At Books@Work, we believe in the transformative power of conversation. A good conversation offers “a hospitable environment for creative thought.” Interacting with each other on a deeper level helps to dismantle exclusionary cultures and biases. We all know it’s tough to have difficult conversations at work – but they are critical to conflict resolution and trust-building.
We use narratives – fiction, nonfiction, poems and plays – to kickstart these conversations. We write frequently about the benefits of these discussions. But what exactly does a conversation around a literary text look like in action?
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This week, we are thrilled to share insights and reflections from Erin Ulrich, a senior English major at Oberlin College who recently completed a month-long internship with Books@Work.
My internship with Books@Work has focused primarily on data-analysis and listening to interview responses from program participants. While the nature of this work may seem mundane at first, it has offered me a first-hand glimpse into how exactly Books@Work works. While the impact of the program improving colleague relationships and promoting a fruitful, healthy and productive work environment are obvious from the company interviews, I have been particularly moved by the community interviews.
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More often than we may realize, one person’s voice, quietly asserted in a moment, changes how an entire group sees things. I witnessed such a moment a few weeks ago during a Books@Work session that brought together police officers and community members to discuss Gabriel García Márquez’s story “The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World.” The story is a classic example of the literary genre known as magical realism – but this moment in the discussion gave new meaning to that term.
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Last week, Karen Nestor wrote about her experience teaching in a Books@Work special program with Veterans living at the Louis Stokes Cleveland VA Medical Center Domiciliary. Karen’s was an hour-long program for the entire residency—but, in partnership with Ohio Humanities and several individual donors, Books@Work has been serving this community with weekly seminars over the past six months. Each week in this program, a group of Veterans came together with a professor to discuss a short story. Recently, I had the chance to speak with Professor Peter Haas about his experience guiding these discussions. Peter is an ordained rabbi and served as a chaplain in the United States Army before entering academe. He retired in the summer of 2016 from Case Western Reserve University, where he was professor of Religious Studies and former chair of his department. Here, Peter talks about the power of the short story and the moving discussions he was able to lead and take part in at the VA Domiciliary.
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For most of my life I have believed in the power of literature to affect the human heart, but sometimes, a discussion of good literature provides an unexpected flash of understanding into the profound impact that stories can have. This week I had such an experience as each person in a room became a teacher and each person became a learner.
This flash occurred at the Veterans Domiciliary, a residential program that is jointly run by the Veteran’s Administration and the Volunteers of America, and that serves Veterans facing a variety of serious issues, including homelessness, trauma, addiction and other life-challenging hurdles.
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At Books@Work, we recognize (and constantly emphasize) that the opportunity for reflection with others shapes our learning and our performance. We are always learning—about our participants, our company and community partners, about the books we use to spark reflective conversation and the benefits of reading and talking together. In this spirit of self-inquiry, we’d like to take moment ourselves to look back and reflect upon what we have observed in 2015.
Over the past year, Book@Work did not slow down. On every metric, we have grown, from the number of programs (50% growth from 2014) to the number of companies, participants, books and professors (and the colleges and universities in which they teach).
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Professor Michelle Rankins led a lunchtime seminar on two poems by Maya Angelou during the first Cleveland Single Moms Conference in October. The group read “Phenomenal Woman” in unison, forceful and strong voices booming through the open air of the Cleveland Galleria. The Single Moms Conference offered Books@Work the chance to reach readers who might feel isolated. “When I read it, it made me think that beauty is internal,” one participant said. “When you find your inner strength,” another noted, “no one can touch you.”
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For Books@Work professor Gail Arnoff, James McBride’s The Color of Water is more than a memorable family story. It’s an opportunity for conversation, for exploring identity, family and history in the Books@Work seminar as well as in the traditional classroom. As she writes, “We talked about Ruth’s refusal to reveal anything about her background; childrearing; and racial and religious exclusion. In the last session, we discussed the burden of family secrets – in the book as well as in our own families. Most of all we talked about our identity, and the places from which it comes. So many passages in the book triggered discussions, including McBride’s own declaration: ‘Now, as a grown man, I feel privileged to have come from two worlds. My view of the world is not merely that of a black man but that of a black man with something of a Jewish soul….[When] I look at Holocaust photographs…I think to myself, There but for the grace of God goes my own mother—and by extension, myself.'”
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For one short story, Veterans were so enthusiastic they found themselves researching names and symbols before and after their discussion. The most thrilling testaments come from the veterans themselves. The professor, one Veteran said, “was energetic, excited and open-minded. She made us feel like her students in her university class.” He continued, “You’ve created a marvelous and exciting opportunity for us to engage our minds, and in ways that most of us haven’t for quite some time. It was awesome to see and feel the critical thinking being done, and to see the creative juices flow!”
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