Steve Wasserman on The Short Story Book Club

The Short Story Bookclub - Personal Connections In The Digital Age

London has more than its fair share of Book Clubs. A cursory search on Meetup.com reveals a group in every corner of the city, catering for even the most niche of tastes: Science Fiction, 'Girly' (sic), Post-Apocalyptic, Asian, LGBTQ, Afro-Caribbean, Crime, Classics, Books of Dissent, Talking Animals, Books That Look Good On Your Bookshelf, and so on. I only made the last two up, I promise.

What unites these groups is the exquisitely human need (increasingly bypassed in our online world of person to screen communion) for face-to-face interaction with other human beings. A good bookclub is a literary, but also a deeply affiliative, and maybe even therapeutic enterprise: ministering and attending to each other as much to the words on the page or screen.

The wonderful Reader Organisation have recognised the power of human beings coming together in small groups to read and discuss great literature. The National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence is starting to recognise this too. Reading and talking about books is actually good for us: it heals, bonds, makes us feel more alive, more human, more socially and emotionally engaged.

And particularly short stories. Short stories with their poetry-like compression of language and emotional veracity, their exploration of liminal states, of people and events often on the margins of society, teetering on the existential edges of their own lives. Those people are us.

If we're truthful with ourselves, our day-to-day resembles much more the haphazard short story collection than the autotelic novel. The individual short story seems somehow closer to life as we experience it, moment by transient moment, lurching from one crisis to the next, with the occasional, joyful burgeoning apprehension somewhere in the mix; and all within a mere page or two, an email, a text message, a tweet.

It is also the perfectly democratic vehicle for discussion. You can join in the conversation after having only read one. Short stories can easily and quickly be re-read and mulled over, held by the working memory of the prefrontal cortex in their entirety, while the bulk of a novel (at least in my experience) often just dribbles away, dragging characters and recollections along with it. 

Of course we use Facebook and Twitter, and Meetup to build and publicise our group. But we are also commited to keeping things small and human-sized: talking about stories in pubs and coffee shops, meeting in each others houses for food and drink, and and reading aloud the stories we love. It feels to me very much in the spirit of what Theodore Zeldin calls 'The New Conversation':

'This is for people who are starved of conversation which is not just superficial chat, or gossip, or a painless way of passing the time, or argument, or professional shop talk.'

So do come and join us in our enlivening and enlightening conversations about short stories and all they contain. Which is everything. Everything that matters.

For more details, visit: http://shortstorybookclub.co.uk/

(Steve Wasserman is a psychotherapist, writer, lecturer and fledgling podcaster.)