Lately the staff at our extremely small company has been starting each week with a Monday morning icebreaker. As the name suggests, an icebreaker is some simple challenge that serves to get everyone thinking and talking, while drawing us together around the shared project of assembling a magazine without reducing anyone to tears. Every Friday someone sets the com-ing week’s challenge, and when Monday comes, we take turns answering it. On a recent Monday we got thirty minutes to draw a portrait of a colleague. Another week, the task was to list three things about ourselves—two truths and a lie. Then, the rest had to guess which was the lie. Since we all work remotely, these icebreakers have proved an entertaining way to shake up virtual meetings, to reveal our respective strengths (and weaknesses … no one wants me drawing their picture), and of course, staying connected.
Last week when it was Managing Editor Jordan’s turn to set the icebreaker, she charged everyone with presenting their six-word memoir. We should have seen this coming, since earlier this year Jordan published an actual memoir—Home of the Happy—an account of her decade-long investigation into the abduction and murder of her great-grandfather on the Cajun prairie in 1983. Mind you, Home of the Happy ran to about 120,000 words, so asking her colleagues to summarize themselves in just six words was an exercise in brevity that required uncommon self-restraint. When Monday rolled around, though, the poignant responses captured their authors amazingly well.
Seeing how much about yourself you can cram into six words is an interesting exercise. The first draft of this column usually runs around nine hundred, from which Jordan has to cut a couple hundred words of adjectival waffle before the final product will fit on the page. I can’t write a headline in six words, so before last Monday’s icebreaker, it took a lot of mental whittling to come up with:
“Across decades, foreign land becomes home.”
If the exercise revealed anything, it’s that finding the right words matters. Words are how we transmit knowledge and learn, how we make sense of the world, how we represent ourselves to those beyond earshot, and how our messy, complicated selves will be remembered after we are gone—if we are remembered at all.
And yet, signs point to a precipitous decline in the incidence and the habit of reading in society. In a recent piece published in the Free Press titled “Without Books We Will Be Barbarians,” the historian Niall Ferguson cited a study by the University of Florida and University College London, which found that among Americans, daily reading for pleasure had declined from 28% to 16% in twenty years. 52% hadn’t read a book in a year. Average adult literacy scores are down 12% over the past ten years, and, in Ferguson’s words, 30% of American adults “read at a level that you would expect from a ten-year-old child.” Add the statistic that daily pleasure reading among thirteen-year-old Americans was down 50% over the past twenty years, and the picture doesn’t look good for social literacy. I realize I’m preaching to the choir here, but if anyone can spot a silver lining in this, I’d like to hear it.
But here’s the irony. Amid the general decline in the habit of reading for pleasure, signs of our need for books and reading are all around. Independent bookstores (including those depicted in the painting by Alexandria artist Matt Dawson that appears on the cover of this issue) remain beloved landmarks, with new ones such as Baton Rouge’s TBR Books and Natchez’s Dixon Books opening with more frequency in recent years. Magazines like this one continue to be relevant and sought-after, and beautiful stories continue to unfold, begging to be told. Want proof? On November 1, thousands will descend on the grounds of the State Capitol in Baton Rouge for the Louisiana Book Festival, which has been gathering hundreds of authors, literary minded organizations, and bibliophiles in celebration of the written word, for more than twenty years.
Country Roads will be there, hosting a booth to mark the publication of this “Film & Literature Issue,” meeting longtime readers, and also, I feel certain, making the acquaintance of some new ones. This year, we’ll be playing a little game at our booth, inviting visitors to share their own six-word memoir in return for the chance to win a signed copy of Matt Dawson’s painting, “Marquees and Manuscripts Along the Mississippi,” featured on this cover.
So, members of the sixteen percent: come see us, and let’s connect around our shared love for reading, literature, and the eternal quest to find just the right word.
—James Fox-Smith, publisher
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