“I was afraid they wouldn’t listen to me,” Karen Thomson admits.
Thomson, a woman with an undergraduate degree from Wheaton and a Masters from Northwestern, sounds confident as I speak with her, and it’s hard to imagine anyone not listening. But Thomson isn’t talking about just anyone. She isn’t afraid of not being heard by boardroom executives or money-savvy Wall Street tycoons. Thomson is concerned about reaching an arguably more difficult target audience: teenage girls. What she discovered was that all she needed to do was listen to them.
In 1996, Executive Director Karen Thompson founded the non-profit group Literature for All of Us, an award-winning program that, according to its Web site, “brings the rewards of reading and writing to young people in Chicago and nearby Evanston, Illinois.”
The program focuses on getting disadvantaged youth, especially teen mothers, to read literature and write their own poetry. The participants then share their writings and reading experiences with one other.
Thomson got the idea from a friend in a woman’s book group she was leading.
“It was sort of born without being planned,” Thomson says. The friend worked with welfare mothers and suggested that Thomson try leading a reading group with them.
Thomson agreed, and got other members of her women’s book group to donate $30 for supplies. She then set out, armed with Maya Angelou’s poetry and some empty journals, promising her supporters their money back if the experiment didn’t work out.
It did.
In the past ten years, the program has facilitated more than 111 book groups and reached more than 3,500 women and girls. In 2005, the program received the Coming Up Taller award by the President’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities, and its partner agencies, the Institute of Museum and Library Services, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. LFAOU has grown from Thomson’s original lone volunteer effort to a professional staff of nine.
Some of the participants’ poems are displayed on the LFAOU’s Web site. Many are stunning. One compares the emptiness of a snowscape to life before her child, and the starkness of both the prose and image is startlingly effective.
“The poetry can be breathtaking,” Thomson says.
The girls have had no formal training, and Thomson suggests that this can add to the poetry’s often raw beauty.
Of course, some of the poetry is not so good, but this is hardly the point. Thomson has managed to take her love of literature and book groups and turn it into a community of respect and creation. She has seen the girls change as they participate in the groups.
“They’ll sit up taller. Prouder,” says Thomson. “It is so beautiful it makes me cry.”
The groups also allow for the girls to form new relationships.
“Many of the girls don’t trust other women,” says Thomson. “Here, they learn that they can.”
Thomson also makes sure there is a sense of ceremony present in the group meetings. “There is something spiritual in it,” says Thomson.
The girls conduct their meetings at a set table complete with tablecloth and lit candle. There they read, write, break bread, and come away with a good book.
“Many girls have never owned one before,” says Thomson. “It is important to me that they get to keep the books.”
Though the original teen mother reading groups remain successful, LFAOU’s hope for the book groups has not stopped there. They have created two other programs. “Children’s Literature for Parenting” focuses on parents’ goals for their children, and “Outreach Training” helps to educate volunteers on how to start their own book groups. In 2005 LFAOU also piloted a boy’s reading group, which continues to grow.
LFAOU also provides means of connecting its participants’ newfound literary voices to the public through readings, anthologies, and cards. No matter Thomson’s original fear, one thing is now assured. People are listening.
