"In our desire to “teach” literature, we have “disciplined” literary texts and shaped the relationalities between text and reader. What types of un-disciplining might allow texts to become subjects of exploration rather than objects of study? What if the text is the subject—an opening for readers to experience and journey through a text? Serendipitous wanderings, the sensations of immediacy or vividness in description, stepping into an unfamiliar landscape, walking at the side of a writer who points to dimensions of the world that have gone unnoticed before—these are the interpretive practices that encourage a nearly impossible-to-put-into-words flicker and glow of a meaningful reading experience."
"...but the point is: think about one novel, play or poem that has never left you, the traces of felt-sense, the roar of sensations that unmoor and unsteady your complacencies, the potential of words to lift you from the words, the page, and move you across space, time and circumstance. This is my hope in facilitating engagements with literature—even just one such poem, one text that has staying power, vibrantly alive in the body/mind to matter in one's life. This poem or story, its word, images, imaginings, does not exist but its very tissue is a mattering produced when reader and text converge."
"My hope is to be part of experiences where literature matters, where reading matters, where a poem or a story causes us to float out of our shoes, rise from terra firma to imagine, feel, and experience (other)wise."
"Literature freed into becoming part of our world-making and world-understanding, as subject rather than as object..."
"For now, skeins of rememorying quiet the world, the radiator’s hiss atrophies, and the mind hums a rehearsal for tomorrow—Sethe’s hauntings, Sweet Home’s legacies and textures and, somehow, Holden is there, too, and Alexie and Kai Ni Fu, and Doty—all entangling into a knot of connectedness, opening spaces to feel, reach beyond, imagine, and discover. In this moment of near-dreaming, Morrison whispers again, 'and use that map to open as much space for discovery, intellectual adventure, and close exploration as did the original charting of the New World—without the mandate for conquest.' Literature is a map for discovering and imagining with and for others."
"How might we encourage readers to become performatively entangled, walk into and around in the text, breath when characters breathe, draw in the same air of doubt or joy in a textual moment, allow the faculties of mind and body to imagine, experience, feel, listen, and see more and differently? Inside the text a reader might reside in spaces of contradiction and experience relationally to enlarge both the logics and sensorium of the encounter. How &might the terrains of experiencing the text change if we move inside and how might this change readers’ habits in reading literary texts?"
"Counter to many practices for facilitating reading experiences with students, I see my role as supporting staying power, inviting student readers to stay alert to the voluminous possibilities, contexts, and ways in which each word or image or action moves to keep the reading experience alive and vital. Part of facilitating students’ readings (and my own) is to create the energy and desire to journey through the terrains of a literary text and offer provisions along the way, complete with rest stops to pause, invitations to gaze back at where we have travelled, and to take time to imagine what is ahead. These provisions require space and time for readers to find their way, stumble into missed and mis-readings, fall into a rabbit hole, or kneel down at an oasis that has an elixir to quench the thirst for certainty."
"The poietic power of literature resides in the creative capacities of composing. Both the writing (by author) and the reading (by reader) are composing and imagining processes, allowing both/and to write and to read into and through literary texts."
"Reading with wonder is a way of reaching into the open-endedness of a literary text."
"Reading is shelving books into the library of the mind and body."
"What confounds me is the realization that the language upon which I am completely dependent for expressing this dream is incapable of conveying something I experienced vividly in the dream but cannot put into words. Isn’t that, too, what we want from the experience of literature?" ... "We change the dream to make sense in the language available to us."
"The beauty of the library is a concrete manifestation of the desire to read, to explore and encounter all the riches of the unknown, to tip into a story or poem, or essay and to have books surrounding us. Books waiting with words, ideas, myths, histories, stories, and speculations."
"To help students undertake something they desire, to assist them in their task of reinventing the worlds for the future, is a vivid description of the essence of this dream of un-disciplining literature that I tell in my way..."