One of my favorite passages in literature is from Italo Calvino’s if on a winter’s night a traveler—the one in which the narrator stands in the bookstore listing all the different kinds of books every true reader owns but will never read. Somehow it’s always captured, exactly, the disconnect between the truth and fiction of my own reading life.

Also, I’ve never been a big poetry person, and I’m jealous of people who actually enjoy Joseph Conrad and Graham Greene—do they have a critical literary gene that I’m missing? I prefer curling up on the couch with a glass of wine and the new issues of Lucky and Bon Appetit.

I think Netflix is the best invention ever.

I own a TV and I’m not afraid to use it.

I go to the gym.

And that’s only the beginning…

I confess: I’m an English composition professor and a writer with an MFA, but I don’t always put my money where my mouth is, literature-wise. I give in to temptations of all sorts when it comes to divvying up my free time. To justify my weak will, I’ve often argued things like, Plenty of movies (Memento, You Can Count on Me) teach me about storytelling as well as written stories. But the fact is that many of the movies I find myself watching (Spiderman) aren’t much good for instruction; instead, they’re good for facilitating my escape from the real world.

I.

Engaging in activities like movie-watching and magazine-flipping gives me that fabulous sensation of quick-fix deliverance from my daily cares (which include teaching and writing). I can think shallow, easy thoughts, like: That purse would look great with my black pumps. Or, Chili pepper flakes would liven up this sauce a lot. Or, At least I’m not as shallow as the heroine of this movie. By comparison, sitting down to read a good book feels like too much of an investment.

Harried modern people feel entitled to such fixes. We think, I’ve got so much to do! Why take the time to (re)read a classic like The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe when it’s going to be released on the big screen, offering us the chance to kill two birds (experiencing the story and still getting to the next five items on our to-do lists) with one stone.

While it’s true that I’m as much a victim of this quick-fix mentality as the next person, I still love to read. And when I do take the time to clear my schedule and sit down with a good book, it feels like a luxury. When I abandon myself to it, I can feel my very soul expanding.

The NEA’s "Reading at Risk" [2]report indicated that fewer people are reading, fewer people are seeking that soul expansion that die-hard readers crave on a regular basis. What I’d like to advance, though, is the notion that many of these “nonreaders” have not, in fact, gone over to the dark side; rather, they’ve just gotten lost in the fray. In other words, plenty of readers are still out there, but just like me, their to-do lists have gotten too long, and/or they’re overly susceptible to the same kinds of quick-fixes that I am. (Furthermore, I don’t think this lost readers theory disagrees with the thesis, advanced by Sven Birkerts among others, that reading is a sequential activity, which has been replaced by non-sequential activities. Many believe that people who enjoy exclusively non-sequential entertainment have trained their brains to find reading difficult if not impossible. I disagree. The human brain is more than capable of adapting to more than two modes of entertainment; it’s simply a matter of training.)

If that’s the case, then the question is not, How do we create new readers? It is, How do we win them back? If, in our quest for the latter we also do the former, well then, good for us.

II.

One of the primary reasons I've been a bad reader lately is advertising.

I’m a believer in advertising partly because, as you can see, I’m such a sucker for it. I even believe in advertising the English department I work in. For the past few semesters, I’ve hosted a series of pizza-lunch panels featuring English professors, the goal of which is to advertise the faculty to potential English-class-takers who might have lost their way to us, under the spell of “practical” disciplines like business and nursing. The title of the lunch that kicked us off was “Guilty Pleasures: Find Out What Your English Professors Really Do In Their Spare Time.” It was quite well attended.

So you’ll be surprised to discover that until recently, I was in the camp of people who reject the idea that writers need to sell themselves and their work. I rejected the notion on such a visceral level that I wasn’t even aware of it, until I joined a group of professors in trying to draft a plan for a literacy program at the university where I teach.

The group was formed in response to both the NEA’s report, and, more specifically, the extremely low—and falling—circulation numbers in the university’s library. The group huddled together for the first time on a bleak February day in the warmth of the library’s multimedia room, shutting ourselves in from the cold outside.

Before we began, we each filled out a short questionnaire about our own reading habits that included questions such as Do you mainly read for: a) pleasure, b) current events, or c) research; and How many novels have you read in the last six months: a) less than 5, b) 5-15, or c) more than 15. That was when I realized—and I said so at the meeting, to an abbreviated chorus of what I took to be similarly embarrassed laughs—that, looking at my answers, I might actually be part of problem we were sitting there trying to fix.

At dinner that night, I was telling my business-guy boyfriend about our meeting, and he said, “Sounds like you’re trying to ensure a market for your work.”

I thought this was unbelievably demeaning. I, a writer—an artiste!—was not going to be lowered to the bottom-line demands of the marketplace. To filthy lucre. Ensure a market, indeed. I aspired to something much loftier: to shaping undergraduates’ malleable minds with great words and ideas, to inspiring in them a hunger for knowledge, a desire to spurn the market-driven mentality of the Internet and television.

I was going to make them smarter.

Realizing that I’d taken offense to his suggestion, my boyfriend took a moment to clarify: “Don’t get me wrong—I think you should be trying to ensure a market base for your product.” My product being the future novels that would hopefully fly off Booksense’s virtual bookshelves.

He was, in short, encouraging me to do the very thing the NEA’s report implicitly urged all teachers and writers to do: Stop—and if possible reverse—the erosion of our market base.

Reading is as much at the mercy of the marketplace as GM stock. And because reading is just one of many priorities, for our students and for us, the commodity associated with the activity will get purchased only if that activity is at the top of a person’s list of priorities. Writers and teachers are competing—however much we wish this weren’t the case—for the time and attention of our students and potential readers.

It struck me then that teachers of writing are in the ideal position to market books. And the best forum might just be every university’s required freshman composition class, which is what literally armies of aspiring writers with MFAs are teaching these days.

We writer-teachers see our students at least two times a week, and we have their attention for a full three months of their formative intellectual years. And yet, how many of us see this as an opportunity not just to make them smarter, but to make them customers? Customers of our own writing, of our friends’ writing, and customers of local indie bookshops the nation over. For the months we hold sway over our students, when they write, they belong to the very community of writers to which we ourselves belong.

It’s really pretty exciting.

If we could make them feel this excitement, rather than the drudgery of the required course, who knows how many readers we’d create? Because we wouldn’t just be converting our own students. Pretty soon, when our students start turning down phone calls because, “Girl, I just can’t put this book down,” others will surely be inspired to follow.

III.

I suspect that at this point many of you are shifting nervously in your seats. We shouldn’t have to advertise ourselves, you’re thinking—if the kids don’t “get it” that’s their problem, their loss.

Wrong. It’s our problem, our loss. Because as long as they don’t get it, they’re not going to buy our books.

It’s easy for writers to get drunk on a strong denial of the realities of the marketplace ("Look at James Joyce; he died broke!"), and so our world is full of a strong prejudice against writers who have embraced those realities. They and their ideas are considered dangerous. Editors and publicists, with whom we plead to do the advertising for us, know the truth. Of course, some writers embrace the truth. There are the writers who self-publish and self-market (like Walt Whitman who self-published Leaves of Grass and sent it to Emerson, who made his reputation). There are writers who make opportunities for themselves by networking in the literary scene, at parties and readings and conferences.

What I’m suggesting—a writer-teacher-led, nationwide grassroots “Back to Books!” campaign—is another of these market-embracing tactics, but with broader goals than a book deal. Think of it as enlightened self interest. You still teach for all the lofty reasons—to make your students smarter, etc.—but you’ve admitted another reason: You teach because you are the best advertisement for books, period.

Remember the college English professors who legitimized your love of reading? The ones who took time to talk with you about the pleasures of devouring a book in a weekend, who stood in overflowing lecture halls extolling the virtues of Dickens, or at seminar tables getting you to say interesting things about Dickens? Like magicians, these teachers created the most amazing illusion: They made you feel really, really smart. For you, they were the best possible advertisement for books, period.

Granted, in our cases, they were preaching to the choir. We already loved books. But, perhaps, without their influence, we would not have stayed English majors, or gone on to write poetry and stories ourselves. Similarly, without our influence, our students may never pick up another book.

How do we start? Though this concept is still new to me, I have a few ideas (and if you have some, shoot me an e-mail.) It’s critical, for instance, that we don’t compromise our campaign with an “us–them” “reader/superior–nonreader/inferior” mentality. Because if you ask your students why they don’t read, only a few will “us–them” you by citing bad English teachers in their past or a gut-level dislike of books. Mainly they’ll cite things you yourself will recognize as distractions in your own life: Instant Messaging, cell phones, the Internet, hanging out with friends, music, and movies.

I’m also not advocating that we execute our marketing entirely in the classroom—or, at least, I’m saying that we have to be careful about how we do it in the classroom. We don’t want to pander to what Mark Edmundson has called, in his wonderful Why Read, students’ sense of “consumer cool.” For one thing, English teachers are genetically uncool; it’s only with alcohol and hip glasses that some have come to do a good imitation of cool, and truly cool kids see through them immediately. But more importantly, again, as Mark Edmundson has said elsewhere at length, and much better than I can—trying to be cool in class will only compromise our teaching; we are there to challenge, not to coddle and affirm. Plus, kids won’t take us seriously if they detect our desperation (“Buy me! Buy me!”). Worse, if we’re trying to be cool, we can’t hand out anything less than an A-, or maybe a B+, and with students’ writing looking the way it does nationwide, that’s just not an option.

Rather, what I’m suggesting is that in addition to taking our teaching seriously—as more than just a way to pay the rent while working on that novel—teachers of writing should try to reach out to their college communities in other ways. Why not host readings and panels and lunches aimed at proselytizing the uninitiated, seducing erstwhile readers? Why not ruthlessly advertise reading- and writing-based classes as a way to all forms of communicative success? Why not make the writers whose work you read in your classes look like rock stars?

I even have a few success stories to prove that this kind of campaign can work. A few semesters ago, I had a redhead who initially came to my 11AM class in his pajama bottoms, to sleep in protest. He swore he hated reading. He came around sometime in November when he discovered coffee and transition sentences, and he took my spring comp. course because he said I’d reminded him of why he used to actually like his English classes (for the record, he was not getting an A in my class). There were also the handful of “reading, ho-hum” students I discovered to have at one point read most of Agatha Christie when I formed an extra credit book club to read Death on the Nile before going to see the school’s production of “Murder on the Nile.” I convinced a Psych-major to minor in English because in my class he came to see that novels are about the mind, and that learning about the mind’s expression in literature would only enhance his study of how it worked. And then there were the pizza-lunch panels, which garnered a loyal following of non-English majors.

Some students, like my redhead, will simply, miraculously, like us, and will respond almost instinctively to the way we teach. Those students will read us. They’re bonuses, though—we don’t get points for them. We need to work on the ones who don’t automatically like us, the ones who used to read Agatha Christie and have stopped, or who have not yet seen the connection between fiction and Psych 101.

They’re our future customers. If we don’t get their attention, someone else will.

Kerri Smith is making a concerted effort to read more and is currently enjoying Bonfire of the Vanities.  You can read more of her writing in Guernica, Ellipsis, and English Journal.  She has an MFA from Columbia and is working on a novel. Smith is a freshman composition professor at Fairleigh Dickinson University. Her Web site is www.kerrismithmajors [3].