Replay: Peter Orner shares Five Things He's Learned about The Art of Re-Reading (and Re-Re-Reading)
Check out the first five minutes of his recent class.
"You know how as a kid you wanted to hear the same book over and over and over and your parents were like no, no, please not Are You My Mother? What do you think was going on there? It wasn’t because you as a kid wanted to know what happened in the story, right? You knew what happened. Doesn’t it have something to do with the pure ecstasy of knowing a story already? And doesn’t knowing a story already, in some strange way, allow you to re-experience additional times in entirely new ways?"
– Peter Orner, Five Things I’ve Learned about The Art of Re-Reading (and Re-Re-Reading)
Peter has joined us twice before, to share the Five Things He’s Learned about Writing (by Not Writing), and Prose Momentum – in Five Great Paragraphs. This month he’s come back, alongside the great Yvette Benevides, with a whole new class in tow.
In Five Things I’ve Learned about The Art of Re-Reading (and Re-Re-Reading), Peter is joined by Yvette, the co-host of his wonderful podcast, The Lonely Voice. Together, they explore the joys of re-reading beloved stories. They share the impact of specific stores of three master storytellers—Alice Munro, Edna O’Brien, and Gina Berriault—and the renewed joys and insights that accompany re-read the writers and stories they love most.
Peter is the author of the novels The Second Coming of Mavala Shikongo and Love and Shame and Love and the story collections Esther Stories, Last Car Over the Sagamore Bridge, and Maggie Brown & Others. His previous collection of essays, Am I Alone Here?: Notes on Living to Read and Reading to Live, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism.
Peter’s inspiring and unconventional memoir, Still No Word from You: Notes in the Margin won the 2023 Pen/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay. He is currently the Director of Creative Writing at Dartmouth College and lives with his family in Norwich, Vermont where he’s also a volunteer firefighter with the Norwich Fire Department.
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