“Mrs Heta would always be there, and when it came to cards she was both Nanny’s best friend and worst enemy. And the two of them were the biggest cheats I ever saw. Mrs Heta would cough and reach for a hanky while slyly slipping a card from beneath her dress.”
– from A Game of Cards, by Witi Ihimaera.
‘That was me,” says Shane Henare, who is in his 50s, Ngāpuhi, a father, a fan of the singer Joan Armatrading, and “no effing saint”.
“I grew up on the marae with the aunties cheating at cards and you knew you weren’t allowed to say anything.”
Always finding the written word a struggle, and embarrassed by that as a Porirua College schoolboy, Henare now champions the shared reading group at HomeGround, a facility run by the Auckland City Mission.
Up the road from St Matthew-in-the-City Church, alongside the shambolic inner-city zone of road cones, construction and street people chatting, begging and roaming, HomeGround is a community hub for people in need. Taking turns to read, a small group in the community lounge – four, five or six people – works its way through short stories and poems, pausing repeatedly to share what a text evokes: a distant hometown, a memory of childhood, a feeling of hope, befuddlement, whatever.
The Reading Revolution, a grassroots organisation founded in 2015, runs about 20 small reading groups like this across Auckland and trained the facilitators who lead groups in places such as Nelson, Christchurch, Invercargill and Gore, often in public libraries.
People sometimes struggle with the concept. These are not book groups or literary criticism gatherings: the reading is aloud, and social connection is a key aim. As with 12-step recovery meetings, there’s no obligation to engage – participants can listen and say nothing – and biscuits, tea and coffee are a feature.
For Henare, shared reading reacquainted him with A Game of Cards, a story he’d loved years earlier, but even better, let him start to get acquainted with fellow tenants. “It’s a way we can socialise rather than sitting in your room.”
During readings in the lounge, which is alongside a rooftop community garden, tenants drift in and out, making coffee, sometimes lingering to listen. Conversations go anywhere. The story Pretty Polly, by Japanese science-fiction writer Shinichi Hoshi, in which a tattoo of a cabbage on a sailor’s bicep turns into a woman and comes to life, prompted a HomeGround tenant to tell the stories of his own tattoos.
Elderly people in rest homes and palliative care, people with dementia or anxiety or addictions, women in jail and migrants sharpening their English have all taken part. There is a vibrant Chinese, Taiwanese, and Korean group. Knitted scarves in Hogwarts house colours featured in a one-off Harry Potter reading.
Revolutionary thinking
Kate Middleton is in her 40s, a former University of Auckland librarian. She’s also a mother, a reformed 10-cup-a-day coffee drinker, a newbie roller skater, and the person who conjured up The Reading Revolution. She was studying for a master of information studies at Victoria University of Wellington (a degree suited to librarians) in 2013 when she heard an Age Concern representative on the car radio talking about the isolation and loneliness of older people.
She pondered how public libraries could help. “There’s a go-home, stay-home culture in New Zealand where people get stuck out in the suburbs,” she says. “But a lot of older people go to public libraries, they like them, and they feel safe in them, so I was thinking, ‘What else could we do to connect people socially while they’re at the library?’”
Coming across reports of The Reader Organisation in the UK, she saw a potential model. Beginning as a Liverpool-based literary magazine in 1997, The Reader went on to launch “Get Into Reading” groups for shared reading in libraries, hospitals, prisons and rest homes in Liverpool and across the UK. Enthusiastic coverage in the Guardian in 2002, headlined “The Reading Cure”, was a big boost and triggered international interest.
With funds from her parents and borrowing, Middleton got together the money for a two-week trip to Liverpool in 2015. By that stage, The Reader was spending millions of pounds a year on its operations and was set to take over a landmark mansion house for a headquarters. Co-founder Jane Davis had reeled in an MBE.
When Middleton mooted her idea of an all-volunteer organisation in New Zealand, the professional staff at The Reader seemed bemused and dubious, she says.
“The people who were really excited to meet me were the people in reading groups across the city,” she says. “They couldn’t believe that someone all the way from New Zealand was showing up. They took me under their wing.”
In Liverpool, Middleton trained as a “reader leader”, the term for the facilitator who hosts a reading session and keeps it on track. Out in the community, she saw that those benefiting were not just the elderly.
“People were using it to help with chronic pain,” she says. “There was one guy who had severe mental health struggles and couldn’t otherwise leave his apartment – he only came out to go to his reading group.”
Back home, the following year Middleton founded a group at Selwyn Village in Pt Chevalier, Auckland, a retirement and aged care community that turned out to be home to a dynamic bunch of elderly women with much to say. Margarita Mahon, the widow of Justice Peter Mahon, was among their number. Quickly a hit, this group became one of the tightest Reading Revolution communities.
Middleton registered the Reading Revolution as a charity and the artist Judy Darragh, whose mother Grace was attending the Selwyn Village group, became chair. In 2017, a representative of The Reader visited New Zealand to teach facilitators. The following year, with the help of lotteries funding, Middleton and her friend, fellow former librarian Danny Prasad, travelled to Liverpool to learn how to train facilitators.
Reading for fun
“The light was so weak at noon that when Pelayo was coming back to the house after throwing away the crabs, it was hard for him to see what it was that was moving and groaning in the rear of the courtyard. He had to go very close to see that it was an old man, a very old man, lying face down in the mud, who, in spite of his tremendous efforts, couldn’t get up, impeded by his enormous wings.”
– from A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings, by Gabriel García Márquez.
Teresa Lee, a 49-year-old veterinarian, was born in Taiwan and moved to New Zealand from Hong Kong with her partner on a whim, for adventure. Loving literature and keen to do some volunteering, she led a group at the Tōtara Hospice in Manurewa for nearly two years before the Covid pandemic. “I was anxious and self-conscious at the beginning because I was always the only one reading,” she says. “Participants were often too ill or tired to read – but they jokingly assured me that they were content to just sit back and allow my voice to lull them to sleep.”
For many, literature was not generally associated with entertainment. “I never knew you could read for fun,” Lee was told. Somewhat dark stories with surprising twists were favourites; women cheered and applauded when an aggrieved wife got away with the ingenious murder of the husband who was leaving her in Roald Dahl’s Lamb to the Slaughter.
Occasionally people joined; some passed away. Mortality as a topic was never shied away from and, if anything, was often front and centre. Robert Frost’s short poem Nothing Gold Can Stay was appreciated.
It’s fair to say that South American magical realism was not a big hit. The end of A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings, a story Lee loved, was greeted with silence and indignant exclamations of, “What was that all about?” and “Oh, I didn’t like that at all.”
“It was funny and wonderful, and I was grateful for their honest, visceral reactions,” says Lee.
At the opposite end of Auckland on the Hibiscus Coast, Emma Duncan has recently become the leader of a Whangaparāoa Library group. That’s quite something, since Duncan struggled to attend her first meeting because of social anxiety and intended only to listen, not read.
“It was a really big thing for me to attend,” says the 60-year-old grandmother with a sociology degree whose life experiences include living aboard a boat for eight years. She has resumed her own creative writing.
Facilitating is a subtle art – gently encouraging people to speak, responding without judgment to non sequiturs, navigating unexpected topics and injecting the enthusiasm and energy to keep things flowing.
At Whangaparāoa, Duncan has encountered scenarios from a person who was high and couldn’t really engage (“we tried to make her feel welcome”) to the sudden shock of a participant saying the n-word.
Tangible gains
Scientific research points to mental health benefits from shared reading. However, studies can be small, and they lack independence when they involve advocates such as The Reader or the University of Liverpool’s Centre for Research into Reading, Literature and Society.
Middleton cites benefits that she has seen. An Auckland woman who had suffered a stroke recovered her enjoyment of literature. She couldn’t read alone because the words blurred and her concentration evaporated, so reading aloud and together made all the difference. At an addiction treatment centre, shared reading opened people up for therapy by helping them to see their own stories from fresh angles.
“Readers with dementia can experience social success within a session,” Middleton says. “Stories they can remember so clearly from their early years are often very relatable and sharing connects them strongly with other group members. ‘My grandchildren aren’t interested in my stories!’ they say.”
So far, the Reading Revolution’s growth has been capped because of a reliance on one-off funding. Foundation North, the Lottery Grants Board, Auckland Council, the Stout Trust and the Trusts Community Foundation have been donors. The single-biggest contribution in the past year was the 10,400 hours of work by volunteers and librarians, estimated to be worth $294,000.
For the charity’s sole employee, Middleton, never being certain of funding has meant operating conservatively with “a side eye to pivoting to a fully volunteer service”.
While prison inmates are a big focus of The Reader in the UK, that’s not the same here. The emotional load of facilitating can be heavy and getting slots in prisoners’ heavily scheduled days isn’t straightforward, says Middleton. After about a year of reading at the women’s prison in Wiri, she pulled back. “We’re not a big enough organisation to support that type of work at the moment,” she says. “I would be worried about whether the volunteers were properly supported.”
Safe spaces
“I saw the Māori Jesus,” says Judy Darragh, reciting the opening words of a James K Baxter poem from the stage of the Thirsty Dog on Auckland’s Karangahape Rd. Occasional open-mic poetry gatherings are one twist on the Reading Revolution theme.
Another is the Aotearoa Literary Hub, a series of collaborations with New Zealand writers such as Brannavan Gnanalingam, Nicole Titihuia Hawkins, and Rosetta Allan. Reading group members and facilitators get the rare opportunity to quiz the author they’ve been reading via a Zoom call. More than 20 authors have taken part.
A third twist, the most recent, celebrates the many New Zealanders whose first language is not English, where group members recite poems in their native languages.
However, what’s at the heart of the programme won’t be changing. “The literature creates a safe space where we can all meet,” says Middleton. “The trust that builds in a group over time, that’s where the magic happens for me.”
For more information, see thereadingrevolution.org