Dip Into A Book
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Dip into a book with the Hub’, a shared reading experience, was born out of a ‘Hub Coffee Morning’ where participant Coral spoke about wanting to have more experiences with people.
She reminisced on when she used to run a reading group ‘Get into Reading’ for Sandwell Libraries. Sarah (an experienced theatre and drama facilitator and actor) agreed that it would be a good group to have and to be able to use it to perhaps read plays and poems.
Renata (BCH) worked closely with Coral and Sarah (now Lead Volunteers) to develop the shared reading experience group. A pilot took place on 9th February, 2021 on Zoom with 4 participants, 2 volunteers and Renata as facilitator and tech support.
The aim was to test how a shared reading group would work online. Since then we have hosted four reading experiences with 13 regular participants and we get at least one new participant for each session.
We read:
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‘Girl, woman, other’ by Bernardine Evaristo
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‘The Lottery Ticket’ by Anton Chekhov
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‘Faith and Hope go shopping’ by Joanne Harris
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‘Going Home’ by Ruth Dawkins
"It made a huge difference, because I have spoken to such a limited number of people in the past year. It was good to see new faces and to focus on something other than our day to day existence; to find a little about our neighbours and their opinions on the characters in the reading. It proved to be a friendly (therefore a safe environment to share freely) and an informal but stimulating experience. I can't wait for the next one!"
Anonymous