Today is World Read Aloud Day — or WRAD, because the world needs more acronyms. Is this the first you’re hearing of it?
The website says “15th annual,” but I first encountered WRAD only last year. I was not in time to do anything about it, except to make a note to do something about it this year.
A nonprofit called LitWorld created WRAD “to celebrate the power of reading aloud to create community and amplify new stories, and to advocate for literacy as a foundational human right.” Worthy causes all. Their website, LitWorld.org, has an activity packet, a social media kit, a web form to report your own activities, and many other resources, including links to – you guessed it – people reading aloud.
LitWorld and WRAD mostly focus on reading aloud to children, and we could make a long list of the benefits of doing that. But just between you and me, good things happen to youth and adults too, when we read aloud or are read to. I submitted a column to a local newspaper this week on that very topic. (I’ll link to it here if and when it’s published.)
To me, the obvious thing to do for WRAD is (ahem) to read aloud. So I got up early to read into a good microphone Monday morning before work, did some light editing after work, and now it’s just under 20 minutes of audio, with me reading three pieces of my own fiction aloud.
Here’s the file. It contains:
- “Marie,” a very short, award-winning story about a seventh-grade boy who likes a girl. It’s flash fiction, about 1,000 words.
- “I Dreamed You Died Thursday Night,” another piece of flash fiction, unpublished so far except here, in which a man’s dream one Thursday night leads to paranoia when he’s awake.
- The (short) prologue and (short) first chapter of The Dad Who Stayed, a novella with a child’s-eye-view of growing up in a progressive university town in the early 1970s. It’s published in my 2023 Silver Quill Award-winning collection, The Dad Who Stayed and Other Stories.
Enjoy! I hope your WRAD is (I can’t believe I’m about to write this) rad.
(Can reading aloud can make you — give you? — w rizz? Don’t answer that.)
Image credit: ChatGPT4
From the Author
Thanks for reading!
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