A note from our founder

Some of us are fortunate enough to recall a time while reading when the clarity of an insight about our human experience became a physical revelation of awe, wonder, and beauty; a time when we had to stop reading in order to remark on the power of language to evoke such feelings, moved perhaps to tears. To be overcome by literature changes you. And I’ve become compelled to discover how and why books capture the hearts of some people – what causes them to be so “won over,” devoting time and resources, happily sacrificing other opportunities in the day, and so in love with fictive worlds that reading endures as a solitary pleasure. It is in such reading - the suspension of disbelief, our consideration of what if, the corporeal bathing in simile and metaphor - that we are confronted with ourselves.

In graduate school at Harvard Divinity School, I studied ritualization and meaning making using the material of the novel as an anthropological site. I was particularly struck by the literary theory of reader response criticism, which argues that the reader is responsible for creating the meaning in a text through her own relationship to it. In this way, reading is an intersubjective dialogue, an exercise in co-constitution. Which is why, as you know, I champion the belief that we are the books we’ve read.

Having felt the call to read from an early age, I can say its allure has compelled me to prioritize books without regard for much else, to be invested in the life of the mind to the detriment of, perhaps, living. But books are most enriching when they complement our realities instead of sublimating them, when we come to a work as a whole person with a life out there, with material to alchemize in those solitary moments when reading fiction gives back to reality. This So Textual platform is a resource for such engagement, marrying the lives you lead with the worlds you think about.

In taking tally of one’s literary and intellectual life we come to know ourselves better. Reading through retrospection is worthwhile insofar as we acquire a new outlook on the original self who read the book in the first place, different than the self now considering the present moment, giving us a clearer path forward to who we are becoming. My life has been meaningful to me because of the playful and creative ways I can draw threads between my cultural resources and my becoming the woman – artist, wife, mother - I am today.

Are you the books you’ve read? I invite you to reflect on your reading and the writing on this platform, and discover yourself with the affinities and particularities you possess in relation to literature. I suspect you’ll find more than an answer; I presume you’ll find clarity where you had yet to recognize opacity, the self reading the self anew, page by page and word by internalized word. What you do after such a transformation is the responsibility of an examined life.

Sincerely,

Jennie