August Tarrier, Ph.D 

Bibliotherapy is a kind of remedy or cure that we enact through reading. Simply put, stories are a form of medicine. Reading provides unique benefits, especially in challenging times, or in times of significant change. Probably you know someone, if not many people, who simply say, I don’t read anymore. If in fact fewer and fewer people are reading these days, it could be argued that reading has become imperiled in current culture.

 

It behooves us to imagine, then, the benefits of reading. What might we lose when we turn away from books and reading? We lose access to an imaginal realm. To immerse ourselves in stories—say, a Henry James novel, or a novel by Toni Morrison, we encounter a complex world that is symbolically rich, much of it revealed via intimate conversation (dialogue). Narrative is not primarily informational (or is certainly not limited to presenting information) but in fact has a rich symbolic dimension. And when we read, we are paying long-term attention (as opposed to superficial attention) because we are tracking consciousness.

 

In this Bibliotherapy course, we will be finding guides, writers whose work, ideas, and thoughts galvanize us and ignite us.  These guides will help us to view the world through a more poetic and metaphorical lens. We’ll be immersing ourselves in a world of narrative alchemy, and it is a potent magic. This partnership with a guide, which we’ll explore in the course, comes through being moved in and via a relationship to this progenitor.

 

In these times, many of us are experiencing loss, confusion, insecurity, estrangement, embattlement, etc., and I want to argue that this sort of mentorship is essential. That such a mentor has tremendous grounding potential. By allowing or even cultivating such partnership, we open to ancient energies (the mentor could be anyone, living or dead, with whom you feel a powerful connection through their novels, stories, poems, plays, memoirs, etc.—e.g., it could be Virginia Woolf, Malcolm X, Jhumpa Lahiri—it’s up to you).

 

We can discover literate allies who are on our side and who are of good cheer. Together we’ll be creating a capacious container toward alchemical awakening; in this, books are the bringers of light, levers that open us to new ways of seeing and being; books are the winch that opens the drawbridge so we can cross the moat, scale the castle wall, and rescue ourselves from ways we’ve been imprisoned (ie, limiting thoughts). Books are way-makers, guides for us on the pilgrim’s path. This will be an emotional education—not in the way of sentiment, but in the sense that our work together will be imbued with a new kind of knowing, a deep medicine of integrating and embodying experience through narrative.