Go on a Readtreat
In the summer of 2012, I spent a weekend reading with seven friends. We printed binders full of stories and essays to share, drove from San Francisco to a cluster of cabins in Big Sur, and dedicated the next few days to four activities: reading, talking, eating, and sleeping. It was heaven. We called it a Readtreat.
The eight of us did most of our reading sitting in circles, indoors and out. Once done with a piece, we’d look up; once everyone’s eyes were up, we’d talk. We’d rifle through the pages to recover passages we meant to respond to, fiddling with the caps on our stubby highlighters while we listened and spoke. By the end, I understood those seven friends far better, through the words they chose to bring and the words they chose to respond to. Plus, I’d done a lot of reading. It was the kind of weekend that’s hard to beat.
If you’d like to host a Readtreat, do! You could decide to all read the same thing, or read different things and talk about the differences. You could each bring a pile of paper books to swap and plow through. Or, you could arrive at your destination without a plan, Kindles in hand, ready to trade recommendations. The key is to go somewhere with people you’re interested in getting to know better, then spend a lot of time reading together.
I’m writing about Readtreat now because it’s one of the simplest good things I’ve ever done, and I still think about it all the time. I hope you’ll think about it, too.
Thanks to Inessa, Bill, Anastasia, Marcin, Patrick, Zack, and Robin for taking a chance on a weekend I return to often. And thanks to Lisa for the conversation that motivated me to write about this at last.
