What we’re about
In this group, we'll explore the Stories that Matter in our lives: From the classics of literature, film, even the stories we tell ourselves about our own lives.
We will approach them several different ways.
Deep Reads: We will regularly select a longer text, and spend months working through it, savoring it.
Shorter Works/Films: Other times, we will select a short text or film to consume in one setting.
Stories of Our Lives: Otherwise, we will find ways to connect around the things that make life worth living.
The organizer, Sean Doyle, is the author of Mud and Dreams; Essays on falling deeper in life (https://amzn.to/2xDQSYQ) and taught positive psychology at NCSU for a decade. Whether I intend it or not, every meeting we will draw from the science of happiness, well-being and flourishing. For more info, see www.JohnSeanDoyle.com
Upcoming events (3)
See all- Deep Reads: Selected Stories of Jorge Luis Borges (one session only)Lynnwood Brewing Concern, Raleigh, NC
This month we are going to read six short stories by Jorge Luis Borges (1899—1986).
Borges, the blind Director of the Argentine National Library, was a founder and principal practitioner of postmodernist literature. With his genre-bending metafictions, essays, and poetry, Borges “effectively influenced the destiny of literature."
While the six stories (listed below) we will read this month are all short, they are tremendously rich, and will lead to great discussion topics
Five of the six can be found in the short stories collections “Ficciones” or “Labyrinths” found here.
If you buy any of the version after clicking on my link, I will get a few pennies to help support the cost of the meetup.
However, each of the stories are also available for free on line (Links below). This month we will read:
- The Secret Miracle
- Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius
- The Garden of Forking Paths
- The Library of Babel
- Funes, the Memorious
- The Aleph (not included in Labyrinths)
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Want to help support the meetup? A few of you generously asked if you could help support the cost of the meetup. It costs me about $180/year ($90 twice a year) If you would like to contribute $5, $10, $20 or any amount the easiest way is venmo: @JohnSeanDoyle or just reach out to me directly. Thanks for considering it! - Deep Reads: The White Book by 2024 Nobel Winner Han Kang (One Session Only)Lynnwood Brewing Concern, Raleigh, NC
This month we'll read The White Book by 2024 Nobel Prize winner Han Kang.
Han was awarded the Nobel Prize for her "intense poetic prose that confronts historical traumas and exposes the fragility of human life"
About the White Book: "Writing while on a residency in Warsaw, a city palpably scarred by the violence of the past, the narrator finds herself haunted by the story of her older sister, who died a mere two hours after birth. A fragmented exploration of white things - the swaddling bands that were also her shroud, the breast milk she did not live to drink, the blank page on which the narrator herself attempts to reconstruct the story - unfolds in a powerfully poetic distillation.
As she walks the unfamiliar, snow-streaked streets, lined by buildings formerly obliterated in the Second World War, their identities blur and overlap as the narrator wonders, 'Can I give this life to you?'. The White Book is a book like no other. It is a meditation on a colour, on the tenacity and fragility of the human spirit, and our attempts to graft new life from the ashes of destruction.
This is both the most autobiographical and the most experimental book to date from South Korean master Han Kang."
You can find a copy here: If you buy any of the version after clicking on my link, I will get a few pennies to help support the cost of the meetup.
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Want to help support the meetup? A few of you generously asked if you could help support the cost of the meetup. It costs me about $180/year ($90 twice a year) If you would like to contribute $5, $10, $20 or any amount the easiest way is venmo: @JohnSeanDoyle or just reach out to me directly. Thanks for considering it!
