A dozen or so of us met every Thursday for 13 or so years with John who taught us how to read. John had taught Middle English literature at Simon Fraser for years and we spent our time reading together and analyzing Webster, Spenser, Shakespeare, Chaucer and so on. We never got good enough to cope with the vernacular of the time but the translations were challenge enough. The fact that we all brought prior degrees to the tutorials cut no ice. We still needed to learn how to read. John was Socratic so I always felt safe. When one sees the voice on the page we spoke what we heard. Seeing and hearing in cahoots, mediated by the second and eighth cranial nerves allows one to reproduce the voice. Learning to read is not a throwaway line. If you want to write you better learn to read. We have a writing workshop coming up and I am looking forward to what Lorraine has to say. It's all good.
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