Since the Seattle Public Library’s Washington Center for the Book launched its citywide book club in 1996, inviting everyone to read and discuss Russell Banks’ The Sweet Hereafter, the “one book, one community” concept has spread across the country.
This fall, the community read came to Mount Desert Island (MDI). In a remarkable partnership, the nonprofit Island Readers and Writers, founded and directed by Jan Coates, owner of Port in a Storm Bookstore in Somesville, worked with Union 98 teachers and administrators to bring together more than 100 seventh-grade students from MDI and Swan’s Island to share their reading experiences.
In 2002, libraries in Bangor, Bath and Brunswick offered the first community-wide reads in Maine. Schools have also embraced the concept. A number of colleges, for example, now have their freshman class read the same book (Dartmouth recently chose Terry Tempest Williams’ Refuge). As with the library programs, these communal reads sometimes include an opportunity to engage in a conversation with the chosen author, thereby enhancing the appreciation of the written work.
Mount Desert Island middle school students read either The Runner or A Solitary Blue by award-winning Deer Isle-based young adult novelist Cynthia Voigt. Both books are part of Voigt’s seven-part Tillerman series, a somewhat stark saga of a family from Maryland’s eastern shore coming to grips with the turmoil of the 1960s, including the civil rights movement and the war in Vietnam.
Island teachers led classroom discussions of the books through the fall in preparation for the grand finale: a gathering at Mount Desert Island High School to further talk about the books and meet the author. A dozen or so island residents-librarians, writers, teachers, journalists, all passionate about reading-welcomed the students in the school gym and then facilitated small group (seven-to-eight students) discussions. Each circle focused on a single book and was charged with coming up with two “burning” questions to ask the author.
Students grappled with a range of topics, from racism to family dynamics, and often related their own life experiences to those of the characters. The seventh-graders tended to be specific in their inquiries: Why was the main character in The Runner named Bullet? What was the significance of Jeff’s gift of a diamond ring in A Solitary Blue?
Following these discussions, everyone moved to the school auditorium where Voigt awaited, wired for sound and ready for question and answers. Accompanied by a sign language interpreter, the author was introduced to the students and then took questions.
Each query seemed to provoke some illumination of the writer’s process. Voigt described how she is constantly thinking about her characters-while she walks, knits, drives. She highlighted the importance of outlines even as she likened the development of her characters to a sculptor slowly shaping a figure out of granite.
Several students asked if Voigt drew on her own life to write her books, to which the author offered nuanced answers. The novels were not autobiographical, she noted at one point, but they came directly out of her (she has drawn on her experience as a teacher, for example, to write classroom scenes). At one point, she evoked the magic feathers that allowed Dumbo to fly: writing gave her the wherewithal to do things she couldn’t otherwise do, like win a cross-country meet. Yet she also acknowledged her own limitations as a writer.
At one point, Voigt discussed her passion for islands. She recalled taking her children to a rustic retreat on a low island in Chesapeake Bay. “I’d rather live on an island than in the middle of New York City,” she stated. Since moving for good to Deer Isle 20 years ago, she has assumed what she calls “an island mentality.”
According to its mission statement, Island Readers and Writers seeks to nurture “enthusiasm for books, the people who make them, the doors they open, the stories they convey, and the learning they rouse.” The Seventh Grade Community Read fulfilled this vision while addressing a desire of island teachers to keep students reading as they move toward high school (where it is well documented that reading for pleasure-for any reason, really-declines). The pilot program, which received grant support from the Lynam Fund and the Maine Community Foundation’s Hancock County Fund, holds enormous potential: other books, other communities, other reads.
Carl Little served as one of the facilitators for the “Seventh Grade Community Read.” He is director of communications and marketing at the Maine Community Foundation and writes about art, most recently contributing an essay to the book Painting My World: The Art of Dorothy Eisner.