Welcome to A Month of Rain and Reads, a celebration of self-published and indie SFF throughout the entire month of November. To find out how you can take part and view the whole list of content, visit our introduction post.
Today, we have a guest post by Zig Zag Claybourne on the topic of reading as a connection rather than an escape.
A therapist once told me I had a tendency to read too much. Over the course of the only 2 sessions I had with him (so much negativity) I told him reading was one of my favorite things to do and that I tried to keep a book handy at all times. Reading to escape, is what he told me. Even asked “Are you anti-social?”
I thought on it. He knew I was a writer. “No. I just don’t feel a constant need to contribute to social noise.” As far as I was concerned being incessantly engaged was anti-social. Blather got used way too often like a shovel to dig a hole someone else couldn’t escape from. I don’t mind idle chit chat here and there but give me a book and I immediately feel like I’ve reconnected to something vital and quintessentially human.
Reading has never been an escape. Reading is an acknowledgment of the one true power that actually changes things: the imagination. Isn’t that what we’re here to do, grow inward, upward and outward toward something wonderful. Even evolution, at some level, is an imaginative act. It hasn’t been proven that individual cells dream but give it time. Reading to be changed is no shame.
I think about books that have transformed me. No metaphor, no cliché. Literal, substantive change. The 1st time I read Toni Morrison’s Beloved I became more compassionate. When I read One Hundred Years of Solitude I fell in love holding onto fewer of the usual trepidations. Sir Terry Pratchett freed my attempts to make hard and fast sense of the ball of nonsensical things called normal life because they were all Boffo! I always read for pleasure, yes, but doesn’t pleasure include being a bit more of who I ought to be and less of who I used to be? Octavia Butler wrote “All that you touch you change. All that you change changes you,” which is magnificent, chunky and powerful. All that I read does the same, too. Slows the world and quiets things down enough to get a decent perspective on where all of us are on this world.
Kind of a schematic for the scheme of things.
Reading might allow you to get lost for a bit, but since every book, whether it’s fanciful or not, is about real life, there’s no escaping the things we humans do. Reading could be better thought of as a comfort, a treasure, a moment, a medicine, a revelation, a challenge, a remembrance, a gathering of strength, and a dip in a communal pool that, no matter how hard we try, doesn’t truly get dirty.
To we who read a lot, reading is a many splendored thing but it’s never an escape. You think you’re getting away from darkness, evil or decay? Where would you go?
- Barsoom? Enslavement.
- Arrakis? Exploitation.
- Narnia? Neverending holy war.
- Westeros? Ha. Hell no.
Earth. An Earth full of books. Earth’s the one place that gets destroyed a million times but Dr Who never fails to come back to it. Our world has books. That makes it a neverending story. Books, being earthenware, are cool. Reading (by the powers of transitive flow) is utterly cool. This is why so many of the best memories involve books. Even people who consider themselves nonreaders can point to a reading experience—even if only privately—that said something to them they’d never heard from anything else before. Maybe sadly not since. The feelings tied to those memories are powerful things. I have memories of Dr Seuss, the Fantastic Four, Archie comics, Go Tell It On the Mountain, Peanuts, Journey to the West, every Toni Morrison novel I could get my hands on, Milan Kundera, The Shadow of the Wind and hundreds more…mixed into so many things because one book touches another, and on and on, same as one person touches the next. This is what’s meant by continuum. This is what’s meant by all that you touch you change, all that you change changes you.
We read to strengthen connections. Words on a rainy day or under a beach umbrella or near a suffusing fireplace or after a particularly grimy day or accompanying mounds of bath bubbles or (when we’re very lucky) right before bed to prime a few dreams can become engines of change more powerful than lightning. Dreaming is creation. Nothing but imagination evolving at a ridiculously fast scale. Creative dreaming is where the human brain loves to be. Reading is everything. Turning a page equals joining the fray, so when someone wonders why you read so much—no matter what world you’re reading about—tell them you don’t escape into reading, you live there.
Zig Zag Claybourne
Hailed by Book Riot as one of the “6 Black Indie SFF Writers You Should Be Reading,” Zig Zag Claybourne is the author of the newly released fantasy Amnandi Sails and its prequel Breath, Warmth, and Dream. Other novels include The Brothers Jetstream: Leviathan and Afro Puffs Are the Antennae of the Universe.
His stories and essays have appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Apex, Realm (formerly Serial Box), Galaxy’s Edge, GigaNotosaurus, Strange Horizons, The Year’s Best African Speculative Fiction, and numerous anthologies. Claybourne is a frequent speaker at libraries, conventions, and learning institutions. Find him on Bluesky at zzclaybourne.bsky.social or at author site zzclaybourne.com.
Links
- Website: http://zzclaybourne.com/
- Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/7176708
- BlueSky: https://bsky.app/profile/zzclaybourne.bsky.social
Reviews
We’ve previously reviewed the following books by Zig Zag Claybourne:
[…] just finished reading ZigZag Claybourne’s guest post on Read Indie Fantasy (which, okay? Cool website. Bookmarked). In “We Live Here”, he talks about how reading […]