Ephemeral Reading

Ephemeral is defined as an experience lasting a short time. For example, Merriam-Webster.com gives the example, “fashion is ephemeral.” I guess that’s true for some though I still prefer 70’s western wear and causal 90’s looks.?

ephemeral is not necessarily a term used to describe reading, nor is it a term we will find in any research, Science of Reading discussions, or measures of cognition.? Because what ephemeral is not, is cognitive.

But I want to beg of you to consider ephemeral in the sense of reading. Have you ever had such an experience or something similar?

I started thinking about ephemeral in the sense of reading only recently after attending the Belmont Stakes at Saratoga Racecourse.? Earle Mack, hardly known in reading, but legendary in racing, described the first-ever Belmont at Saratoga as an ephemeral experience. Having been at Saratoga the same day, I concurred. It was short-lived in experience. However, the day, the races, and the emotions will never be forgotten.? I would dare to say many of us have had experiences like this as readers.

So I began to ponder the idea of “ephemeral reading” and brought it up at the NCTE/NCTM session in New Orleans just after school let out. I described “ephemeral Reading” as a non-cognitive reading experience. One of four in fact: Affective (The physical response), perpetual (How one sees the world based on experiences), emotional (The emotions experienced be they empathetic or sympathetic, and ephemeral (short-lived, but leaving an ever-lasting impression.

I contend that an “ephemeral reading experience” is an intersection between the book taking us to a world that allows us to escape our own, but it's so intertwined with the realities of our world that we couldn’t have described it better ourselves.

Have you ever had such an experience? Have your readers ever had such an experience? Or can they have such an experience?

Let’s consider this. Anne of Green Gables. Now, it’s been decades since I looked at the book. But during a trip to Canada’s Atlantic provinces, I was somewhat obliged to check out where L.A. Montgomery wrote the classic.? Being in the setting, being in that space, though short-lived, changed the experience that I was familiar with. Being in Prince Edward Island helped me internalize the setting to bring about a different level of comprehension, some ethereal rather flaccid. To contrast this, I teach a small walk away from where Harriet Beecher Stowe allegedly wrote Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Though the setting is based on her experiences, it’s only an experience I can imagine.

This is not the only experience for me, it’s the newest experience for me.

An “ephemeral experience” is the reason why some of the books left an impact on me.? Here are some examples:

Rump by Liesl Shurtlieff - Rump and I are one in the same. Rump was a mirror of my experiences with “friends” and people we would go out of our way for, only to be renounced. In short, Rump’s journey felt like my life.

Crashing Into Love by Jennifer Jacobson - The love story itself had no connection to me.? However, knowing the setting in which Jacobson wrote, like The Dollar Kids and Paper Things, as I do, I was able to follow the story. Again, the journey. Only the journey, this time, was based on the setting, having precise visualizations of where things happened and what it was like to be in those places.? For example, riding a bike along a Maine back road in Woolwich or Wiscasset.? This is an example I share with kids so they feel they can engage a book the same way through read-aloud.

A third example, my favorite, is Bug Boy by Eric Luper.? I was in the book from the start with it taking place at one of my favorite places in the world: Saratoga Racecourse.? This book was an ephemeral experience for multiple reasons:

1. Mornings on the Oklahoma side or Claire Court with the dew and fog. Magical.
2. Working as a groom, tending to horses. The smells (which Gary Paulsen once wrote we cannot experience in a book because words alone cannot create the smell), the long days, the desire to be more than a stablehand. I lived that life before becoming a teacher.
3. The intensity of being on or behind a racehorse in a race.
4. The falling in love… and that’s where I’ll leave that.

Bug Boy was by no means a commercial success. It was not a middle-grade novel and didn’t fit YA literature. Never mind that books with horse racing backdrops are seldom popular.? To be honest, Wild Girl, by Patricia Rielly Giff, though taking place at Belmont Park, left very little impression on me despite knowing the settings quite well.

To be honest, off the top of my head, I recall a student of mine who read Endangered by Elliot Screfer. Despite the book not being “at her level,” she was the perfect example of a student who had an ephemeral experience, whose background knowledge supported her comprehension of the text though her language comprehension was progressing. What I recall most about her experience with the text is stating that the author was wrong about the setting. She’d lived there.? That’s not what the place looked like. Her ability to transport herself back to her hometown, though a contrast to the author, constituted the ephemeral experience that helped her continue reading.

To me, ephemeral reading would constitute what books become our favorites - those books that make us not feel alone, that serve as mirrors, but create scenarios where we can respond to the text in agreement or disagreement because we “know” that experience. If anything this should be a goal for our students and how we scaffold them through conferences to these experiences would be helpful for students to better embrace a purpose or reading and engage in a reading process.

I don’t see “ephemeral reading” becoming a catchphrase in the near future, if at all. But I will leave you with this, if we are working so hard to ensure that students can decode texts and that the ultimate goal of reading is comprehension, wouldn’t an ephemeral experience change the life of a reader and represent the culmination of those goals?