We cannot go back in time to the point where a reluctant reader first developed an aversion to text, but perhaps it is possible to recreate a key process that might have been missed when they were younger, when a child first becomes conscious of the power that language has, and they develop a hunger for it.

Since 2023, I’ve been what’s called a Champion of Reading in a programme run by Children’s Books Ireland called Everyone a Reader. CBI is an organisation that promotes children’s books in Ireland, and supports the creators of those books. The Everyone a Reader programme is a response to an alarming drop in reading for pleasure in teenagers; it seeks to reignite the joy of reading by giving secondary schools a supply of carefully chosen books for their libraries and activities to encourage their use. As part of that, they send in someone like me.

I’ve been doing creative writing residencies in schools for about 20 years, but this was something different, a more challenging, longer-term project. The aim was to encourage readers, not writers, and to do so free from any of the demands of the curriculum.

I was working in two schools in Clondalkin in Dublin, but there was one group in particular in one school that I was to work with over three years, with several two-hour sessions per year. I used my basic writing workshop to sound them out, leaning more into discussion than writing. A common exercise I start with is to get each student to describe a famous fictional character, but without giving their name, and seeing if the other students can recognise who it is from the description. Some students will use sentences to describe their character, but even in secondary schools it is not unusual for many of them to just use single words.

If you have never worked in schools, you might be surprised at how a student can grind their way through the education system while keeping their reading and writing to a bare minimum. Teachers compensate as best they can. This group was not particularly unusual; there were a few who were keen readers, some others who would read within certain topics they were passionate about, but a large proportion of the class did not read for pleasure. Their English teacher, Yvonne Crowley, told me that, while they could all read, many of them struggled with longer texts and it was hard to keep them engaged. She was very keen to try something different.

It wasn’t that these students did not want to succeed, but for various reasons they had fallen behind with their reading skills in primary school, developed a dislike for it as they found it increasingly difficult, and had arrived in secondary with a firmly cemented aversion to it. Unable to read and write at the necessary level, they became resistant and frustrated in their classes. The best they could manage was subsistence reading; text was a problem, not a solution, and they could find little enjoyment in it.

For my time there I decided not to focus on books, or even reading text. I couldn’t fight that aversion by giving them more to read, or even talking about reading. Having discussed it with Aoife McDonnell, CBI’s manager of the programme, and with Yvonne’s support and that of the special needs assistant, Joan Smith, who also worked with the class, I made my focus the point where language triggers the imagination – a point that many reluctant readers struggle to reach, or never experience, with text – and I was prepared to try as many different ways as possible.

I made my focus the point where language triggers the imagination – a point that many reluctant readers struggle to reach, or never experience, with text – and I was prepared to try as many different ways as possible

But I needed to open with a connection to books, so I started with a short talk on how I’d written my historical novel, Race the Atlantic Wind, about the first people to fly across the Atlantic. From that story about the dangers of crossing the ocean, we then watched personal accounts on YouTube of survivors of the Titanic. We discussed how each one had a different perception and memory of what had happened. We watched war veterans speak about their experiences and, again, we contrasted their attitudes and the emotions they expressed. We listened to Taylor Swift have an argument with her parents and managers over how political she should be in public, and why it might be dangerous.

We looked at the difference between a purely functional piece of writing like a CV and an expressive piece like a story or poem – or in this case, the Lou Reed song, Perfect Day.

I showed them the positive-sounding lyrics as text first, reading them before playing the song itself, so we could talk about the way the words played off against the tone of the performance, and the emotion they implied, right up to that mournful ending. Contrasting the song with the CV demonstrated the difference between words just serving a practical purpose, and words that lit up the imagination.

Every now and then, I’d just read to them. At one point, I showed them a photo of the 3,800 year-old complaint tablet about sub-standard copper written to Ea-nāṣir, a text of marks in clay that nobody in the room would recognise as an alphabet, in a language we didn’t understand, to make the point that we all start off looking at text this way, before learning to read it. But those who could read this could hear a voice from thousands of years ago.

By the end of the sessions in the second year, I got each student to find one quote from any source that meant something to them, that had an effect on them. You could see the way they engaged with that language, and we recorded each of them speaking their chosen words, making them think about how to express them, and compiled them into a short video of our own.

I can only hope that they found the experience as rewarding as I did. When CBI brought me back for this new school year, I planned to work up to making a video about the group’s choice of books in the same way, but it wasn’t to be. The reality of school life made itself felt; the class was split up as some went into Transition Year and some did not, and Yvonne changed jobs, moving to another school. I didn’t get to work with that group again.

However, those sessions convinced me that if we really want to tackle the issues with reading, then text may not be the starting point, and that we should aim for that earlier, instinctive stage, that sparking of the imagination which creates the appetite for language. This could be an important factor for teachers, parents and book professionals to consider in their approach to the National Year of Reading, rapidly heading our way.