Get Into Reading Showcase Manchester

Bringing about a Reading Revolution...

Get Into Reading trainee facilitators at Burton Manor, with Director of The Reader Organisation, Jane Davis (right, front) and below, trainees in the grounds of Burton Manor, the home of our accredited training course

Contents

Contents Introduction

2

What is Get Into Reading?

3

Case Study: Helen‟s story

4

Conference Speakers

5

The Speeches Blake Morrison „The Reading Cure‟

7

Louis Appleby „How Reading is Good for Your Mental Health‟

12

Get Into Reading: Salford

17

Read to Lead Training

18

Contact Us

20

Books enable us “better to enjoy life, or better to endure it” Samuel Johnson

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Contents

Introduction

Introduction The Get Into Reading Showcase was held in the Reception Rooms in Manchester Town Hall on Tuesday 21st October 2008. Three partner organisations – The Reader Organisation, Time to Read and Arts About Manchester – collaborated, with support from the National Year of Reading 2008 and Arts Council England, to deliver a highprofile one-day conference to promote the Get Into Reading creative reading project. The event highlighted the work of Get Into Reading in Merseyside and Salford, to gain further knowledge and understanding of the project and to explore the potential for further development of this initiative across Greater Manchester.

The Conference Aims were: To showcase the work of established Get Into Reading initiatives in Merseyside and Salford; To raise awareness and demonstrate the benefits of Get Into Reading for health and social care providers; To demonstrate the benefits of multi-agency partnerships for libraries; how Get Into Reading groups bring „value-added‟ work to libraries and other organisations; To establish links between library managers, other statutory bodies, health and social care professionals and other relevant parties, e.g. voluntary sector and arts outreach workers, in order to develop the Get Into Reading project; To secure support from interested parties and commissioners to support the launch of a Get Into Reading initiative within Greater Manchester. The conference was aimed at: Senior Library Managers Senior PCT Commissioners Senior Health Service Practitioners Strategic Health Service Managers Senior Health Charity Managers Strategic Arts and Cultural Officers

“Get Into Reading is exactly the kind of work the NHS should be developing in the next ten years” Professor Louis Appleby

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Introduction

Get Into Reading

What is Get Into Reading? The Reader Organisation‟s pioneering social outreach project Get Into Reading currently delivers over 120 regular community reading groups, reaching more than 600 people each week across the North West. Groups meet in community centres, libraries, homeless shelters, schools, hospitals, drug rehab units and care homes to enjoy great books and poems together.

“It‟s like another door has opened and the light has come in.” Get Into Reading member, Wirral

What‟s different about these groups is that short stories, novels and poems are read aloud by one of our trained facilitators – members can choose to join in, but there‟s no pressure to. This provides immediate engagement with the text, which is enriched by the spontaneous sharing of life stories and experiences as confidence builds over time. The groups meet week-in-week-out, providing valuable structure and support. Both of these elements are integral to the success of Get Into Reading.

“It‟s like massage for the mind” Carer, Burnley Central Library

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Get Into Reading

Case Study

Case Study: Helen’s story Helen is in her thirties and when she first arrived at the Get Into Reading group she was visibly shaking, couldn‟t make eye contact with anyone and couldn‟t talk to the other people in the group. If anything even remotely connected with the idea of death came up in whatever text they were reading, she had to leave the room. Nevertheless, she continued to attend, rarely missing a session and it was clear that she valued the group highly. Helen eventually revealed that attending the Get Into Reading group was actually the first thing she‟d been able to come out to independently for 18 months, since the death of her mother. Before her mother‟s death, she had suffered with depression for several years and had eventually had a major breakdown. She was given medication and several courses of therapy, lasting 16 months in total, but feels that she only really began to improve when she joined her Get Into Reading group. This was a safe haven, where she was allowed to remain quiet for as long as she liked, but gradually, over the course of a year, she began to join in, improving to the point where she was eventually able to join in a 50-strong Get Into Reading members‟ coach trip to Manchester Royal Exchange to see Pete Postlethwaite in The Tempest. Her rising confidence levels also allowed her to take on a few hours‟ voluntary work at a local Oxfam shop. Helen is now about to return to employment, after six years of being unable to work. She has just been on holiday with

her husband to Sorrento. They travelled by plane – something she wouldn‟t have been able to contemplate a year ago. Before joining her GIR group, Helen hadn‟t read for three or four years because of concentration problems. She says the fact that the group was local – in her immediate community – helped, and also that the group was small. She liked the quiet, gentle atmosphere and the fact that there was absolutely no pressure to join in – it immediately felt therapeutic. As she puts it: “The group gives you maximum pleasure – in both the people and the book you‟re reading – with minimum stress.

“The knowledge that you don‟t have to do anything is very important, but then trust begins to build and you‟re able to share personal feelings with the group, so that they end up knowing more about you than friends you‟ve known for years. You can say what you want and you know they‟ll understand.”

“You can say what you want and you know they‟ll understand” Helen

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Case Study

Conference Speakers

Conference Speakers Professor Louis Appleby NHS Director for Mental Health and Professor of Psychiatry, University of Manchester Professor Louis Appleby has played a central role in plans to reform mental health services as part of the Government‟s NHS Plan, bringing in a range of new services including home treatment, early intervention and assertive outreach teams, and mental health legislation. He has led numerous initiatives looking at reducing suicides and improving the physical environment of mental health wards. Since 1996 he has been Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Manchester and since 1991 a consultant psychiatrist in Manchester. He was awarded a CBE for services to medicine in the 2006 New Year Honours. Jane Davis Founder and Director, The Reader Organisation Dr Jane Davis left school at 16 with 2 O-Levels and became a single mother at 18 before returning to education in her twenties. In 1997, after several years teaching literature courses in the University of Liverpool‟s Continuing Education department, she founded The Reader magazine. The magazine has grown organically into The Reader Organisation, a charity which aims to bring about a Reading Revolution. She works enthusiastically to develop new projects and to build on the success of „Get Into Reading‟ Merseyside, engaging and inspiring Primary Care Trusts, libraries, Mental Health trusts, the Criminal Justice service, Social Care services and other local authorities across the country to create infrastructures for the project. She holds on tight to her vision to make the serious pleasure of literature available, in many different ways, to as many people as possible. Jane Mathieson Regional Reader Development Co-ordinator, Northwest Jane Mathieson co-ordinates a regional partnership of reader development practitioners working in public libraries across NW England. The partnership, called „Time To Read‟, exists specifically to share information and good practice in developing the audience for reading across the region. „Time To Read‟ develops promotions with the aim of encouraging people to read more and borrow more from public libraries. It works to improve the skills of library staff and brokers reading partnerships. Jane has worked with The Reader Organisation for a number of years, particularly on the Liverpool Reads project, and until recently was on the Board of Trustees.

“The reading group mends holes in the net you would otherwise fall through” GIR member, Birkenhead

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Conference Speakers

Conference Speakers

Tom McDonald Former Director of Joint Commissioning (PCT) & Deputy Director of Community, Health and Social Care, Salford Sarah Spence Libraries and Information Service Manager, Salford Blake Morrison Author, journalist and bibliotherapy advocate Blake Morrison is a poet, novelist and journalist, best known for his two memoirs And When Did You Last See Your Father? and Things my Mother Never Told Me. Born in Yorkshire, he now lives in London, where he writes regularly for the Guardian and is Professor of Creative Writing at Goldsmiths College. He is Chair of The Reader Organisation‟s Board of Trustees. Ivan Wadeson Chief Executive, Arts About Manchester Arts About Manchester is the audience development agency for Greater Manchester, working with nearly fifty arts organisations to develop audiences for the arts by delivering marketing services, research and strategic and collaborative projects. Ivan‟s role focuses on business planning and strategic development of the organisation and the team; partnership development; management of relations with funders and key stakeholders; and advocacy and representation. Ivan had worked extensively in theatres and arts centres – including Liverpool Playhouse, Sadler's Wells (London) and the Royal Exchange Theatre (Manchester) – before taking his current role at Arts About Manchester in 2003. He is on the Boards of the Everyman and Playhouse theatres in Liverpool, and Network, the national network of audience development agencies. Honor Wilson-Fletcher Director, 2008 National Year of Reading Following a degree in English and History at Goldsmiths College, Honor Wilson-Fletcher worked with a succession of booksellers and publishers in a variety of roles – as bookseller at both Books Etc and Waterstone‟s, as Head of PR at Waterstone‟s, Associate Publisher at Transworld, Sales and Marketing Director at Hodder Children‟s Books and in both sales and marketing roles at Penguin. She also had a stint online with BOL.com, before joining the British Museum as Head of Marketing. Prior to joining the National Year of Reading she was Director of Marketing at the Southbank Centre working on the re-launch of Royal Festival Hall and the reinvigoration of the whole Southbank Centre site.

“Get Into Reading‟s like going on holiday without packing your bags” Full-time Carer

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Conference Speakers

The Speeches

The Speeches We have transcribed two keynote speeches from the Get Into Reading Showcase event so that those who were unable to attend the event can get a sense of the dialogue and to gain some useful insight into the world of reading and health. If you were fortunate enough to attend, then here‟s a chance to refresh your memories and be re-inspired!

Blake Morrison: The Reading Cure When we talk about the reading cure we have to be realistic: we can‟t cure everything. There are some illnesses, some viruses, that no amount of reading can ever heal. I make that point because I like to be above the idea that The Reading Cure and „bibliotherapy‟ are somehow alternative and new-age: that‟s not how I see it. I‟m the son of two GPs in the north of England; both of them are hard-headed pragmatists who believe, and so do I, in the advances of modern medicine – penicillin, antibiotics, stem cell research, everything. But the body is not law unto itself, it‟s not entirely distinct from the mind.

person into a healthy one, but something more gradual, more complex, where a person‟s emotional, physical and psychological development and progress are linked by their immersion in books and reading they engage with and the people around them. When I came up to see Jane Davis‟s work last year and wrote „The Reading Cure‟ article in the Guardian, which she probably doesn‟t thank me for really(!), I talked to a variety of people, and one of them, somebody who works with Jane, Kate McDonnell, said to me, “Reading pushes the pain away to a place where it no longer seems important. No matter how ill you are there‟s a world inside books which you can enter and explore, and where you focus on something other than your own problems. You get to talk about things that people usually skate over like ageing or death and that kind of conversation with everyone chipping in, so you feel part of something, something that can be enormously helpful.”

We know that some physical ailments are linked to the mind and we know that people‟s ability to cope with illness is often connected to their sense of who they are and where they‟re at. We know that isolation, depression and a lack of selfesteem can be crippling and disabling. By contrast, confidence, a sense of belonging and the ability to express oneself are positive attributes that can be good for one‟s sense of wellbeing and health. That‟s where I feel that books have a part to play. I don‟t mean anything so crude as the transformation overnight from a sick

Other members of Get Into Reading groups that I spoke to said: “I‟ve stopped seeing the doctor since I came here”, “I‟ve

“It‟s relaxed you can be yourself. You can just sit there and be yourself” GIR member, Wallasey

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The Speeches

Blake Morrison

cut down on medication”; a lady who had breast cancer said, “Being in a group of other women who have what I have didn‟t help me but talking about books made a huge difference”; and then someone else said, “The reading group mends holes in the net you would otherwise fall through.” They‟re all I think interesting insights into what books, what reading can do.

Raymond Tallis, professor of Geriatric Medicine at the University of Manchester, whom I also talked to about the therapeutic benefits of such reading groups, was a bit doubtful about some of the research that‟s been done in the field of arts as therapy but did tell me about an old colleague of his who had been enormously helped in his last weeks of life, when he was hooked up to a diamorphine pump, by reading War and Peace as he lay there. On how reading could be therapeutic, Tallis said that reading provides “the pleasure of escape into a parallel world, the sense of control one has as a reader, and the ability to distance

oneself from one‟s own circumstances by seeing them from the outside, suffered by someone else and gathered up into a nicely worked-out plot”. Somewhere in there you sense a notion of the Aristotelian catharsis, the cure. So, I think there is evidence here of things happening. D. H. Lawrence, after writing Sons and Lovers, said, “One sheds one sicknesses in books” and that reading “repeats and presents again one‟s emotions to be master of them”. Shedding your sicknesses in books leads me to think of Ted Hughes, who talked about how poetry – poetry in particular because that was important for him – could be an exploration of things we don‟t actually want to say but desperately need to share. So the reading group becomes an occasion for saying things that are perhaps difficult in a normal social discourse. In his last years, Ted Hughes became quite convinced about poetry as therapy, defining poetry as “nothing more than a facility for expressing that complicated process in which we locate and attempt to heal a fiction, whether our own, or that of others whose spiels we can share; in other words, the inmost spirit of poetry is at the bottom in every recorded case, the voice of pain, and the physical body so to speak of poetry is the treatment by which the poet tries to reconcile that pain with the world”. I used to be a bit sceptical about the idea of writing books as therapy, about „creating‟ as therapy. You could say that creating is different from sitting around reading a book, couldn‟t you? But I think

“The reading group becomes an occasion for saying things that are perhaps difficult in a normal social discourse.” -8-

Blake Morrison

Blake Morrison

the two processes are very similar in many ways. I think Proust – I confess to not having read the whole of Proust but I did notice something – once described the book as “a sort of optical instrument the writer offers to the reader to enable the latter to discover in himself what he would not have found but for the aid of the book”.

they‟re not pamphlets, they‟re not medical textbooks: they are novels and poems.

The book becomes a sort of optical instrument, or it‟s a mirror in which we see our own reflection or something that‟s going on in our own lives; or it‟s the process that the schoolteacher in Alan Bennett‟s The History Boys talks about when he says how, in the presence of great literature or poetry, “it‟s as if a hand has come out and taken yours”.

Often these great pieces of literature are dealing with very difficult and painful experiences, which I can see is a challenge to those of us, say, dealing with people who are in pain, whether it‟s mental or physical, and are perhaps anxious about exposing such people to pain capacities in literature. But my sense of it is that it can be liberating, it can even be upbeat to confront really difficult emotions and pain: it doesn‟t lower the experience to see it being worked out where it can raise them. It‟s what Thomas Hardy said, “If a way to the better there be it exacts a full look at the worst”, and I think he‟s right about that. Even people who perhaps haven‟t experienced extreme despair and depression first-hand will recognise it as a result of reading what other people go through; books become a kind of empathy, they become a way for us to connect with other people with other people‟s experiences.

If you‟re feeling quite isolated in what you‟re experiencing and have been thinking about, you can suddenly realise somebody else has thought and felt this and they‟ve expressed it in poetry or prose, and you feel somehow affirmed in your sense of the world and yourself. I think we locate ourselves in the work of others in that way and that active reading is not unlike writing in some ways: it certainly can be therapeutic. I‟m talking about self-help through literature. I am sceptical about overtly „self-help‟ books. I‟m sure they have a part to play but one of the things I like about the Get Into Reading scheme is the sense that we‟re dealing with classics, we‟re dealing with serious works of literature, these aren‟t just feel-good books, they‟re not full of psycho-babble,

It‟s said that reading works as therapy, that at one level it‟s a way of echoing, a way of finding in a book an echo of your own

“I think we locate ourselves in the work of others” -9-

Blake Morrison

Blake Morrison

experience: you feel recognised, you feel vindicated, you feel validated but also sometimes it takes you to places that you haven‟t expected to go, places you perhaps didn‟t even particularly want to go but you feel grateful for having visited them. And I do think that real works of literature, without being snooty, the classics, works of literature that stood the test of time, have a serious purpose to them: they have a shape, they are the crucial way for this reading cure to work rather than overtly „self-help‟ books. So you find a sort of order and shape there in the poem, or in a brilliant passage in a novel, which provides that order you shore up against in the disorder, the chaos and confusion in your own life. The reading cure works, I think, both as a group, communal experience and as a private one. That‟s to say there‟s no doubt

the experience of sitting around a table with other people discussing a book, that the communal solidarity that gives, the sense of engagement with others, sharing things, is absolutely crucial. But I‟d like to think that there‟s something else too; that people go away, that they withdraw but they take that experience with them; that they read at home as well and if they‟re not reading at home very much at least they‟re thinking about the issues that have come up. In other words, it‟s social but there‟s also withdrawal into a private place, a bit like a religious retreat if you like. You‟re taken out of the world when you‟re reading and when taken out the world you lose track of time and space. Yet when you‟re taken out of yourself in that way – like when you missed that stop on the bus or the train because you were immersed in a book – where you‟re taken out of yourself like that, you‟re also being taken inside yourself: you‟re going somewhere deep inside yourself as well, and that‟s what books can do, both take you out of, and inside, yourself. ~~~

In The Prelude Wordsworth talks about how there are „spots of time‟ in our lives, which are scattered somewhere in our memory and which when we read or when we reflect we recover, like recovering buried memories. By doing that, through that act of recovery, we are in his terms renovating and repairing. He says:

“The reading cure works both as a group, communal experience and as a private one” - 10 -

Blake Morrison

Blake Morrison

There are in our existence spots of time, That with distinct pre-eminence retain A renovating virtue, whence–depressed By false opinion and contentious thought, Or aught of heavier or more deadly weight, In trivial occupations, and the round Of ordinary intercourse–our minds Are nourished and invisibly repaired; A virtue, by which pleasure is enhanced, That penetrates, enables us to mount, When high, more high, and lifts us up when fallen.

new world: it was a renovation of life.” A renovation.

In reading poetry you recover these „spots of time‟ in your memory and you feel renovated, you are lifted up from somewhere fallen. It‟s interesting that words about being renovated are also used by John Cross, the young man who used to sit reading Dante with George Eliot after her husband had died, which helped her through her grief. John Cross, who subsequently married George Eliot, said about this experience: “Her sympathetic life in stimulating my newly awakened enthusiasm for Dante is something to distract her mind from sorrowful memories. The divine poet took us to a

So my feeling is, there is The Writing Cure, there is The Reading Cure and I think what Jane‟s doing in trying to get great books out there to the whole nation is immensely valuable. I think that too often literature can be annexed as the property of teachers and lecturers: they‟re to do with school syllabuses; they‟re to do with university programmes, degree programmes. But the best literature is about life and the stuff that we experience and that you go through, and I think that the emphasis of Get Into Reading is for people to make connections with their own lives: to look at books as books, to respond to them, judge them, decide whether they‟re good or not, but constantly to make connection with their own experiences, and that seems to me to be a healthy way, the healthiest way to approach books.

I‟m all for The Reading Cure.

“Reading poetry you recover these „spots of time‟ in your memory” - 11 -

Blake Morrison

Louis Appleby

Professor Louis Appleby: How Reading is Good for Your Mental Health What is the connection here? you might be asking. What is the connection between reading and mental health? Why is it I am here to draw up the link between the work of Get Into Reading and my job, which is forming national Mental Health policy? By assumption that not everyone here is a mental health professional, let me just take you back a little bit to what‟s happened in mental health services in the last ten years. Ten years ago when we began the process of reform on the NHS, and mental health care in particular, there was a very pressing problem that community care was seen to have failed. It had lost public confidence. It had lost political confidence. A very eminent politician had said, “Community care is a failed policy.” That

was a damning comment to make about what had been a twenty year period of deinstitutionalisation. So at the time when I moved into the Department of Health, the policy became to try and restore community care, to try and make people feel it was the right policy, the humane policy, for people with severe mental illness and in particular for adults of working age. We set out to reshape the policy and we did that by developing specialised services: first of all an intensive community team, which would support people who had complex health and social care needs, people who didn‟t easily accept what the service traditionally had to offer, so would drift out of care and become vulnerable and become high risk. We were also concerned about young people getting ill for the first time and it would take a long time to have their first contact with services, by which time they‟d be more ill, more in need of admission and more in need of heavier treatment; we were concerned to provide an alternative to admission for people when there was a safe alternative. We spent a lot of time strengthening community care. It‟s my job to create the policy content but you realise when you work in government policy that you‟re very dependent on the people outside doing their job. People need to pick up national policy and turn it into something real for mental health service users.

“You need something more than just tablets – that‟s only a crutch” Mental health service user

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Louis Appleby

Louis Appleby

So the success of the last ten years has primarily been theirs – because of the success of the people working on front line services. Two weeks ago the World Health Organisation produced a report that said British mental health services were the model to follow across Europe. Last week, the Healthcare Commission, the independent watchdog for healthcare in England, produced its annual report on the NHS. There was a lot of reporting about what was going wrong with it, none of the reporting, as far as I could see, mentioned the key point that mental health services was far outstripping other parts of the NHS on quality of care. So something has really changed. You couldn‟t say those things ten to fifteen years ago. Something has really changed about mental health services. But where does that leave us? Well, much of what I‟ve described is about specialised services for people with severe mental illness, and you reach a point where having done that, your policy emphasis has to reflect that. It has to be about the mental health needs of the community as a whole – about people‟s emotional health as well as their mental illness, about emotional well-being. So the policy switch of the last year or so – and this will become more apparent in the next five or ten years – the policy switch has been the broader community. Not just adults of working age, but children and older people; not just people who are in specialist services, but people who are outside the remit of specialist care but who still have mental health needs. We all

have mental health needs. And people of the margins of society, people who traditionally mental health care has been about: people who are offenders, people who are in prison, coming out of prison, young people who have been in care, people who are marginalised by society, asylum seekers, refugees; the kind of people who don‟t usually get very good press. Those are the people whose mental health needs we will now reach out to. That means not just treatment, it means prevention and it means mental health promotion. So the thrust of mental health policy will be much more addressing the mental health needs of people who are not mentally ill but who are emotionally in need. I‟m talking about people who have lost confidence, people who have lost self-

“It‟s been great this – a real boost” Client at drugs detox unit

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Louis Appleby

Louis Appleby

esteem, not necessarily depressed, people who have lost family, people who have lost friends, and people who are lonely and isolated. It‟s a major challenge for society to support the people who are lonely. We‟re going to talk a lot about loneliness in society. Loneliness is a major challenge to modern society where movement around the country is fragmented, within cities and so on. There are positive things as well: there are people who are positive about what they can achieve, who are optimistic and who still have mental health needs, who still need to address their own mental health needs if they‟re to fulfil their potential. That‟s much more of what you‟ll now see from the mental health policy.

I should say I‟ve noticed a few of the things you‟ve already said: The first way in which that promotion and prevention agenda can be turned into something practical is through schools, through the workplace, where we talk to children about emotional literacy, not just conventional literacy. Schools nowadays are starting to do a much better job of this than five years ago. It‟s much more part of what schools see as responsible – it‟s not just about preventing bullying or support, it‟s also about giving people the language of emotions through which they can understand themselves and others. It‟s about what the government would call social exclusion – helping people into training, helping people into jobs, helping them defeat the stigma of discrimination that people with mental health needs, not just with severe mental illness, encounter in their day to day lives. There was a very important report published in 2004 by a social exclusion group which was about social exclusion and mental health; important because it was the first cross-government report that had focused on mental health – a significant moment. It was helping people into training and helping people fulfil their potential in literacy was a key part of it. So how can reading be good for your mental health? How does it fit in directly to this agenda?

But what in practice does this mean? What do we mean when we talk about prevention and promotion and how does reading fit into mental health promotion and prevention?

I think there are three ways: first of all there is a direct impact of reading on us as individuals, on our emotional health and on our social health. It may be an obvious thing to say but combating depression, combating low mood, is partly about

“That means not just treatment, it means prevention and it means promotion” - 14 -

Louis Appleby

Louis Appleby

addressing what‟s enjoyable. You might think that everybody would know that but it has taken years of research, careful research, to demonstrate that a model of depression, human depression, which is a kind of vicious circle, whereby people‟s emotions when they are low will prevent them from doing things that will lift them out of feeling low. That‟s the vicious circle. So, an obvious example, if you‟re feeling low about something, any of us feeling low, and a friend rings up asking you to go out, you can feel “I can‟t quite be bothered”, and it‟s that decision, influenced by your mood, which maintains your lower mood. Now, therefore, there is a whole world of therapy built on the idea of reversing that vicious circle, and the key importance therefore is doing something which you get an immediate lift out of. Not because it‟s transforming in itself, but because it‟s the first step towards helping people out of the vicious circle. So, you can see the point here, if you can get enjoyment out of reading, then that is an important factor of maintaining mood and maintaining our capability. There is also a direct impact of simply understanding. Reading presents to us the themes of life: books are about jealousy and regret and resentment and revenge. Revenge is what Wuthering Heights is all about, isn‟t it? These themes are mentioned in Shakespeare – that‟s what his plays were about, they were about these things and they‟re powerful because we identify with them. We identify with the people in these stories and we learn about them, of course, but we also learn about

ourselves. That emotional language, that emotional literacy of understanding comes from observing other people, whether it‟s in fiction or in life. So there are characters who are like us and characters who are not like us. Every adolescent reads The Catcher in the Rye and learns about Holden Caulfield. I remember reading The Catcher in the Rye at university and thinking I really didn‟t like Caulfield at all. I was expecting a great moment of identification with this adolescent crisis but I really didn‟t like him at all. It was actually quite helpful not to like him because I thought, “I hope I don‟t come across like that at times.” So we can learn from characters who we like, characters who we don‟t like, characters who we are like and characters who we are not like. We learn a lot about ourselves. We also learn about achievement. Reading can be an achievement. Of course I‟m partly talking about people whose education or social environment hasn‟t given them the opportunities for reading that maybe some people have had. But it‟s not just that. I‟m looking forward to the moment when I finally have time to read War and Peace – I know that when I read it I will feel really proud of myself and it‟ll be a great achievement. It doesn‟t matter if I like it or not, it will be a great achievement because I‟ve been looking forward to it for so long. Certainly there is a sense of achievement, and coming back to what I was saying about understanding human emotion and human mood, we know that achieving something is another way of getting a lift, of reversing that vicious circle.

“It‟s something normal – you can join in without having to talk about mental health problems” Mental health service user - 15 -

Louis Appleby

Louis Appleby

I said it‟s good for our individual health but it‟s also good for our social health. I suppose this is why I think a project like this has an edge on just reading because there is a social dimension. If you go to libraries, they play a similar role. There is a social side to it, to talking to people. I remember when the BBC did that campaign about the hundred best books. I thought that was very interesting, very good because people began to talk, all sorts of people began to talk about books that they enjoyed. I discovered people liked books that I liked, who I hadn‟t otherwise had any other contact with. People who I was reading about, people who I happened to meet. It was a social dimension to shared experience, shared enjoyment, which can‟t be underestimated.

Families know this, all families know this. Growing up in a family where parents read to their children, there is a social dimension there, a bond, a shared experience there, which is good for our emotional health. It‟s not about treating depression, it‟s about remaining emotionally healthy. I still read to my nine year old son, I think I do it more for my

sake, not for his; he sort of sighs tolerantly when I get the book. It‟s because it is a tremendous bonding experience. I know when I stop there‟s going to be a moment of tremendous loss, the moment when he actually says, “You know what, I‟d actually like to read for myself tonight,” I just know that‟s going to be an emotional moment. There is also a social inclusion element. Reading is a skill. It leads us onto other skills. It is a step on the way to training, onto work, in a way that many people need help with. I‟m not particularly talking about severe mental illness but it‟s impossible not to refer to mental illness when we talk about skills, helping people back into mainstream society. There are people who have suffered severe mental illness, who need that help back into training, into jobs, just to do part of what the rest of us take for granted and any step on the way is the right step for them. There are many people who are troubled and failing in education and anything that helps them back into educational achievement is right for them. So there‟s a direct impact and there‟s the lower impact on schools. Thirdly, there‟s something a reading project can bring and that is, it can bring the values of society to people. Then there are the values of opportunity, fulfilling potential, of providing support, and a sense of community – one person for another. Those are the right values for a modern society. So I see Get Into Reading as very important as it does all those things.

“We learn a lot about ourselves. Reading can be an achievement” - 16 -

Louis Appleby

Get Into Reading: Salford

Get Into Reading: Salford

Public Library Services in NW England support a large and growing number of reading groups in libraries and communities and are very keen to further develop groups which have a health benefit for people who need it most. A number of library authorities have already taken steps to support the Get Into Reading model. A clear example of this is Salford Library Service. Get Into Reading in Salford utilises the existing skills and resources of the library service and other services within the Community Health and Social Care Directorate, in partnership with The Reader Organisation and Salford Primary Care Trust. The project is an excellent way to support the health improvement agenda. It was established as Salford Libraries‟ key project for the National Year of Reading 2008. Groups are delivered at a variety of venues across the city: A residential care home An arts centre for people with mental health problems A day centre A community library A homeless shelter The library service leads the project with two dedicated days per week from Reader Development Officer Sarah Coyne and by providing resources to support the groups. Groups are facilitated by Sarah and Amanda Brown, a member of The Reader Organisation. We are in a situation where everything is done for us, we get out of the habit of thinking. This group presents us with the opportunity to think for ourselves, stirs up the old grey matter! Care home resident

The challenge now is to develop the project by encouraging more staff working within day care centres, elderly person‟s homes, libraries and other organisations to become actively involved in the facilitation of Get Into Reading groups. Many other library authorities in the region and nationally are keen to follow this exemplary model. There are advanced discussions and plans in progress in a number of NW authorities, with others trying out different models of health-related reading activity. Nationally, training and delivery models are being discussed and piloted.

“There‟s much more to a reading group than just reading a book” GIR member, Salford

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Get Into Reading: Salford

Read to Lead

Read to Lead Training The Reader Organisation delivers specialist Read to Lead training throughout the country for those with a desire to spread the pleasure and power of reading through the Get Into Reading model. Courses are open to people from all professional and social backgrounds: a love of books, a belief in the social value of reading, and a passion to share this vision are our main criteria.

It was a privilege to attend a course that feels like it could truly change the way I work ... and to learn from the dedicated, enthusiastic members of The Reader Organisation. Trainee Read to Lead Workshop Want to know more about Get Into Reading (GIR)? This workshop offers the opportunity to take part in an intensive reading experience as part of a GIR group, observe the principles of our work in action and learn about specialised reading and group facilitation techniques. You will meet people from your part of the country who are interested in GIR and be able to discuss strategies for developing GIR in your area. (Cost: £150) It was a joy and a privilege to be there. I think it's such a wonderful thing you're doing – on so many levels. Very many thanks for an inspiring day. Workshop attendee Read to Lead Residential This residential course is intended for people who want to become accredited Get Into Reading facilitators. Over a fun but intensive five days this course will give you the insider view on what makes GIR work. The enthusiasm of all involved – staff, group members and fellow students – gives one the energy and optimism to get going; the stimulus is both spiritual and intellectual. Course attendee GIR facilitators and reading group members will put you through a vigorous reading workout, help you identify areas of practice to work on, and give you the opportunity to lead a reading group in a companionable and supportive environment. This course provides all the experience necessary to run a GIR project. (Cost: £1,000)

“Immensely good and nourishing” Read to Lead trainee

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Read to Lead

Read to Lead

Read to Lead Non-Residential This training course is intended for people who want to become accredited Get Into Reading (GIR) facilitators, but whose schedules do not allow for them to attend the Read to Lead Residential. Brilliant and varied. The course’s flexibility was really great and the rests in between allowed me fully to absorb the information. The course is delivered over six day-long sessions, scheduled over a course of time that suits your timetable. In addition to four core sessions: Introductory Workshop Read Aloud with Confidence Facilitation Skills in Depth Choosing Reading Materials your group will be able to choose specific workshops relevant to nature of the GIR project you wish to develop. Cost: £800 (minimum 8 trainees; maximum 12 trainees) Read to Lead Consultancy Through the Read to Lead training programme, The Reader Organisation offers tailor-made consultancy in developing Get Into Reading and other aspects of our expertise throughout the country. Please contact Casi Dylan, Training Manager, on the details below to talk over the best way to make your workplace, service, or team part of the GIR community. Reading in Practice MA The Reader Organisation is involved in the delivery and development of an MA degree in Reading in Practice at the University of Liverpool. The MA is concerned with the wider and deeper ways in which books „find‟ people, emotionally and imaginatively, by offering living models and visions of human troubles and human possibilities. The first MA of its kind, it invites open-minded investigation into the role of reading in relation to health – in the broadest sense of that word. The MA, costing approximately £2000, is taught part time (in two-hour seminars on Thursday evenings) over two years.

“The small decisions a writer‟s made, that‟s where thoughts can be found: the author‟s and our own” Current MA student

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Read to Lead

Contact Us

The Reader Organisation The Reader Organisation exists to bring about a Reading Revolution, extending the hand of supportive shared reading, and offering access to books for all. Our work encourages people of all ages and backgrounds, in whatever life situation they find themselves, to become readers, or to extend their reading habits, and to share the reading experience. If you would like to explore working in partnership with us, offer us funding or support, or help champion our cause, please contact Jen Tomkins, Communications Manager on 0151 794 3849, email [email protected], or pick up a pen and write: 19 Abercromby Square, Liverpool, L69 7ZG. www.thereader.org.uk

Arts About Manchester As the audience development agency for Greater Manchester, Arts About Manchester supports arts and cultural organisations in building and sustaining their audiences. We are a membership organisation who acts as a central point of contact for the local arts community as well as an important research and intelligence resource. Our expertise in audience development and arts marketing also means that we work with non-members at both regional and national level. We‟d be happy to hear from you at any of the following contact points: Telephone – 0161 234 2955; Email [email protected]; Fax – 0161 234 2966; Postal Address – Arts About Manchester, Green Fish Resource Centre, 4650 Oldham Street, Manchester, M4 1LE www.aam.org.uk

Time To Read Time To Read has existed as a formal reader development network since 1997 and has supported a full-time coordinator since October 2002. The post is hosted by Manchester City Council and core funding comes from subscriptions from NW library authorities. Focus is on working with adults, but also addresses areas of overlapping work with young people and families. Time To Read has an agreed strategy for reader development activity called Readers For Life. This was recently renewed and takes work forward to 2011. Through its Readers For Life Strategy, Time To Read is concerned with many aspects of public library service delivery: Promoting reading services to potential users Encouraging wide reading through promotions and use of reading-related websites Bringing readers together in groups and at events, to counter social isolation Supporting libraries‟ work with emergent readers The work of Get Into Reading clearly fulfils Time To Read‟s strategy in these areas. Librarians across the NW are well aware of the achievements and impact of Get Into Reading, and are striving in many places to establish and maintain Get Into Reading Groups for the benefit of local communities and individuals. www.time-to-read.co.uk

“It moves you, I mean it hits you inside where it meets you and means something” Dementia sufferer on reading poetry - 20 GIR member, Liverpool

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“In the presence of books, it's as if a hand has reached out and taken our own. That's the hand The Reader Organisation is trying to extend.” The Guardian