How I Read Aloud, 1

       I have been blessed to have a pretty good speaking voice, but my enjoyment of and success at reading aloud has almost nothing to do with this.

       Yet people are all the time coming up to me and praising my voice as though that somehow contained the secret, as though that were the secret of my ability to read well.
 
       Maybe none of us quite has a look-in on each other's abilities and strengths; what we take as the knack or secret or ability is quite far afield from the real gift.


       In a sense the real gift is a deficiency.  I pretty much assume I don’t understand anything.  From the beginning, my reading aloud was an attempt to make out what was being said here.   The goal of getting things into my head, and sometimes into my bone and gristle, is what the reading aloud is usually about for me.

       And what I discover is, foraging through the language to try to “take” its meaning is what allows others to take the meaning, and often the coloring, and pleasure, and feeling, for themselves from my reading.  The voice is incidental.