Universal Table

We see our books, especially our Wising Up Anthologies, as catalysts for community, a way of deepening the conversations that develop through the shared experience of reading, especially around areas of sticky, or strident, social concern, for example pluralism in families, love and aging, illness and meaning, immigration and acculturation, and religious difference. We want to bring our books to the groups that are most concerned with these questions and could most benefit from the stance our anthologies take - warm, empathic, musing. . . and unafraid to ask the difficult questions, or to accept our responsibility to understand ourselves as constructively interconnected, to find the 'We' in 'Them', the 'Us' in 'You'.

Our writers and editors are interested in starting Reading for Relation groups in different areas of the country and feel that house readings are an excellent way to encourage this as they provide warmer and safer atmospheres in which genuine reflection can take place. Then, if people want to engage in more sustained discussion groups, they can go on from there.

We would love to hear from people who would like to host such an event in their community. If you arrange an evening of reading and reflection for 10-20 people, we will provide anthologies at steep discounts, arrange for a writer's physical or virtual presence, provide a discussion guide, and announce it on our website and our Facebook page.

If interested, write us at housereadings@universaltable.org or call us at 404/276-6046.

ALL YOU NEED: Thoughtful readers eager to explore the interconnection between their own most important life experiences and those of others through reading and discussion.

On some subjects, often the ones most important to us, it is difficult for us not to fall into didactic, reductive stances. We don't welcome difference. We opine, declaim, set the matter straight, rather than explore, revise, hear ourselves and those around us, tentatively, into fresh speech. Sometimes identifying with the multiple authors in a book, in all their variety, may open up new perspectives, allowing us to understand and explore something about ourselves and our own lives more fluidly and thoroughly that we would be able to in any other way. Hearing someone else do the same opens up fresh possibility of relation. 

We see reading and listening as inextricably related. We not only listen to the writers we are reading, but we are listening to and for something in ourselves as well. In that listening, we provide community for them and for ourselves. And the community we experience while reading is qualitatively different, often, from what we have when we are listening in real time, where we are far quicker to reject, judge. Where difference doesn't necessarily feel so appealing or safe – or something we want to try on for five seconds, let alone the time it takes to read two hundred pages. But how would our sense of community shift if, even with the most important subjects, we took, for awhile, a musing, reflective stance? One where we sought to understand rather than persuade? To identify with rather than distinguish ourselves from? One where we realized that, doctors or patients, parents or children, naturalized or native born citizens, shaman or Pentecostal, that we were all, with all our differences, equally responsible for finding what unites us.

If the subject of one of our anthologies is of special interest to you and you would like to explore the subject in greater depth with others, we encourage you to start a small Reading for Relation group that might meet four to six times. Invite two friends with an equal concern with the subject - illness and meaning, families, citizenship - but different viewpoints from you; have them do the same. There you have it: a reading for relation group. Use the structure of the anthology to help develop your subtopics, choose selections from the anthology as jumping off points for your discussions. We'll do everything we can to help: provide anthologies at steep discounts, arrange for a writer's physical or virtual presence, provide a discussion guide, and announce it on our website and our Facebook page.

If interested, write us at housereadings@universaltable.org or call us at 404/276-6046.