Health Is Other People (and Some Books): On Wellness and Book Clubs
This piece is part of a series that responds to the theme of the 2023 Cleveland Humanities Festival: “Wellness.”
I’d like to say my life has been defined by the books I read with others. Growing up I read picture books, then chapter books, then novels. I always read comics. All along I shared these stories with others, whether that meant being read books by my mother, joining story time at the public library, or in middle and high school talking to my friends about the newest Harry Potter books or our deep dives into Lord of the Rings. When I went to college, I studied English. I didn’t know what that meant at that time, but I thought I’d be able to continue reading and discussing books. I learned to love literature in new ways as I absorbed the knowledge of my professors and bonded with classmates. I went to graduate school for English because I wanted to teach and write about literature and it was another opportunity to read and discuss books together. Today I am a Professor of English at Ursuline College, so I talk about books every day.
Because so much of my life has been defined by the books I was reading and convening over, I vividly remember a particularly lonely period of my life where I was not actively discussing stories with others. Even now as I look back on that time it feels empty. As I reflect on the subject of the humanities and wellness, that moment stands out to me because it would be a book club that got me out of that feeling. What I learned from that period is how important reading and discussing literature is for my own health, something I consider in my classrooms and in my work facilitating book clubs. This piece is a reflection on what led to that book club and how it defines how I think about and teach literature today.
After several years of congregating over books in university classrooms, I began training as a social worker. That first year I was placed in an agency working with victims of domestic violence. For nearly a year I traveled downtown several days a week to meet with clients whom I advocated for and worked with in the community. I connected with my clients by listening to their stories. After long days I would return home to read and practice other forms of self-care as we were instructed to do in school to avoid burnout. I still felt alone in this work because I did not share anything with my colleagues beyond the work we did together. I did not want to vent or to talk about the stories I heard, I had supervisors to help me process those experiences. Those needs were being met. Still, something was missing: that feeling of connection you have with someone when you share something together. I was for the first time in my life reading entirely alone. I wasn’t reading for a class or even to share with friends. This was a new experience for me. What I needed was to connect the best way I really knew how: by talking about books, sharing feelings about a story with someone, and through those discussions learning how their mind works and in turn my own.
Around this time, I learned about the book clubs at Cleveland Public Library from a colleague. I wouldn’t say I knew that was what I needed, but it felt like something that might be good for me. The first book we read was Haruki Murakami’s 1Q84. While I have little memory today of the plot points of the story, I remember the energy of the discussion and debate we had. I remember feeling connected to others again. Even though I hardly knew them, facilitated by reading together, our new connections across difference were enlivening. I don’t think this is what everyone needs, but I did. That feeling of connection sustained me and inspired me as I moved from being a participant to leading book clubs at Cleveland Public Library, establishing “Get Graphic,” a comics and graphic novels book club. While we began with books which I consider to be the usual suspects, we also discovered new comics by creators who have lived through political trauma, who lost family members to illness, who documented everyday life in pictures and words, and countless other stories. Many of us, including me, may not have read some of these books outside of the book club, but the shared exploration kept us going.
We never strayed far from the works; our discussions were always rooted in what was in front of us. We brought our experiences, fantasies, and associations to each other to illuminate the stories. I can still hear one of our group members, a former nurse discussing her experiences in healthcare as we read about working in an HIV/AIDS unit in the 90s in MK Czerwiec’s Taking Turns. We drew together when we discussed Lynda Barry’s Making Comics. I recall laughing together reading Marjane Satrapi’s Embroideries, about women making tea in Iran while gossiping. And we read G. Willow Wilson and Adrian Alphona’s Ms. Marvel, a story about a young Muslim Pakistani superhero in Jersey City who idolizes her hero Captain Marvel and emulates her when her own powers awaken. One member of our book club teased me for picking this book because it was too didactic, like a Saturday morning PBS special. I defended the work against her criticisms, but I will admit I think fondly on the days of my youth where cartoons taught me to recycle or work on developing emotional skills. Nonetheless, we bonded over this. Ms. Marvel being a Saturday morning special became shorthand for us. I smile when I tell the story now.
We learned about one another through the ways we read. This became clear to me early while reading Brian Azzarello and Lee Bermejo’s Luthor, a comic about Superman’s greatest villain Lex Luthor, a story which explores why he abhors his nemesis, the man of steel. I got lost philosophizing about the comic, thinking from the perspective of the villain. However, one reader paused our debate to focus on Luthor’s assistant, Mona. She has only a few lines in the comic, but visually she appears throughout. He wondered if we could be curious about her, feel empathy for her. I realized then I had simply shifted my vision from one giant to the other, from Superman to Luthor. This book club member showed us his way of reading and it was instructive to see through his eyes, to be able to look at the comic with him. Stories like these which come to mind as I look at my shelves. Each one of the books we read now holds the stories printed on their pages in addition to the stories of our group because when I look at them, I see us downtown on the second floor of the Cleveland Public Library. A decade later I still lead these book clubs, which taught me to value those attachments to literature which are not purely critical but full of feeling.
When I began my Graphic Medicine course at Ursuline College this Spring semester, I asked my students on the first day, “what did you know how to do before you were taught?” I took this question from Lynda Barry, who in the opening to Making Comics, declares, “We draw before we are taught. We also sing, dance, build things, act and make up stories before we are given any deliberate instruction beyond exposure to the people around us doing these things. Everything we have come to know as the arts seems to be in almost every 3-year old.” I wanted to know what each student was bringing to the classroom. I wanted to know about their earlier selves, before they came to school. They were quick to answer, and their reflections were fascinating, but not what I expected to hear. Answers included: “I knew how to be angry,” “I knew how to love,” “I knew how to feel empathy,” and “I knew how to cry.” Nearly every student shared a knowledge rooted in feelings, something so integral to themselves that they could not have been taught—perhaps fostered, but not learned in the way we teach reading. I asked that they remember these abilities they shared because they would be useful in this course as avenues into stories about health and illness, about death and dying, about surviving and thriving. I learned this in our book clubs: to value what is innate to these readers, the abilities they never learned but bring with them to each part of their lives.
If I were to answer that question I would say, I think I knew how to connect with others before I was taught. I rely on this part of myself as a teacher and as a social worker. That I learned that the way I do it is through sharing and discussing stories together became more apparent to me after joining the book clubs at the Cleveland Public Library. I soon recognized that at least for me book clubs are about wellness. People find themselves in book clubs for various reasons but looking for connection is one of them.
When I sat down to write this piece I looked back at my notes and the flyers from the book discussions of the past ten years and I thought to myself, which discussion should I write up? Which one best represents how we thought about these works? I realized that those thoughts felt flat compared to the feelings I had about the people I could see in my mind and the voices I still hear as I pick up each book. What I want to share is how the books became heavier as we left each discussion. That the stories we discussed each week become carriers for more stories shared between people. We should be critical readers but rather than imagine our associations as tangential, we ought to embrace them as part of the experience, as avenues into the works and into learning about one another and in turn ourselves. To this day it’s those associations and feelings we attached to the stories we read that mean more to me than anything else.
*Acknowledgements: I am forever grateful to the many readers who have come to our book clubs over the years. They have changed how I read. I hope to have done the same for them in different ways. These book clubs also would not have been possible without the wonderful librarians who have been my partners over the years, Donald Boozer, Jean Collins, Amy Dawson, and Nick Durda. Thank you all.