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Stories That Could Be True Reading Club

The Stories That Could Be True Reading Club takes its name from the William Stafford poem, "A Story That Could Be True." The club features writings, which, even though marked as fiction, hint at the possibility that they may, in fact, have actually happened.

For more information about Stories That Could Be True please contact Dr. Audrey Sprenger at asprenger@denverlibrary.org or 720-865-1206.

Current Selection

July 2008: William Golding’s The Lord of the Flies

July 2008: William Golding’s The Lord of the Flies
Sunday, July 13, 2 - 4:30 p.m.
Central Library, Level B2 Conference Center

William Golding’s The Lord of the Flies (1954) is a favorite high school and college reading list staple on the social mechanics of community building. Re-read them this July and then join us for the third session of our Stories That Could Be True Reading Club. Our meeting will start with a discussion of the book, followed by a screening of the 1990 cinematic version of this novel.

Archive

May 2008: Oscar Wilde's De Profundis

May 2008: Oscar Wilde's De Profundis

Building upon our last Reading Club selection, Jack Kerouac's On The Road, we turned to another author whose public persona and personal story deeply affects the way we read and understand his writings, Oscar Wilde. Our selection, De Profundis, is written in the form of a letter to his friend, Lord Alfred Douglas, but it is really his apologia for posterity. Wilde wrote De Profundis in his last weeks in prison, and he wrote it as though it would be published. It was published in its entirety many years after his death.

January - February 2008: Jack Kerouac's On the Road

Stories kicked off its inaugural year with the 50th anniversary edition of Jack Kerouac's On the Road, a novel greatly loved in the city of Denver.

Readers were invited to join sociologist Audrey Sprenger, Ph.D for a three-hour club meeting, which took participants out of the library and into the streets to some of the places Kerouac set and, in many instances, actually wrote this classic American novel. Notes from our first meeting.

An indoor, follow-up meeting was led by Sprenger and Jack Kerouac's first musical collaborator, composer David Amram. Readers were invited to explore the wider geographical expanse of Kerouac's novel by following Sprenger and Amram's 7-day Reading Guide to On the Road, published online by the Westword.

Nota Cultural: Billy Collins' poem, "Marginalia," has inspired us at Fresh City Life to encourage our "Stories That Could Be True" Reading Club members to "write in the margins" of their books.

Marginalia
by Billy Collins

Sometimes the notes are ferocious,
skirmishes against the author
raging along the borders of every page
in tiny black script.
If I could just get my hands on you,
Kierkegaard, or Conor Cruise O'Brien,
they seem to say,
I would bolt the door and beat some logic into your head.

Other comments are more offhand, dismissive -
"Nonsense." "Please!" "HA!!" -
that kind of thing.
I remember once looking up from my reading,
my thumb as a bookmark,
trying to imagine what the person must look like
why wrote "Don't be a ninny"
alongside a paragraph in The Life of Emily Dickinson.

Students are more modest
needing to leave only their splayed footprints
along the shore of the page.
One scrawls "Metaphor" next to a stanza of Eliot's.
Another notes the presence of "Irony"
fifty times outside the paragraphs of A Modest Proposal.

Or they are fans who cheer from the empty bleachers,
Hands cupped around their mouths.
"Absolutely," they shout
to Duns Scotus and James Baldwin.
"Yes." "Bull's-eye." "My man!"
Check marks, asterisks, and exclamation points
rain down along the sidelines.

And if you have managed to graduate from college
without ever having written "Man vs. Nature"
in a margin, perhaps now
is the time to take one step forward.

We have all seized the white perimeter as our own
and reached for a pen if only to show
we did not just laze in an armchair turning pages;
we pressed a thought into the wayside,
planted an impression along the verge.

Even Irish monks in their cold scriptoria
jotted along the borders of the Gospels
brief asides about the pains of copying,
a bird signing near their window,
or the sunlight that illuminated their page-
anonymous men catching a ride into the future
on a vessel more lasting than themselves.

And you have not read Joshua Reynolds,
they say, until you have read him
enwreathed with Blake's furious scribbling.

Yet the one I think of most often,
the one that dangles from me like a locket,
was written in the copy of Catcher in the Rye
I borrowed from the local library
one slow, hot summer.
I was just beginning high school then,
reading books on a davenport in my parents' living room,
and I cannot tell you
how vastly my loneliness was deepened,
how poignant and amplified the world before me seemed,
when I found on one page

A few greasy looking smears
and next to them, written in soft pencil-
by a beautiful girl, I could tell,
whom I would never meet-
"Pardon the egg salad stains, but I'm in love."

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