Reading as a Way of Life
An excerpt from Festival of Faith & Writing director Lisa Ann Cockrel’s opening remarks at the 2016 Festival.
“It is a great privilege and joy to be able to stand up here and welcome you all to the 2016 Festival of Faith & Writing. I’ve not missed a Festival since my first one in the spring of 2000, when I received a scholarship to attend. (Thank you, to all of the Friends of the Festival out there, who have given to that fund.) Whether this is your first time here or your fourteenth, welcome on behalf of all of us for whom this gathering—this lively, wide-ranging conversation and celebration of literature and belief—is a way of life.
The Festival is a way of life in that everyone is this room—whether a poet or screenwriter or an editor or a marketer or a journalist or a novelist, a librarian, a songwriter, a teacher, a student—everyone in this room is first and foremost and always a READER. Whatever our own writerly ambitions are, they are deeply rooted in our love of reading. And here is some good news: it’s impossible to fail at reading. I know it might not feel like that every time another list of best books of the year is released or the suggested reading for the next Festival gets posted. But it’s true. It’s impossible to fail at reading. You’re already too far gone.
If you’re here at the Festival of Faith & Writing, it’s not a conditional happenstance that you are sometimes to be found reading. Instead, reading is characteristic of our lives. We are people of not just the book, but of many books. Because for us, books—and films, songs, plays, essays—for us, other people’s words provide access not just to their experiences, but also provide a kind of purchase on our own lives. In this way we come to see our own lives more clearly and dwell more fully in the world around us.
And here we come to a second way in which the Festival and reading is a way of life. On the inside cover of your program you’ll see a short excerpt from an essay by tomorrow night’s keynote speaker, George Saunders. He wrote: “literature is a form of fondness-for-life. It is love for life taking verbal form.” Words require us to be attentive to details: to a tree’s particular shade of green in late May, to the fierce amalgam of pride and regret in his eyes just before he swings, to the spring in her step.” Language requires attention, and attention is a form of love. Paying attention, being astonished, and telling about it, as Mary Oliver would have us do, these are all works of love. And literature is both a record of this work, and an invitation to this work. Reading is both a way of life and an invitation to a way of life.”