Sherwood's project

Massimiliano Bellavista

This column comes from the experience of years of attending schools, forums, events and socials, talking and enjoying literature. As a writer and lecturer in charge of the Recensio project (see www.thenakedpitcher.com), I have had thousands of discussions with a single goal in mind: to convey the message among young people that reading and the profound and personal interpretation of a text are the foundation for gaining excellent writing skills and above all an original capacity for expression.
Reading is a passport to life, growth, awareness, sociality. Literature can legitimately be considered either as utopia or dystopia, but it is nevertheless a "place" that must be frequented and explored, which must not be viewed by teenagers with distrust, even or worse with indifference, in a word as "terra incognita".
Otherwise, those concepts of community culture and advanced social defense through culture (and therefore primarily through reading in its broadest sense) that explicitly fall within the founding mission of Literary Parks and Cultural Reserves would necessarily disappear.

A good book is often like a mirror: you have just to come closer and it is reflected in the reader and the reader as well can reflect in it faithfully or in a distorted way according to his special and sometimes unique point of view.. And both of them, the text and the reader, will emerge changed forever from this physical entanglement. In recent years, reviews written by young people, women and men no more than eighteen have sometimes been unique, beautiful, unsettling. And above all they have served to bring many people who have never read closer to reading, because shared reading is a multiplier of curiosity and a catalyst for knowledge. More recently, established authors and publishers have understood the importance of this project, helping or supporting us.

In the end, what is a Literary Park if not also a tangible and original way to approach the intangible beauty of the words of an Author, laying the foundations for this approach to the intangible heritage constituted by literary classics on to the view of a glimpse, in the perfume of a flower, in touching an object that once it belonged to that specific writer? Thanks to this very original path, the reader becomes a visitor and supporter of the Italian cultural heritage. And what else should a review be if not a journey into a novel, a short story or a poem? It is a small path traced in the world of the word, a small sheep track that intersects invisibly to the layout of a main road, thanks to which a young person can become a reader.
From readers to visitors, from reviewers to cultural pilgrims. Two journeys therefore, two paths that come together, one from the physical and the other from the mental point of view, biologically closer than you think if it is true that recently the cognitive sciences have explained that the neurons of reading are none other than our much older cortical circuits originally intended for the recognition of objects and above all traces left on the path in front of us by a prey, another human being or a predator,
So walking and reading are in a certain sense the same thing or perhaps one the necessary complement of the other. The review also explains, or attempts to explain, the intangible rules that influence and bind tangible matter. What seduces the reader by holding together a few tens of thousands of words printed or made of bits, what logics, feelings and circumstances transform two hundred thousand characters into something we call a novel?

Sherwood aims therefore to build a bridge between young people, authors and works, giving them a voice, making sure that they can steal words from the rich (the authors) and give them to those who need them most (the 'weak' readers and non-readers). And that answers, certainly not definitive but interesting, can be given to the questions we raised above. In short, a dialogue from reader to reader, capable of throwing a different light on many authors, more or less known.

It will be them, the young people, who will speak, mediated only by a few comments and a guiding theme, capable of covering, in stages, the distances that separate the Italian territories and cultural parks. And we will talk about known and lesser known works or about authors who are almost unknown to the young audience. The first theme will be that of the ... moon. A theme, as we shall see, very interesting and seductive. The path, open to all young people and schools who want to join, will be combined and supported by an Award, created with the aim of giving due recognition to the best contributions that will arrive.

Please feel free to contribute as a school and as individuals!!!!

Foto di copertina di © Massimiliano Bellavista

Riproduzione riservata © Copyright I Parchi Letterari

The Sherwood column is edited by Massimiliano Bellavista, engineer, blogger (www.thenakedpitcher.com) and university professor. Winner of various literary awards, his short stories and poems are published in magazines and anthologies. He writes reviews and weekly columns for some literary magazines and online newspapers. In organizing important cultural and literary festivals, he animates the Recensio writing school in Siena, designed for high school students, and curates Barzhaz, a reading and writing school for emerging authors in Bologna. His works of fiction, poetry and management are published in Italian and English. In 2020 they came out for Controluna 'La poesia è morta and other verses' and for Castelvecchi 'Punto triple and other stories'