The Three Movements of a Reader's Journey

On book endings + commissioning your reader

Welcome to Slant Letter’s spring seasonal intensive! Become a paid subscriber to join our full close reading of Pádraig Ó Tuama’s In the Shelter for an editor’s annotated insights on an extraordinary meditation on the stories that shape us.

1. “The stories that shelter us”—on introducing your extended metaphor or title concept

2. Finding the courage to name “here”—on locating yourself and your reader within the story

3. I, we, you—on changing tense as art form

4. Lectio Divina on our typos—on play, snapshots that tell the whole, and a miscellany of techniques

5. Stories that read us—on creative reciprocity

6. Greeting the day—on commissioning your reader

In my Episcopal tradition, the service isn’t over until the priest has walked to the center of the aisle and booms in a loud voice: “Go in peace, to love and serve the Lord.”

I love the simplicity of this sending: May peace be present with you, as you go from this place back into the demands and complexities of your life. Go a different way out then you came in, perhaps a little more centered, more filled, more whole. Here, take this goodness with you, as you go.

I like to think of the end of a book as a writer’s commissioning, a sort of, “Go in peace.” An acknowledgment that, while the reading experience is over, there is plenty for readers to take with them as they are sent back into the story of their own lives.

If a book is a sacred conversation between writer and reader, it contains both an initial greeting, and what I like to call a commissioning—an acknowledgement and blessing as the writer sends the reader back into their own life.

So for today’s Slant Letter and our final letter in our close reading of In the Shelter, we’re turning to the final page, to see how Pádraig “commissions” us, and the three movements writers can create for an engaged readers’ journey.

I think of the writer as a guide, a pilgrimage perhaps, accompanying the reader through three distinct movements, so let’s start here by mapping them out: