A slow philosophical reading group: The Woods in-between midsummer|midwinter
Are you seeking shorter-form mythopoeic reading that spans seasons and hemispheres?
Slow reading. What does that idea mean for you?
If it means wandering in and out of some short fictional/mythopoeic texts about woods/forests/trees in a discussion that spans the spectrum of an entire year of seasons passing, this might be the slow book discussion group for you.
You are standing at the edge of a wood in December.
A breeze sighs through a seemingly infinite shadowy column of trees, troubling the leaves to tremble, rise and fall. The colours, well, they are only yours to imagine, wild heart...
You enter the woods …
“Before me lay a land solemn with auroral light. For a thousand years, that were as a moment, I wandered therein. Then, far before me, I saw an immense semi-circle of divine figures, tall, wonderful, clothed with moonfire, each with uplifted head, as a forest before a wind.”
(Fiona Macleod|William Sharp, The Divine Adventure, 1912).
Is it Midwinter or Midsummer, the hemisphere of your imaginings…?
The quest begins:
We all begin with the same story, Susanna Clarke’s novella, The Wood at Midwinter, which we read/share/discuss on or around December 21-22, 2025, during the Solstice week.
The quest continues:
At the turning of each season (December, March, June, September and finally, December once again), I will share a prompt to explore a different wood-whispering story, prompted across three different woods (Instagram, Fable, Discord). You can choose how you wander.
The stories we traverse collectively will be short, novellas, literary fiction, and, where possible, public domain or library borrowable. I hope to represent both hemispheres of the planet. In the meantime, between our short collective reading, you are encouraged to wander and to return, leave snippets about your encounters with other literary and mythic woods in your longer storying adventures.
The quest returns:
In December 2026, we reread Susanna Clarke’s The Wood at Midwinter, once again.
What will we wonder, personally and collectively, about if and how our slow reading has changed or transformed us?
Are we the same after so many forests?
This is a slow, philosophical reading cycle that turns back on itself.
It allows time for your mind to wander in the woods.
Links to the three woods (Instagram, Discord, Fable) will be shared in early December.