What have we been reading this month at Story Cafe? Pauline beautifully captures our sunny vibes….
Wendy chose a summer seaside theme for our July Story Cafe and although the day was anything but summery, the readings brought summer to us in evocative stories which feature developing, life affirming, close relationships between grandmother and granddaughter.
Tove Jansson is best known for the Moomin stories but in The Summer Book she incorporates family memories in a novel of summers spent on an island in the Gulf of Finland. Each chapter, written in a deceptively simple, laconic style, is a jewel of a vignette, dispensing a mixture of wisdom, humour and love in the developing relationship between Sophia and her grandmother. Wendy read two of these, The Morning Swim and Dead Calm, both encapsulating Jansson’s understanding both of her characters and the island environment. The Summer Book is a masterpiece of Scandinavian literature
I read A Swimming Lesson by Jewelle L Gomez, an American author and activist whose writing centres on the experiences of LGBTQI+ women of colour. In the short essay, she describes being taken by her grandmother to the beach and being taught to swim. In 1957 USA, this was a very brave thing for a black woman to do – to leave their own neighbourhood and travel to a segregated beach to swim. There were layers for us to unpick in this essay, which was about so much more than swimming lessons. Looking back she realises how much her grandmother had helped in “gaining control over my own life”
We all have stories to tell and one of the special things about Story Cafe is that it allows us to tell these stories and share them with the others sitting in the circle. Today was no different, so after both readings we told our own stories about our relationships with grandparents, learning to swim, outdoor swimming pools (now mostly closed) and other summer memories.
To finish we read two poems, Water by Cherry Smith and Planting the Meadow by Mary Makofske
And as we left at the end of Story Cafe, the grey skies had lifted, there was some blue sky with a little welcome sunshine!
The Summer Book is available for loan from GWL. I have just finished reading it and absolutely loved it.
At our Story Cafe Special on the 24th August we welcome back Anne Pia from Edinburgh, reading from and talking about her book of poetry Dragons Wear Lipstick which celebrates the women in her life, so book your ticket and come along and join the circle for another session.
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