{"id":114,"date":"2026-09-28T17:22:15","date_gmt":"2026-09-28T21:22:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/laurenpressley.com\/library\/?p=114"},"modified":"2026-09-28T17:22:34","modified_gmt":"2026-09-28T21:22:34","slug":"reading-together","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/laurenpressley.com\/library\/2026\/09\/28\/reading-together\/","title":{"rendered":"Reading Together"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Most of my working days are spent on questions about systems: how the library supports student success, what faculty need for their research, and what our community will need from our library as AI reshapes the way people find information, process it, read, and write. I love that work and know it can be transformational for the university. This past weekend, though, gave me a chance to spend time on the literature and books side of the work. And even so, I was reminded of what all of it is ultimately for.1<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n\n\n\n

At Bookmarks<\/a>, Winston-Salem’s book festival, I heard John Green<\/a> in conversation with Angie Thomas<\/a> and Jodi Picoult<\/a> interviewed by Winston-Salem’s own Virginia Evans<\/a>. In the middle of all of this my husband and I drove to Raleigh for a stage reading of new work by Hannah Reynolds<\/a>, a Winston-Salem playwright and ZSR colleague, at the Carolina Playwrights Lab<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What I keep returning to is how much of the weekend was about reading together. We think of reading as a solitary act, one person in a quiet chair with a book, perhaps in an internal conversation with an author. But all weekend reading was something shared, with authors talking through their work in front of thousands of people who were familiar enough with the author to be excited about their next books. The stage reading made this especially vivid. With actors at music stands and no sets or costumes, the audience conjures everything the script leaves open, and we arrive at its meaning together in a shared experience.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Reading is one of the ways we learn and understand what is true, and one of the best ways we have of understanding lives unlike our own. It struck me afterward that the work at the center of the weekend kept circling the boundary between what we process on our own and what we share. John Green’s Hollywood, Ending<\/em> explores the pull between a public life and a private one, and the search for someone to navigate things with together. Jodi Picoult’s Hollow Bones<\/em> looks at the stories we tell ourselves as we make sense of our own lives, including ones that may be harder to know as true. And Hannah’s Roses Fading<\/em> reinforced how much of who we are is in in our minds and memory. We come to make sense of and understand our own lives, and the lives of others, through shared stories. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Those encounters become more meaningful when they are shared, because we test our readings against other people’s. Through bookclub conversations and book talks we are exposed to something someone else noticed that we missed. We might discover that what moved us didn’t affect someone else the same way, and why it was so different. There is also joy in this. Delight sustains us and can help us be open to new perspectives. As Picoult and Evans shared, it can be easier to learn about an issue from fiction than a dry report. I think a lot about how communities seek truth and build empathy. Literature is one of the places where we do this work together.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That conviction connects to how I think about the library’s work right now. AI promises to make reading faster, more personalized, and more summarized, and some of that will genuinely help our students and researchers. Anticipating what our community needs also means protecting the conditions for the slower, shared encounter with ideas I witnessed this weekend. Libraries have always been places of, and created opportunities for, practices through which people learn things together. That purpose feels even more urgent to me now than it did a few years ago.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I saw that purpose on the festival grounds, too. Walking among the tents at Bookmarks, I kept finding Wake Forest librarians at tables ranging from Special Collections<\/a> to Read Free NC<\/a> to Bookish Birds<\/a>. I was able to stop by and talk literature and libraries with the Wake Forest University Press<\/a>. Seeing colleagues spread across so many corners of the festival was a reminder that a library’s part in the literary life of its city reaches well beyond its own walls, as well.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A city in which people fill rooms to hear authors, and one in which people travel to cheer on their own writers, already understands something important about what literary life is. I’m grateful to live in such a city, and I am excited to see its development since the last time I was part of the Winston-Salem bookish community.2<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n\n\n

  1. I am with authors Jodi Picoult and Virginia Evans in enjoying ending sentences with prepositions at times! \u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/li>
  2. Back in 2008 I managed the website<\/a> for the festival! \u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/li><\/ol>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    Most of my working days are spent on questions about systems: how the library supports student success, what faculty need for their research, and what our community will need from our library as AI reshapes the way people find information, process it, read, and write. I love that work and know it can be transformational […]<\/p>\n<\/a>","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"[{\"content\":\"I am with authors Jodi Picoult and Virginia Evans in enjoying ending sentences with prepositions at times!\",\"id\":\"15829a80-3fc4-4c4e-a935-64a52d683f83\"},{\"content\":\"Back in 2008 I managed the website<\/a> for the festival! \",\"id\":\"09a54c8d-75b6-48d0-9f2a-3d5653e53439\"}]"},"categories":[5],"tags":[72,6,73,71,69,70,68,74],"class_list":["post-114","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","category-libraries-ai","tag-angie-thomas","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-jodi-picoult","tag-john-green","tag-literature","tag-playwright","tag-reading","tag-virginia-evans","h-entry","hentry"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/laurenpressley.com\/library\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/114","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/laurenpressley.com\/library\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/laurenpressley.com\/library\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/laurenpressley.com\/library\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/laurenpressley.com\/library\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=114"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/laurenpressley.com\/library\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/114\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":115,"href":"https:\/\/laurenpressley.com\/library\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/114\/revisions\/115"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/laurenpressley.com\/library\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=114"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/laurenpressley.com\/library\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=114"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/laurenpressley.com\/library\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=114"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}