, in the meaning we make between the words, we share connection. This sharing makes us feel better. We know we are not alone.
Alison Cable is a facilitator at the London Literary Salon, she is currently leading a series of Writing for Wellbeing studies, including Trees and Us beginning on 26 April.
Toby appeared on BBC Radio 4’s Start the Week yesterday (Monday 10 January), discussing ‘finding consolation and community in literature’ with Michael Ignatieff, Christopher Prendergast (editor of the Penguin Modern Classics In Search of Lost Time) and Tom Sutcliffe. This is available from our Press & Media page, together with recordings of Toby talking about the LitSalon Challenge on both BBC Radio London and Times Radio.
On the subject of our online presence, Start the Week generated so much internet traffic that our website crashed. We were thrilled to encounter so much enthusiasm, but we apologise to anyone who had difficulty accessing the website yesterday and thank you for your patience. We’re pleased to say that normal service has now resumed.
Colmar Painter – Running Warrior, Walters Art Museum
There is a rare opportunity to join Mark Cwik’s ongoing Iliad Unhurried study on Wednesday afternoons. The current subscription covers twelve weeks starting with book 5 (of 24). There are two places available and you are welcome to join at any point in the cycle, but the first meeting is today, Wednesday 5 January, at 2.00pm GMT!
More studies will be listed soon, including new travel opportunities and Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night with Jane Wymark. We’ll be sending out another newsletter later this month to keep you up-to-date.
Meanwhile, there is media news: Toby will be a guest on BBC Radio 4’s Start the Week next Monday, 10 January, discussing Finding consolation and community in reading with Michael Ignatieff, Christopher Prendergast and Tom Sutcliffe
The LitSalon Challenge is gathering momentum, do share details with anyone you think might be interested. You can hear Toby talking about it live with Robert Elms on BBC Radio London this Sunday morning, 9 January, and in her interview with Hugo Rifkind on Times Radio last month.
This has been such a strange year . . . but, thanks to so many of you, it has been a year of discovery and development for the Salon community. I hope others have found – as I have – the studies to provide some ballast in this unstable time.
There is the frenetic energy of the moments in the Salon when we build upon each other’s ideas, questions, struggles, to come (unexpectedly, with a whoosh of pleasure) to textured reading that resonates with each of us, and with the text. In those moments, the loud world hums around us, briefly, with rhythm instead of dissonance. And, in spite of the divided Zoom frame, I feel connected to a global gathering of hungry minds.
But the Salon has also given me the enduring gift of apt words, deeply witty aphorisms and lyrical phrasings shared between the Salonistas embedded in a particular work. The photo above is an example: all of those cards are Joyce-connected, the postcard from Gibraltar (combining Proust AND Joyce in an involuntary memory connecting fragrance and literary references), a seascape with a vision towards Sandymount, Dylan – grandson of two dedicated Joyceans – preparing for his life-long reading, a Yulysses greeting from a Wakian with this Joyce (Ithaca) quote:
“May this Yuletide bring to thee
Joy and peace and welcome glee”
The winter solstice is a time when I am reminded to stop fighting the dark and hard moments, and instead to make room. To find a space of quiet and reflection, to be mindful of the struggle of others in this hard, hard time, to be present even as the world swirls. And in the gift of poetry, I find words that help me hold the dark:
Quiet friend who has come so far,
feel how your breathing makes more space around you.
Let this darkness be a bell tower
and you the bell. As you ring,
what batters you becomes your strength.
Move back and forth into the change.
What is it like, such intensity of pain?
If the drink is bitter, turn yourself to wine.
In this uncontainable night,
be the mystery at the crossroads of your senses,
the meaning discovered there.
And if the world has ceased to hear you,
say to the silent earth: I flow.
To the rushing water, speak: I am.
Rainer Maria Rilke, Sonnets to Orpheus II, 29
And finally, some Joyce trivia: from a 2022 Ulyssian:
Q. What have Sir Richard Rogers (recently departed architect of the Pompidou Centre, Lloyds Building et al) have in common with Mr Joyce?
A. Mr Joyce taught English to Richard Roger’s mother, Dada, when he was in Trieste.
Who knew?
Have a peaceful, happy and healthy time and look forward to catching up in 2022.
P.S. If you haven’t already seen our new LitSalon Challenge it’s free to join and please pass it on to anyone who you think might be interested. You can hear me talking about it on Times Radio here (about 2 hours 25 minutes into the programme, although be warned that it can take quite a long time to load).
Today sees the launch of the LitSalon Challenge. We’ve developed a new online opportunity for anyone who is interested in reading more widely and exploring what the Salon offers but can’t currently join a conventional Salon study. It’s free, open to all and will complement the existing Salon. You can find out more here.
You can hear Toby talking about the Salon and the Challenge on Times Radio’s Hugo Rifkind show today, Saturday 18 December, at around 12.15 GMT (and we’ll make it available later on the website if you can’t listen live).
As someone who wonders about buying green bananas these days (will any of us be here to appreciate them when they ripen?) why take a leap into the dark with Proust, whose reputation inspires trepidation in the heart of the ignorant reader?
I knew Toby’s salon would be a safe space where I could learn from bright, committed, generous friends I had not yet even met. I wanted a fixed appointment in my week when so much of what was once a routine had fallen off a cliff . . .
The Proust Study is way more than a reason to get out of bed every Monday. It is a privilege to share the frustrations and genius of each reading, to get to know the cast of characters, their way of conversing, the class system, the politics, art history, classics, science and human nature, warts and all. I have been horrified by the anti-semitism – as a traditional but not religious Jewish woman I thought, wrongly, I knew all there was to know – and the salon has been sympathetic and equally disgusted by the vile anti-semitism from which Proust doesn’t flinch. I have learned more about furnishings, flowers, clothes, food, fragrances and trees, spires, seascapes, carriages, Paris, army life, snobbery and magic lanterns than I thought possible . . . . and I am only on The Guermantes Way (Volume III).
In a nutshell: ‘Frail, sickly, sensitive, over-imaginative mummy’s boy in middle-class French family reaches adolescence (perhaps, even, becomes an adult, Proust’s narrator changes tense so often I am never entirely certain of anything). Against a backdrop of Dreyfus, crumbling aristocracy, ennui, and the tyranny of servants who make life possible, the volumes are as much about procrastination, memory, the impossibility of love, perception, grief, longing and cake.’
Sue Fox is a journalist and veteran of many Salons
I’ve been thinking a lot about close reading, the kind we do at LitSalon, not the lazy before-bed turning of pages or the rushed speed read of the latest bestseller. The world rushes past us, dips and dodges like a butterfly, but we often fail to notice the markings on its wings. For me, attentive reading can be my moment of watching the butterfly, attending to it.
In Kew Gardens Virginia Woolf is paying attention to moments where the human and natural worlds intermingle. The “zig-zag flights” of butterflies are not unlike the random movements of people through the gardens, all the while a snail slogs linearly toward its goal. We readers are given the opportunity to pause and relish the details — flashes of colour and snatches of conversations — for example, eavesdropping on a married couple contemplating past lovers:
“How the dragonfly kept circling round us: how clearly I see the dragonfly and her shoe with the square silver buckle at the toe. All the time I spoke I saw her shoe and when it moved impatiently I knew without looking up what she was going to say: the whole of her seemed to be in her shoe. And my love, my desire, were in the dragonfly.”
Woolf’s painterly style invites us to contemplate the words visually, and in these moments at Kew Gardens are distilled a thousand dreams — the human and natural worlds collide in an image where dragonflies contain passions and people are the garden:
“Yellow and black, pink and snow white, shapes of all these colours, men, women, and children were spotted for a second upon the horizon, and then, seeing the breadth of yellow that lay upon the grass, they wavered and sought shade beneath the trees, dissolving like drops of water in the yellow and green atmosphere, staining it faintly with red and blue.”
At LitSalon, we practise and celebrate slow reading as a communal act as well as individual activity. Committing to a study is committing to close reading, collaborative meaning-making, and the idea that great thinkers and beautiful words deserve our close attention, our time together. Noticing these fine details is the opposite of scrolling through Twitter, rushing past the rose garden. And great words open up opportunities for conversations we wouldn’t normally have these days.
Yes, it can be hard to make the time for slow reading, but whenever I do, I’m always grateful. And I feel better, ecstatic even. Indeed, it’s not a new idea that reading can increase our well-being and restore our zest for living. In his article The Reading Cure, Blake Morrison writes:
“Plato said that the muses gave us the arts not for “mindless pleasure” but “as an aid to bringing our soul-circuit, when it has got out of tune, into order and harmony with itself”. It’s no coincidence that Apollo is the god of both poetry and healing; nor that hospitals or health sanctuaries in ancient Greece were invariably situated next to theatres, most famously at Epidaurus, where dramatic performances were considered part of the cure. When Odysseus is wounded by a boar, his companions use incantations to stop the bleeding.”
Blake Morrison, The Guardian, January 2008
It seems to me that now, more than ever, we can use the kind of healing that comes with careful reading, and that we can benefit from making the time to pay attention. Revisiting the words together expands our understanding, increases empathy, and reduces loneliness — we share assumptions and learn from each other’s reactions. We connect.
Alison Cable is a facilitator at the London Literary Salon, she is currently leading a series of Writing for Wellbeing studies.
Leah Jewett (far left) and other members of The Years study group, St Ives, September 2021
Three times I’ve taken the train down to St Ives – a region apart – for London Literary Salon Travel Studies of Virginia Woolf books: The Waves, To the Lighthouse and the last book published in her lifetime, The Years.
Woolf means a lot to me. Growing up I read her journals, just as I devoured the diaries of Sylvia Plath and Anaïs Nin to enter into the detail of these female writers’ thoughts and lives. Some of the last lines of Mrs Dalloway saw me over the threshold of turning 50: “What is this terror? what is this ecstasy? he thought to himself. What is it that fills me with extraordinary excitement?”
Travel Studies are worth going the distance for. Set against the backdrop of a place related to the book you are reading, a Travel Study makes the words come alive over time and feel shot through with new meaning.
I’d already been to Dublin with the London Literary Salon after doing a six-month study of James Joyce’s Ulysses. Because Joyce, as he proclaimed, “put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries”, the least daunting and most rewarding way to read this vast book is in the company of a group of people spearheaded by the astute, inquisitive, light-hearted, deep-diving teacher/facilitator Toby Brothers. Founder and Director of the Salon, she masterminds seminar-like discussions that are informal and in depth. Because she’s an avid swimmer, a Travel Study often incorporates swimming – in the bracing Atlantic (for The Years), in warmer Grecian waters (for The Odyssey) and off the Forty Foot promontory into the roiling Irish Sea (for Ulysses).
I’d already been to Dublin with the London Literary Salon after doing a six-month study of James Joyce’s Ulysses. Because Joyce, as he proclaimed, “put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries”, the least daunting and most rewarding way to read this vast book is in the company of a group of people spearheaded by the astute, inquisitive, light-hearted, deep-diving teacher/facilitator Toby Brothers. Founder and Director of the Salon, she masterminds seminar-like discussions that are informal and in depth. Because she’s an avid swimmer, a Travel Study often incorporates swimming – in the bracing Atlantic (for The Years), in warmer Grecian waters (for The Odyssey) and off the Forty Foot promontory into the roiling Irish Sea (for Ulysses).
In Dublin on Bloomsday – which commemorates the events of 16 June 1904 described in Ulysses – we retraced characters’ steps and watched scenes played out in costume on doorsteps, in a crypt and at Sweny’s, the Dispensing Chemists (“Mr Bloom raised a cake [of soap] to his nostrils. Sweet lemony wax”).
He bought lemon soap; we bought lemon soap – and its tart scent time-travelled me back to turn-of-the-century Dublin.
That’s the thing about a Travel Study: it superimposes echoes of the book, and the life and times of the author, onto your experiences in real time. It transports you into the book and the book into the moment.
No 4 St Ives, the B&B where we’ve stayed for the Virginia Woolf Travel Studies, is a 30-second walk from Talland House, where Woolf spent 13 happy childhood summers. We stand transfixed in front of the white villa and think of how she movingly wrote in the essay “A Sketch of the Past”:
If life has a base that it stands upon, if it is a bowl that one fills and fills and fills – then my bowl without a doubt stands upon this memory. It is of lying half asleep, half awake, in bed in the nursery at St Ives. It is of hearing the waves breaking, one, two, one, two, and sending a splash of water over the beach . . . and feeling, it is almost impossible that I should be here; of feeling the purest ecstasy I can conceive.
A bit bedazzled, I keep thinking: This is the view (partially impeded, since, by houses) of the sea that she would have seen; that tide mirrors the waves she wrote about in The Waves; there’s the lighthouse from To the Lighthouse. Did the wind sound similar in these same trees? Undoubtedly she walked here, turned that doorhandle, looked through that pane of glass.
Time on a Travel Study is telescopic: it takes a while to put the workaday London world behind me, but by day two I’ve decompressed and am caught up in the escapism.
Each Travel Study is a study in work/life balance. It reminds me of the buzz I felt working at the Cannes Film Festival. Alternating schedule and spontaneity, you work, wander around, run into people, socialise, carve out some solitude.
Every day we parcel out the time: dash five minutes down to the sea for a 7am swim; join the others for breakfast; walk through the cobbled streets of whitewashed houses over to the rough-hewn, Grade II-listed Porthmeor Studios, which give on to a beach, to read aloud and discuss The Years; go our separate ways – to maybe take an open-top double-decker along the coast, tour the Barbara Hepworth Museum and Sculpture Garden or opt for downtime to catch up on reading – then reconvene to discuss the book for another hour; continue talking over dinner; sleep.
A Travel Study, which elides past and present, is a journey to the centre of many things – of how aspects of a book’s personal and political landscapes resonate when you take them in experientially, how your ideas can evolve as you hear other people’s perceptions and analysis, and the connectedness – on location – with a writer and their words.
Leah Jewett is director of Outspoken Sex Ed and an inveterate Salonista
Every visit to Paris is an encounter with the inexhaustible ideal of style. Even though I once lived here, I find myself tipsy with the sights and smells and sheer beauty of it all, even before I sip the crisp Pouilly-Fumé that somehow tastes better in Paris.
Here, life is lived on the streets in the most swirling and satisfying ways. In this city I am always hungry: the smells of coffee and patisseries surround me as I run along the Canal Saint Martin; on rue Montorgueil we are torn between multiple bistros for dinner, our mouths watering with the possibilities of fresh fish and autumn’s mushroom bounty.
We visit the newly reopened le Musée Carnavalet — the city’s oldest museum, dedicated to celebrating the history of this illuminated city. The current retrospective exposition of the photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson reminds us how his work is so embedded in the history and vision of Paris that my friend, who thought she was not familiar with his work, kept murmuring, ‘I know this picture . . .’ With his images in my mind, I am thinking about how an artist can shape our idea of a place — Paris becomes the time-misted, complicated, fleeting glimpses that Cartier-Bresson captured: the days of liberation, the children on Paris streets whose poverty does not diminish their intense play, the women walking as though they aren’t being watched, knowing very well they are watched . . . All his images catch moments of motion and hold them frozen in time: I am aware of a tilting skirt, a leaping man, a glance across a room. None of these movements may be remarkable in themselves, but by being captured in the instant they become eternal. In this and many other ways, our visit to the Carnavalet has me thinking about Proust’s explorations. Finding on the rue de Sevigne the entrance to the building that was home to Mme Sevigne, the 17th century journalist beloved by Marcel’s grandmother, is only the start of the threads of connection to Proust.
Reflecting on the Belle Époque in the Musee Carnavalet
Travelling is different in these pandemic days. Each café requires proof of our vaccinated status; I find this is reassuring. I wonder if I am also newly alive to the allure of foreign spaces and unknown faces. The months of enclosure have made me hungry – and Paris feeds the senses voluptuously.
As September slides in under summer’s fading shadow, I find returning to the depths of literature offers a delicious slowing down after the shifting and frantic days of this summer with its overwhelming world news. I look for a way to balance the fears and dread of global and local upheavals with a space for hope, inspiration and celebration of the human creative spirit.
One Salonista put it succinctly: “. . . I look forward to seeing you and reading the book which helps me to think deeply rather than be frightened by the daily news.”
Immersion in literature is not to escape, but to find a perspective that is wide enough to hold the chaos of living, to help give context – historical, global – to the individual subjective self that must absorb and flow through the experience of being awake in this world, at this moment.
This autumn’s Salon Studies offer a sumptuous feast to support, expand and sometimes soothe the troubled mind. We have expanded our offerings to give choices in length of courses and cost, approach, focus, genre and historical perspective. In our recent facilitators’ meeting, we discussed developing studies that connect and build on one another – studies which can stand alone but are also linked thematically, developing ideas and understanding of particular strands of literature.
The coming study of Ulysses (starting January 2022, as we approach the centenary of its first publication) offers an opportunity for this kind of interconnected study: this huge book that is both the peak of modernist literature and one of the great unread books, is interwoven with other great works. Joyce used Homer’s Odyssey – often humorously – as a reference point and scaffold upon which to weave his tale of a scruffy and sensitive modern hero who echoes Odysseus in unexpected ways. Ulysses also repeatedly echoes Shakespeare’s Hamlet both thematically and in exploring the perennial question of the relationship between the artist and their vision. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man may be seen as the prequel to Ulysses – giving the reader background to Stephen Dedalus and his struggles, as well as introducing us to Joyce’s experiments in language and style.
We will be offering studies of The Odyssey, Hamlet (soliloquies) and Portrait this autumn. If you are joining the Centenary Study of Ulysses, any or all of these courses would be valuable but, of course, you don’t need to be preparing for Ulysses to enjoy these extraordinary works!
