Reading Aloud

Most nights Adele and I read short stories aloud over the phone. Often, the narratives offer portals to a dimly remembered moment in our own lives to be shared. Sometimes, we halt and re-read a passage beautifully rendered.

We have read dozens of Joyce Carol Oates short fiction and, as if a rejoinder, tackled several collections of John Updike’s priapic yarns. She treats men as a sub-species with uncontained menace and Updike’s males are happily predatory as if that defines normalcy. His women have no agency. Yet both are masters of language so we turn the page and read on.

When we moved on to anthologies we discovered authors we had never heard of. One such is E.K. Ota’s gem The Paper Artist, the story of Japanese tradition and the heavy toll paid for patriarchal pride. So beautifully written it elicited sadness and joy at the same time.

Another author previously unknown to us is Brad Felver. His work appears in two editions of O. Henry Prize collections, 2018 and 2025. He is not to be missed. While most entries are heavily plotted, Felver’s are masterpieces of nuanced love. They resound with truth and speak to our core.

He strummed a toy ukulele for her. It wasn't long before Annabelle learned how to smile. D minor and G were her favorite chords, and for hours he would play them, the D minor hovering like a Frisbee in flight, just out reach, until he would finally resolve it with the G, and little Annabelle would smile and kick.

Several times we pause, thinking we must have missed something. But the gaps are meant to make demands on us to fill in the narrative. Queen Elizabeth, the title story is meant to be a tree. It is our surmise; we are never told as much. And just when we figure it out the tree becomes a metaphor for their dead baby. 

His language is spare as if sculpted from a larger block of marble. We get the essentials. His genius is how effortlessly and quietly he draws us into the drama. Communication happens from what is unsaid. Somehow he articulates the silences.

After receiving the gift of those two stories Queen Elizabeth and Orphans, we have now moved on to his newly published collection, Dogs of Detroit. The stories have turned harsh and the environment unforgiving as he explores the extremities of relationships. We hope they take a turn back to soulfulness.

Reading aloud is a different experience than reading to ourselves. We are sharing the moment; the sounds and cadence of the phrases are like music and, in the hands of great writers, our hearts are stirred together.