Sasha Fletcher, On Reading

"I. I think it is as important to not like a book as it is to like a book, and I think it's even more important to try to figure out why we feel what we feel towards what we read.

II. And anyway I read a lot when I am stuck so that I can find something really good to borrow or steal or anything at all to get me to line my words up in a better formation.

III. But I read mostly because I like to. Because I want to feel something. To get excited. To be moved. To fall to my knees and fucking weep.

IV. Another way to put it is that when I was in the third grade I broke my right wrist and so instead of learning cursive I had to write book reports and at some point it became more interesting to me to make up the stories I had read than to write about something someone else wrote about and this is the point probably where things started to happen but I never would have done that if it wasn't for all those goddam book reports each and every week."


{Sasha Fletcher's novella When All Our Days Are Numbered Marching Bands Will Fill The Streets And We Will Not Hear Them Because We Will Be Upstairs In The Clouds is out now from Mud Luscious Press. He is an MFA candidate in Poetry at Columbia University in the city of New York. Visit his website here for more information.}