Читать книгу Daffodils in Spring - Pamela Morsi - Страница 5

When Karen Thomson opens a book, she is certain of one thing: by turning a page, she is opening herself up to laughter, tragedy, beauty and a profound and deep understanding of how other people think, feel and exist.

She is opening herself up to the world and all of its potential.

Karen is the founder and executive director of Literature for All of Us, a charitable organization that reaches out to between 500 and 600 disadvantaged teens in the Chicago area each year with thought-provoking book groups. Most groups are made up of teen girls struggling with everything including domestic violence, poverty, teen pregnancy and faltering grades.

Karen is convinced that by giving teens a safe place to explore the world and speak their mind about a book they’ve read, they will gain confidence—and with confidence comes change.

“I can’t tell you what it feels like to look in on a group and see everybody’s head buried in a book, because I know what the alternative is,” she says, sounding perpetually energized and excited. “So this is really good.”

Falling in love with her girls

Karen’s own path to the present has been paved with fabulous books, thoughtful discussions and two epiphanies.

The first happened while having dinner with friends back in 1979 and musing over whether she would go back to work after staying home with the kids for eight years. Finally, one friend turned to her and asked point-blank what Karen really wanted. She thought for a moment, then answered, “If I could do anything, I want to be a book group leader for women. And you know what? I’m going to do it.”

For the next sixteen years, Karen, who has a B.A. in English Literature from Wheaton College and a Master of Arts in Teaching English from Northwestern University, introduced hundreds of female readers to Virginia Woolf, Kate Chopin and Judy Chicago as her book group business grew by word of mouth. She hosted groups in colleges, retirement homes and in Barnes & Noble bookstores. She ran women’s retreats (“We talked intensely about our mothers in the woods,” she says) and would have kept chugging along if it hadn’t been for a friend who suggested she branch out to disadvantaged teens. Karen wasn’t so sure. She had taught school for a short while before having her own kids and wondered if it would be the right fit.

It was.

Karen volunteered to lead a book group for teen mothers at the Illinois Department of Human Services. That first week she walked into the room with some trepidation and a stack of Maya Angelou poetry under her arm. Only one problem: The fifteen girls whizzed through the three poems she’d prepared—and still had over an hour of time to fill. The solution? Have the teens write their own poetry.

“I noticed when they read their poems, their body language changed significantly,” Karen says now. “They were proud of themselves.”

Word got out about the transforming and fun book group and by the next week attendance doubled.

“I fell in love with these girls by the second week,” she says. “I just realized that they enjoyed the group so much and it was exactly what they needed. They were reading and writing. They were creating. It was about them.”

For ten weeks the young women read two books and opened up about their lives. They read parts of the books aloud to keep everyone on the same page and also to increase their reading skills. The teens wrote short pieces about their children’s hair and other personal topics and kept a strict “no putdown” policy about each other’s reading or writing. As their confidence grew, their disciplinary referrals dropped at school.

That’s when epiphany number two hit.

“I thought, Oh my God. This is the rest of my life,” says Karen. “I saw it unroll before me.”

She launched Literature for All of Us in 1997 with a mandate to grow a community of readers, poets and critical thinkers.

More to be done

Today, Literature for All of Us has facilitated more than 200 book groups, reaching more than 5,800 young people. It employs five book group leaders, a collection of fabulous young women who see the world as Karen does and keep her mission alive. While Karen fundraises and designs the programs, they head out to Chicago schools to run groups for teen girls and boys. Twenty percent of all book group members are boys now, a program that started after many girls said they wanted their partners and boyfriends to start reading, too.

Members keep the books they read so they can build their own libraries, but just as often they pass them around to friends and family. The organization is also committed to teaching the magic of the written word to young children. Its Children’s Literature for Parenting program introduces parents to relevant and award-winning kids books they can read at home.

Karen remembers one young mother she invited to a fundraising event who agreed to talk about the charity.

“I have a son and I never read to him,” the sixteen-year-old told the silent audience. Then she turned to Karen. “But I did what you said and I put him on my lap, with my arms around him, and I read him this book. And guess what? He was good and quiet. I fell in love with him. And I read to him all the time now.”

Years later, that story still reminds Karen that books have power far greater than any one sentence on a page. They transform the soul and encourage readers to embrace the world so they can make a difference, too.

And while she admits that fundraising is always tough, finding the time to take the organization to the next level and tend to her personal life is even more of a challenge some days.

“I’m a reader so I need lots of time to read and write,” she says with a laugh. “But I don’t feel that we’ve fulfilled our whole mission yet. There’s more to be done.”