Jenni Baker is the communications specialist for Goodwill Industries International in Rockville, MD.  Beth  Ayer is a second-year graduate student in the Professional Writing program at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, and the current marketing and media advisor for  Changing Lives Through Literature.

November 5^th marks the one-year anniversary of Changing Lives, Changing Minds. In honor of this landmark, founding editor Jenni Baker and current editor Beth Ayer came together to talk about the blog’s progress and where it’s headed.

Jenni: We’ve come a long way from one year ago and the blog is picking up speed. Readership and interest in CLTL has really taken off in the past few months.

Beth: Absolutely – it has been great to hear from a lot of new people. Picking up where you left off was almost deceptively simple. The blog was founded on an endlessly positive and intriguing idea: the conversation from the CLTL classroom can carry over to the Internet to spread positive change. Still, I say “deceptively simple” because we still need to maintain a concerted effort to reach out to readers.

Jenni: In the beginning, the task was to get CLTL’s core supporters on board with the blog, both by contributing essays and coming back to comment on what others had to say. These individuals formed a strong foundation to build our external readership. Now, the task is to continue to reach out to new audiences. The potential to spread information about CLTL is exponential — new readers interested in the blog may share program information to their friends, who may continue to pass the word along.

Beth: One of the major challenges has been continuing to build on the great progress we’ve already made by maintaining reader interest with new content, and by attracting new readers through the strength of the CLTL concept. But, as you say, the existing foundation has positioned the blog very well for continued growth. I think it helps to keep focused on the blog’s role and purpose within CLTL.

Jenni: Certainly. And it’s important to recognize the important role the blog does play in raising awareness about the organization. In the past, CLTL relied mostly on grassroots, word-of-mouth efforts to raise awareness about the program.  Blogs and social media have made it possible to take this grassroots movement online and get the word out to many more people. We’re seeing that more than ever recently.

Beth: Absolutely. The blog is a perfect tool for getting the information out to as many people as possible. Other social media tools, like Twitter and Facebook, will also increase awareness of CLTL and hopefully draw followers to the blog.

Jenni: It’s somewhat ironic that we’re using technology to educate people about a program that, at its heart, is about what can happen when we divorce ourselves from computers and sit down with a book. How do we justify using online tools to our supporters who say it’s out of sync with CLTL’s ultimate goal of using literature to change lives?

Beth: Well, I can see the concern. But if our ultimate aim is to spread awareness of the program (and hopefully spread the program itself) then we would be doing a massive disservice to that goal by failing to take advantage of these tools. We really have to use both literature and social media (in their own distinct ways) in tandem.

Jenni: I agree. And I think we have to see social media not as the antithesis of what we promote in the CLTL classroom, but as an extension of the conversations that happen there. Getting people talking — whether it’s around a table about a book or on the internet about the program — is at the crux of it all.

Beth: We have had a lot of lively discussions on the blog lately. When people are willing to respond, whether with differing opinions, supporting comments, or new ideas, our mission is automatically furthered. Looking back on our assortment of essays over the past year, I noticed one point in particular that stands out as the future and impetus of CLTL and the blog. In “The Experience of Democracy,” Kathy McLellan compares her experience as a juror to the CLTL classroom:

The jury would engage in focused discussion that would require them to communicate their thoughts and analyze a situation.  There would be disagreement, persuasion and a presentation of various points of view.  Hopefully, the jurors would eventually reach an agreement.

It can be easy to forget how closely CLTL is related to the idea of democracy itself. The clash and cohesion of diverse perspectives is a strength of the CLTL classroom, as well as an asset to Changing Lives, Changing Minds. I look forward to the continued growth of our blog and of Changing Lives Through Literature. More great conversations to come!

Readers, we invite and encourage you to share memorable essays and conversations from the blog over the past year in the comments section.

Allan McDougall is a graduate student from the University of Waterloo, Ontario, Canada. Allan is a staunch believer in language as social action, with a focus on reading and writing. Allan is currently writing his MA thesis on Changing Lives Through Literature, and writes about professional and academic issues on his blog: allanmcdougall.wordpress.com.

This essay is the final in a series of three posts written by Allan McDougall based on interviews he conducted with CLTL program participants.

The West Roxbury courthouse women’s CLTL program is specialized for women suffering from mental illness, drug addiction or both. Veronica, a single mother, was more reserved than my previous interview subjects, Ken and Sheila. Yet Veronica’s shyness is nothing compared to her crippling inability to communicate before taking CLTL. Veronica told me, “I would never talk to nobody before; I never got along with nobody.” She continued:

In front of the class everyone would get a chance to talk about their problems. I have never opened up to people like I did with Adita, the people in my class, and Leigh, the teacher. I got to learn a lot and become closer with people. Now I’m very open.

The opportunity to share her thoughts and feelings in a reading/writing group environment changed Veronica’s ability to communicate with others. But she also told me about some other positive benefits of CLTL, specifically benefits for her daughter:

I never used to read before, now I read, I have a library card for the first time ever. I write more, read more, talk more. Reading keeps you out of trouble. I even read more to my daughter now. She loves animal books!

Volunteers like Adita Velasquez, Veronica’s probation officer, and Leigh, the Boston English professor who facilitates Veronica’s course, used a structured program of reading and writing to effect the positive changes for students in the West Roxbury program. But, as Veronica puts it, “we’re finished but we’re still not finished.” Each year, Leigh collects and publishes the best writings from the CLTL group. As in the men’s Dorchester programs, this is the first time Veronica has ever seen her writing in print.

Voices from the Table: Sheila

Voices from the Table: Ken

Brooke Joseph is a graduate student in education at the University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth. She has a bachelor’s degree in Humanities and Social Sciences with a concentration in Sociology and Elementary Education.

In a recent interview with Professor Robert P. Waxler, co-founder of the Changing Lives through Literature (CLTL) program, I focused on finding out how CLTL changes lives.  Three themes emerged from this interview: Putting Yourself in the Story, Becoming Friends with Characters, and Breaking Down Stereotypes.

Putting Yourself in the Story

Reading and writing can change people’s lives by helping individuals to focus and increase their awareness through self-reflection.  Waxler explained that when you are reading a good piece of literature, you often put yourself in the story and empathize with characters.  Even though during the CLTL sessions everyone is reading the same story, each individual will read the story in a different manner.  Therefore, when the story is discussed, the characters are seen from opposing angles and people “begin to understand that stories, like our lives, are richly textured possibilities.”

Although stories do not offer definitive solutions to people, they do “raise profound questions about our lives.  And as long as we continue to ask important questions, we are doing something worthwhile with our lives.” Waxler says reading the right stories helps us to “pursue our identity as if we are on a journey through life;” by “expanding our perceptions, offering new experiences and deepening our thinking, stories move us and they make us self-reflective. They offer us questions, and then the stories give us the opportunity to pursue answers to those questions.”

Becoming Friends with Characters

Dr. Waxler also gave an example of how a particular character can change people’s lives. When people are reading they allow the characters to become a part of their lives; characters in the stories “become our friends.  Their voices are embedded in our hearts.”  For example, take Santiago from Hemingway’s Old Man and the Sea novel. Even though Santiago does not catch a fish for weeks, he continues to wake up every morning to “fight the good fight; his endurance is admirable.”

After reading OLD MAN AND THE SEA, one CLTL participant claimed, “in essence, Santiago saved my life.” The CLTL student had been thinking about going back to his old neighborhood and returning to drugs.  But then he thought of what Santiago had endured, and decided not to take the turn back to his old neighborhood.  Santiago was a friend in his heart, inspiring him that day.

Breaking Down Stereotypes

Another way that CLTL changes lives is by changing people’s perspectives, and, more specifically, breaking down stereotypes. Perhaps this is best illustrated through a passage from Waxler’s 2008 essay in the Journal of the Modern Language Association:

It is interesting to witness, through CLTL, court officers (judges, probation officers, lawyers) and criminal offenders sitting around a long wooden table in a seminar room talking together about a story they have read.  Customarily the criminal offenders at first see the judges, in this context, as the officials in the dark robes who employed the harsh language of judgment to rule over them, and the judges often see the criminal offenders through the other side of that lens, as marginal characters in need of discipline—if not punishment, at least rehabilitation.  The offenders agree, recognizing themselves defined in the narrow prison of such perception.

CLTL facilitates a breaking down of stereotypes, and the participants around the table take on new identities as they discuss the literature before, As Dr. Waxler says, “stories evoke stories, and through that process stories can help build a democratic community.”

At the end of our interview, I told Professor Waxler I teach second grade and I asked him for any suggestions that he might have for ways that I could engage students. He suggested that stories can be magical and this is what young children know and love.  These magical stories offer imaginative possibilities for the children.  My challenge as a second grade teacher is to make sure that my students never “lose that sense of enchantment.” That is a challenge worth pursuing!

Robert LeBlanc is a Ph.D. candidate in literature at the University of Rhode Island. His dissertation research focuses on notions of publicness and subjectivity in Christian leftist texts. He has taught writing and literature courses at the college level.

I suppose I became an active reader at a fairly young age, and I remember looking out for interesting books at school or at the local public library. During my first few years as a reader, my interests were normal ones for a young boy in the 1980s: dinosaurs, baseball, cars. I would read or leaf through a few children’s reference books about cars or the American Revolution or the Red Sox, and then after a few weeks it was onto another topic to read about.

At a certain point this habit of reading took a turn toward stories. I began to realize that I liked some stories for themselves, independently of what topics and settings were featured in their pages. If the story was told with a certain rawness or intensity, if the words really leapt off the page and begged me to read on toward the conclusion, then I could enjoy reading a story just for its own sake.

In the fifth grade, I began to devour a wide range of young adult novels and short stories. I was enjoying—in a secondhand, readerly way—the experiences that different narratives brought to life, and I also started to develop a real appreciation for writers with a daring style. Some writers avoided the typical plots and worn-out phrases and went right for those moments of odd insight that would bring me back to certain passages again and again.

Even after I had raced through certain books, I would turn back to my favorite descriptions and stylistic flourishes within their chapters to marvel at the way the words reached out across the gap of communication to strike me with an almost physical force.

Readers who grew up as part of my generation will remember that the young adult market was at a saturation point in the late 80s and early 90s. Many classic YA novels that had defined the genre in the 60s and 70s were still in print or at least sitting on the classroom bookshelves, and new writers were churning out novels at a rapid pace.

I began to drift toward the novels of a particularly daring writer, one whose works (according to my teachers) even challenged their labeling as young adult fiction in their increasing experimentation with postmodernist form and controversial content. This writer, Robert Cormier, also fascinated me because I learned that he was born in my hometown: Leominster, Massachusetts.

As I started to read voraciously through Cormier’s books, the puzzle pieces all began falling into place. But the mystery that I was unraveling seemed to exist beyond the world of the stories themselves, and I increasingly came to find that Cormier’s books had a role to play in the formation of my own identity.

I began reading to listen closely to what these books said to me, almost feeling that I had found an endlessly fascinating conversation partner as well as a favorite author. His novels challenged me to think critically about my roles in society, to face tough ethical questions head-on without flinching or retreating from the call to speak out on behalf of those who are forgotten and wronged.

I began to love his novels not only for the mysteries of their plots, but also for the opportunities to redefine my identity that each novel presented. Through all of this, I continued to marvel at Cormier’s postmodernist yearnings beyond the confinement of the printed page. These stylistic gestures screamed out to the reader with urgent social messages, but also with the provocative suggestion that good writing, though necessary in our times, was only a frustratingly partial act. For a text to be successful, good readers would need to find themselves in the pages of a text and actively take up the causes that it proposed.

My encounter with Cormier’s novels as an adolescent shaped my identity as an engaged citizen and also impacted my eventual professional identity as a writing instructor. I try to encourage my students to view the act of writing as a call toward ideal readers, toward those who will see a piece of themselves in a text and latch onto that text, offering it their open minds, their critical faculties, and sometimes their nods of understanding.

I still believe that the exchanges between readers and writers in the quiet space of the page can be moments of identity formation that linger in our memories with surprising power.

Erin Royston Battat is a Lecturer in the History & Literature program at Harvard University.  She taught the CLTL women’s class in Dorchester in Spring 2009.

When reading literature, we expect change to happen.  Change is what drives the plot.  Literary terms we learn in high school teach us to look for change, and to appreciate its aesthetic value: a “dynamic” character, the “turning point,” an “epiphany.”  As teachers, however, only rarely do we witness a student’s dramatic intellectual or spiritual awakening in our classroom, before our very eyes.

Instead, we must trust that the seeds we plant today will bear fruit sometime in the future, coaxed and nurtured by other teachers, different texts, and new experiences.  Accustomed to seeing teaching this way, I was awestruck by the profound transformations experienced by several of my students in the Changing Lives class in Dorchester last spring.

One student came to the first class consumed by fear and anxiety, deeply ashamed of her poor literacy skills.  “When I first came to class I was nervous, and scared to read out loud,” she remembers.  “After the first class, I said, ‘I am not going back’…I cried and I cried.”  This student did come back, however, and she had the courage to ask for help. In doing so, she provided the first bit of gel that would bind the students into a community.

In her simple way, she describes this process of writing and community-building: “I felt shy when I read my poem out loud, but people laughed and I liked it.  I liked listening to the other women.  Sometimes I learned something from them.”

A dramatic moment on the last day of class—a moment that seems more the stuff of literature than real life—testifies to this student’s growth.  We were visited by the Chancellor of the University, whose imposing figure is surpassed only by his booming voice and larger-than-life personality.  He filled the room.  All of us held our collective breath as this woman, who refused to read aloud from the syllabus two months before, read an original poem to the highest ranking official at UMASS Boston.

Another student was unable to even start her first homework assignment.  After years of substance abuse, her mind was rusty, burnt, seemingly incapable of creative expression.  She spoke only of her struggle to stay sober; it seemed that nothing else could penetrate her consciousness.  Yet this student came to every class an hour early to get help with her homework, forcing her mind to consider stories and characters outside of herself.

Over the course of the semester, as the winter turned to spring, her mind seemed also to thaw, slowly, subtly.  In her analysis of “I Stand Here Ironing” by Tillie Olsen, she wrote of a mother “engulfed with guilt about what she did and did not do” for her daughter, and connected this story to her own childhood, and its “days of struggling.”  These carefully chosen words indicate the stirrings of emotional and intellectual life that seemed dormant on that first day of class.

Finally, a woman in her mid-twenties came to class with a great weight on her shoulders.  Her mother’s drug addiction had destroyed everything in its path, and she was left to pick up the pieces.  Several years before, she was faced with an impossible decision: whether to continue her college education, or to take legal custody of her younger brothers and sisters.  To her, there was no choice.

I watched this student’s face as the judge told her own story about dealing with an unstable parent.  There was a look of astonishment tinged with a dawning hope: Even a judge can suffer a terrible childhood? Maybe I, too, can make something of myself?  By the end of the semester, this student had enrolled in community college, confident that even though her mother failed her, she was not doomed to repeat the past.

I feel deeply grateful to have witnessed these transformations.  They testify to the power of literature, and to the importance of storytelling in the building of community.  These changes, however, are hard to measure; they don’t translate easily into statistical evidence, or proof that Changing Lives reduces recidivism.  It seems somehow fitting that like literature itself, Changing Lives works in subtle, ambiguous, and deeply personal ways.

Allyson Sonne is a senior at the University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth.
She is currently working towards a bachelors degree in English with
concentration in writing and communications, as well as a masters degree
in Education. She is focused on becoming a middle school English teacher post graduation.

T.C. Boyle’s short story “Greasy Lake” (1979) is a fast-paced telling of a night in the lives of three boys: Jeff, Digby and the unidentified narrator. Looking for a dangerous thrill to feed their “bad boy” images, they head to Greasy Lake. The night quickly goes from wanting to be “bad” to a situation where even the most “wanna be bad boy” would want to trade his leather jacket and cigarettes for a suit and tie. Mistaking a strange man in a car for their friend, the boys honk and pester the car until the man gets out. The narrator gives a devastating blow to the man’s head with a tire iron. The “tough guy” character emerges again within the boys as they feel accomplished; they decide to see what they can get away with by the girl in the car.

As the story goes on and the night goes on, the boys’ positions are shattered by the realization of what was actually happening. Reading this I envisioned the boys resembling John Travolta and the T-Birds in the movie Grease. Although this image is clear-cut, I feel that Boyle made the characters universal at the same time. No matter where you are from, what you look like or how old you are, the characters and the situation can be identifiable with something in your life.

Of course, I’m sure not many have smashed someone with a tire iron, ran for their life, hid in a mucky lake, or stumbled upon a dead body and a couple of stray women. At least I hope not. The point is, somewhere, sometime we have all been in a situation that just didn’t turn out how we expected. Good or bad, regretful or lesson learned, there is a well-remembered turning point on the road to maturity in all of us.

Because of the powerful message held in the story’s universal plot and identifiable characters, it is hard not to question yourself or some of your actions in certain situations. Why did I do that? Was this really worth it? What am I looking for? Maybe pondering these questions you will come across a realization like the narrator did when he realized the danger he was actually in — that he could have been the body floating in the lake — or, maybe you will not.

I think the story was great solely in the fact that it gets you thinking. That’s what a great story does. It raises questions that spill out from the page into your own life experience. You follow the characters as if you are on a quest and the experiences of the characters push you along to question your own quest.

Great stories don’t give you the answers to those questions, but they enrich your life by encouraging you to ask important questions about what it means to be a human being. And, in the process, good stories give you the hope that perhaps you can find some of those answers as you make your own way in the world. So, what do you think will help to the narrator next? Will he return to Greasy Lake soon?

While studying for the ministry, David G. Sarles began substitute teaching in the New Haven public schools.  He began running also then, up and down East Rock, and has been running more or less since then. But his running pales in comparison to those inmates who circle prison yards thousands of times to compete in marathons.

When a young friend of mine got pregnant, she knew that in her situation as a single parent, she was not going to be able to provide for the child.  Massachusetts’ forward looking laws helped her determine to give up her new, yet to be born baby for adoption to a Massachusetts family.  The laws require the birth mother to stay with an in-state Massachusetts family different from the adopting family for the last few weeks of her pregnancy.  There was no cost to the birth mother.

Just before the birth, while living with her Massachusetts host family, my young friend wanted to find an Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) meeting to continue her dedication to remain dry.  She had wisely given up alcohol as soon as she became pregnant.  The meeting nearest her host family was at a Massachusetts prison, and included so-called hardened criminals.  It was, though, an open meeting, meaning the public was invited.  Not unlike a CLTL class, which is guided by a probation officer, judge and facilitator, the prison AA setting was supervised by prison staff and included a few outside AA facilitators and members like my friend.

When my dedicated young friend attended the meeting, she was ready for anything.  She had endured threatening city streets and had honed her survival skills.  She was not afraid.  As she entered, nine months pregnant and the sole woman, the inmates (all males) rose and one, “Tiny”, 300 some pounds, came to the door and took her hand.  He led her to a chair in the reception room.  He reassured her that she was safe with them.

The meeting proceeded with testimonials and speaker.  My young friend was gratified with the support offered by the group of convicts and the few AA local members.  The experience bolstered her courage to proceed with the birth and gave her a sense of direction.

The birth of my friend’s child went without a problem.  The infant boy was adopted by a couple who were not able to have children.  Although she was forbidden by law to meet them, my young friend knew that this couple had been carefully screened and were ideal parents for her baby.

My friend’s experience resonates with the CLTL classroom discussions as found in several of the blogs posted and in CLTL publications.  Her prison visit says much about the need to reexamine incarceration and bring the public to a greater awareness of compassion across the human spectrum.

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Zinovia Canale is the English Department Chair at Rogers High School, Newport RI, and has been teaching for thirty years.  She is currently enrolled in the Masters Program in English at the University of Rhode Island.

I’m one of those teachers with whom high school kids like to hang around. They like to tell me about their problems and they like to listen to my stories, especially when I share my human side of being a parent who yells at her kids to get up, to get off the “machines,” and to get their work done.  When they hear stories about my love for The Grateful Dead and the fact that I still go to concerts with my deadhead husband to catch Bob Weir and Phil Lesh they nod in approval.

I’ve also been able to amuse my students with my dance of the “chicken noodle soup,” appreciation of the art of the rap (writing one is more difficult than one imagines), and my enjoyment of Beyonce, and Rihanna. I’m great at picking up new dance steps and am always open to learning new moves. I have a good time listening to my students’ jokes, learning their language, and trying to understand the dilemmas of their world, especially those kids of the “down-trodden,” I say with trepidation.

In fact, forgive me for labeling a group as the “down-trodden” which sounds so snobbish and evokes such an attitude of superiority. Yet, to ignore the truths about the conditions with which some of these kids live is to ignore the truth about their hearts, minds, and souls and as an English teacher there is where I want to reach.  I can’t bring them into a more expansive world of literature if I do not meet them where they reside-emotionally, physically, and socially.

I’ve had the good fortune of being raised by hard-working, responsible, God-fearing parents who provided great meals, financial support, and clear guidelines and parameters.  I lived within the confines of the American dream, trusted it, and gained relative success and comfort as a result of its beliefs. Therefore, all of the ingredients required to foster a desire, a love, and an appreciation of literature and reading were provided and nurtured.

I sat at the knees of my immigrant mother surrounded by my two brothers and two sisters and listened to her tell stories both fictional and non-fictional. Her journey to America was intriguing-sad and hopeful and my mother did not spare the details as she recounted them in a combination of Greek and English. And on Sundays, when my father was off for a portion of the day  (he owned a bar geared toward entertaining the young navy guys) we sat at the kitchen table with my grandparents and heard stories about the wars, the politics of the day, and the happenings of the village over in Greece. Music played and it was not unusual to hear choruses singing along. Ours was a verbal family, not always peaceful and calm. In fact, quite often it was loud, emotional and dramatic a family of stories and sounds.

Just like I could never live without food or music, I could never live without stories-my passion, my sustenance, my dreams, my hopes, and my world. The moment I stepped into my first classroom thirty years ago, I knew I had to find a way to bundle and wrap this gift to be unwrapped in daily prizes like nuggets of the sweetest chocolate to be savored and enjoyed by the most resistant students.  When I realized that not everyone loves chocolate, I learned that sometimes individuals hide their desires and that oftentimes stories are hidden within them.

Stories live everywhere and when one reaches inside or mutually collaborates with someone to get inside, builds a relationship with that person, establishes trust, then connections begin to develop. The desire to connect to strangers such as Steinbeck, Morrison, Shakespeare, McCourt, Austen, and Angelou to name a few becomes less threatening. Instead, the realization that these strangers are also living hearts, souls and minds is apparent. The difference lies in the fact that they have had the inclination to write their stories. If we choose to visit with them for moments in time by reading their work, than perhaps, we too may discover a story to think about, to tell, to write or to simply enjoy.

Allan McDougall is a graduate student from the University of Waterloo, Ontario, Canada. Allan is a staunch believer in language as social action, with a focus on reading and writing. Allan is currently writing his MA thesis on Changing Lives Through Literature, and writes about professional and academic issues on his blog: allanmcdougall.wordpress.com.

This essay is the second in a series of three posts written by Allan McDougall based on interviews he conducted with CLTL program participants.

The Dorchester Women’s Program classes are smaller, but, according to Judge Sydney Hanlon, a smaller group allows for a more intimate environment in which to discuss themes of violence, illness, responsibilities for children, and unthinkable tragedies (Trounstine and Waxler, 56). At the 2009 CLTL Annual Conference, Probation Officer Adita Vazquez would later share a similar sentiment:

In the CLTL classroom, I’m aware of what’s going on with each of these women, and I’m listening to what they tell us about those stories. And the same thing happens again and again: violence. The classroom is a special environment for them. We discuss are how they should handle it, what’s there to protect them, and how they see themselves.

At the same conference, Judge Hanlon stated that she once sat in a CLTL classroom with eight women, all mothers. At some point in each of their lives, all of these mothers had witnessed shootings, and all of them had life insurance policies on their children. “Hearing something like that changes a judge: you don’t see people the same way again.”

Sheila and I also met at the Dorchester courthouse. Sheila is an amateur poet, described by her Probation Officer, Pam Pierce, as, “one of those girls who is so smart and so talented that you really just can’t understand why she is in trouble with the law.” Sheila contrasted her early experiences in the class with the transition she saw in other students:

There was a lot of closed-minded girls that were in the class . . . there was some girls, the things that we were reading, they words they used, you know, especially like the books about slavery, you know how they used the old-time words, you know. And how they would word it and the girls were like offended. But they learned and they changed and they became more open . . . in the class you could see that everyone became more open-minded.

Sheila is still close with one of the girls from the class, but also shared an interesting anecdote about a chance meeting on the subway:

But I do see a lot of them in passing and I do say hi and things like that. And one time I saw a girl on the train, and she was reading! And I have to tell Pam that, and I have to go up to her and tap her in order for her to put her head up. She had like a thick, thick book in her hand and she was reading.

Unlike Ken, Sheila discussed lasting bonds with her classmates, which is unsurprising considering the Dorchester women’s class is five times smaller than the men’s. Yet, more importantly, Sheila’s anecdote on the train shows that CLTL students form lasting bonds with books as well.

Beth Ayer is a second-year graduate student in the Professional Writing program at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth. She is the in-coming editor for Changing Lives, Changing Minds.

“Literature adds to reality, it does not simply describe it. It enriches the necessary competencies that daily life requires and provides; and in this respect, it irrigates the deserts that our lives have already become.”  - C.S. Lewis

Literature’s involvement in our lives is more than that of a record. It is more like a portal to places we know but perhaps in our flurry of living forget how to access. It also helps us talk to each other about our world and about ourselves. I am new to CLTL and have yet to enter the classroom, but already it has been a welcome reminder of literature’s unique power and profound individual impact. People can come together around literature as around a fire; it connects common experience and ignites discussion.

Surely even a skeptic of the program would have to admit – good must come from this. But, some might ask, how is reading meaningful to our lives?

Meaning can be the result of things we do or things we build, of anything that requires notable effort, concentration, and patience. It often appears as a result of an object or action’s direct relation to us.

But often meaning is not simply found and must not only be sought after; it must be made. Literature is this way. Surely a book means something much different to its author than to its audience. The physical book itself may just as easily be seen wedged beneath a table leg as found firing synapses in a reader’s brain. So, for readers to detect meaning they must stand up to meet it — bringing past experiences, prejudices, fears, and future hopes along with them.


Reading allows us to get out only as much as we put in. Literature describes and adds to our common humanity while also showing us the differences among people. It delves into tragic histories that maybe we as individuals are ill equipped to untangle.


Through reading we face our own tragic histories, regardless of how small or large. We perceive events from varying perspectives or from a wide lens. And in literature we allow contradiction; we let things come apart in ways we didn’t know we could manage. Then through discussion we attempt to piece together understanding.


A story often include multiple perspectives, and the truth can be found in the manner of its telling, in the contradictions of its narrators, and in the willing participation of an audience.


Similarly, each CLTL program participant brings a unique perspective and history of their own, and through combined effort the discussion expands toward greater understanding – whether of the book of the day, among the people in the room, or both.


As a newbie, I have not yet participated in the CLTL classroom. But I know coming in that conversation and discussion move us as human beings forward rather than backward. Literature helps us find new ways of communicating with each other, and of understanding each other. It fleshes out the limits of what we can conceive of – and what we can conceive of helps expand the limits of what we can do.