The power of words

READING AS THERAPY:A project in England is showing the potential reading groups can have, in areas as challenging as prisons, broken communities and mental-health wards, writes ANN MARIE HOURIHANE

THERE IS LITTLE THAT is lovely about the Kevin White drugs detoxification unit in Wavertree, in south Liverpool. Here Jane Davis, the founder of The Reader Organisation, is realistic, as well as very proud, of what her growing organisation has already achieved with its project, Get Into Reading (GIR). “There are times when we’ve had our heads in our hands. When nobody comes. When the person you’re working with is on a bender,”she says.

But today is not one of those times. The group this afternoon is led by Eleanor McCann, who is so young that she is wearing fashion shorts. The extract being read is from The Catcher in the Rye. There is no shortage of people wanting to read aloud. In the extract, JD Salinger's hero, Holden Caulfield, had briefly remembered a headmaster he had not liked – Mr Haas – because the man would not talk to the poorer parents of children at the school. It is only a passing reference, not even a paragraph. But it sparked memories from the young men present of how teachers had treated them and their own parents. Then one man goes to his room to get the non-fiction book, D-Day, to read us his favourite reminiscence from it.

Joe Holman is team manager at the Kevin White Unit, and a tough-looking man. “You never know what will work,” he says. “When they first mooted this idea of a reading group I thought ‘Jesus Christ, what do-gooder effort is this?’ But it’s worked extremely well.”

Here, group therapy sessions are a matter of routine, but Joe Holman thinks it useful that GIR gives people a topic – literature – apart from themselves. Certainly people who are troubled, but who don’t wish to confide in strangers, must find the GIR groups, where they are not obliged to share the private details of their lives, especially welcome.

Eleanor McCann runs eight of these groups a week, across Liverpool. "What I enjoy most is the range," she says. Working in the dementia ward of a local hospital before Christmas, she heard one old lady recite Christina Rossetti's In the Deep Midwinter.

“You’d be surprised how often that happens with older people,” she says. Poetry learned in childhood is held fast in the brain after a lot of other things have melted away.

This is the frontline of GIR, which started on the Wirral in 2001 with a group of half a dozen single mothers in the local library. There are now 270 groups meeting weekly, with more than 1,000 people attending. It brings both prose and poetry to a wide range of ordinary people, where it is read aloud. It is not a literacy project – you don’t have to read aloud, or even speak within the group if you don’t feel like it. Yet this simple and inexpensive strategy of getting people together to talk about a poem and a piece of prose at each session has been remarkably effective.

Last year Dr David Fearnley, who is medical director of Mersey Care, the local National Health Service Trust, said: “Get Into Reading is one of the most significant developments to have taken place in Mersey Care and mental-health practice in the past 10 years.”

Dr Fearnley is a forensic psychiatrist and in 2009, he was named psychiatrist of the year by the Royal College of Psychiatrists. He has been running his own GIR group for the past three years at Ashworth, the high security mental hospital where he works. Patients at Ashworth are "deemed to be a grave and immediate danger to the public", as Dr Fearnley puts it. Of 15 wards in the hospital, eight now have GIR groups, attended by patients and staff. At the moment, Fearnley's group is reading The Coral Island, the boys' adventure, by RM Ballantyne (it was suggested by one of the patients). Fearnley praises GIR as "very cheap and easy to do. The approach is very simple and inspirational." He has watched patients who attend the reading groups become more confident and articulate.

But it isn't only the marginalised or the mentally ill who attend GIR groups. In 2009, Liverpool's firemen read The Savageby David Almond at their fire stations, part of an annual city-wide communal read-in organised by GIR. This year, the same event, Our Read, reaches beyond Liverpool. A new book, specially written for GIR by Liverpool man Frank Cottrell Boyce, and aimed primarily at 10-16-year-olds, will be distributed all over the UK on World Book Day, March 3rd.

GIR's communications manager, Jen Tomkins, runs a reading group for office workers in the centre of Liverpool. Last year this group, which meets every Wednesday at 6pm for an hour and a half, read Milton's Paradise Lost, a project which took 14 months. Now it's moved on to Dante's Divine Comedy"We've just started on Purgatory," says Jen Tomkins.

For the past seven Christmases, GIR has hosted a revival of Charles Dickens's Penny Readingsat St George's Hall in Liverpool, at which the admission is one penny, just as it was in Dickens's day. In fact, with its optimism and practical philanthropy, GIR and The Reader Organisation are reminiscent of the best of the improving Victorian social crusaders. The city of Liverpool, now restored to some of its imperial grandeur, but with long years of poverty and deprivation, is somehow the perfect backdrop for the project.

In Ireland, GIR has a single pilot project, operating at the Hydebank female prison in east Belfast. Patricia Canning began working there last July. “The women were very receptive to the idea. They are frighteningly honest, refreshingly so.” Each session of the Hydebank reading group lasts about two hours. In its first week the group read Faith and Hope Go Shopping, a Joanne Harris story about two old ladies going on the run from an old people’s home. “There was a bit of a cheer when they escaped,” she says.

She has nothing but praise for the training she received from The Reader Organisation, which has appointed her a GIR project worker for the next three years. Like many of the organisation’s staff, Canning is engaged in academic research, as well as organising a reading group. To go into a women’s prison on a lousy day, she says, and to hear a woman say at the end of a reading session, “I feel I’ve just gone outside for a walk”, is strong testimony indeed. “I’m going to bring a Shakespearean sonnet in in the next few weeks and really blow them away, ” she says.

Patricia Canning with her female prisoners, Jen Tomkins with her office workers, and Clare Williams, who leads GIR groups over the Wirral, all hold PhDs. Eleanor McCann graduated in English from the University of Liverpool only last year. These women positively burn with enthusiasm for their work. McCann was a volunteer with The Reader Organisation and GIR before she was employed by them. “I’m so lucky,” she says of her work with the mentally ill, and the drug- and alcohol-addicted.

In The Reader Organisation, literature is not a luxury for the privileged, but a weapon of survival for everyone. This attitude comes directly from Jane Davis, a powerhouse of a woman in her 50s whose own life, she believes, was saved by books. “I come from a family of poverty and broken stuff,” she says. “I saw loads of people I grew up with, including family members, going down the pan.”

Her mother was a book-lover, a docker's daughter, who won a scholarship but whose education ended abruptly when she became pregnant. She provided books and spontaneous performances of the witches from Macbethfor her four children, of whom Jane was the eldest. This intelligent woman was an alcoholic who ran a pub after her divorce and Jane, as the eldest child, effectively became the carer within the family. She spent a lot of her childhood trying to break up fights between her mother and her mother's boyfriend. "They fought Friday, Saturday, Sunday and I was up in the night trying to stop them."

The family lived around the corner from Toxteth library, which became a refuge for the young Jane. “Shopping, cooking, going to the launderette, that was my job when I was 11, 12, 13 years old. That was my job.” In this atmosphere, books were a shelter in which, as Jane Davis has commented elsewhere: “Your parents took care of you and you had a pony.”

Jane became a mother in her teens – as did her sister. She went to live in a feminist commune where she was encouraged to go to university because, “I realised I was clever. I had always been a reader and wanted to write.”

She entered university, "although I nearly dropped out a couple of times". She read Doris Lessing's book Shikasta"which showed that life is very, very serious and what you do matters. Your job matters. At the same time, my mum was dying of alcoholism."

She went on to do her PhD and to teach adults. “When I became a teacher all I knew how to do was read.” She knew from her own experience how relevant books can be to people in trouble. The first reading group she set up proved this to her. “I saw life happen to them and to me.” She saw one of the group members, a woman called Betty Ramsay, who was a GP, confronting her death alone. “And she was reading for dear life. I learned a lot from seeing that type of personal engagement.”

Jane was working in continuing education at the University of Liverpool, and in 2001 set up the first mixed group of 14 people on the Wirral, which then split into two. "As soon as the creche closed we lost some of the mums. But I knew in the first week there was something really compelling in both groups." People broke down and cried when they read Crossing The Barby Alfred Lord Tennyson – an anticipation of his own death. "In 20 years of university teaching I'd never seen that."

Perhaps the therapeutic potential of books is only beginning to be recognised. Margaret Hayes, Dublin City Librarian, lists 150 reading groups affiliated to and meeting in the city’s libraries, as well as her organisation’s support for prison libraries and a project in which prisoners read stories aloud and record them for their children. The Dublin libraries already work with the HSE on a list of books dealing with specific health issues (this is referred to as a bibliotherapy list). However, she would welcome Get Into Reading. “We’d be very much in favour of such a project,” she says.”I’m in favour of anything that brings people and books together.”

Back in Liverpool, The Reader Organisation is acquiring remarkable support. Blake Morrison has become its chief patron. Brian Keenan is a supporter. Last year the organisation was visited by Sonja Sohn, who played Lieut Kima Greggs in The Wire.

But on a grey winter's morning in the Lauries community centre on the Wirral, outside Liverpool, it is back to basics. We are discussing the short story The Birds, by Daphne du Maurier, on which the Hitchcock film was based. Later we move on to Yeats's poem The White Birds: "I would that we were, my beloved, white birds on the foam of the sea."

The group leader, Clare Williams, goes through the poem verse by verse. It's hard work. Williams listens to what each member of the group says, nodding and saying "Yes! Yes!" with the energy of a great theatre director in rehearsal. She leads five groups here each week, with the Shakespeare group meeting on Mondays. The group today consists of just three people: Pam, Tony and Francis. Francis is a pensioner. Pam and Tony are long-term unemployed and living on benefits. The last work this group examined was Lord Jimby Joseph Conrad.

Tony says that The White Birdsreminds him that there is life after death. Pam says that it has cheered her up, and she has recently lost her father. Pam lives with her cat, leaving the TV on all day for company. It is Tony who offers the best explanation for why GIR works.

“Ever since people have been on the earth, for the past two million years, they have sat round the fire and told stories and listened to stories. It sustains people. It’s in the genes, you see. It’s natural. I see these reading groups as an enhanced version of that.”

The Reader Organisation is hosting a Showcase event in Belfast, on February 22nd. See thereader.org.uk/showcases or tel: 00-44-151-7942830