Community Building in the Washington, DC area!!

SFP Editor: What is the goal of your literary discussion group? Peter Costolanski: As one would suppose, the aim is to provide a forum for people who enjoy literature to get together and discuss various shorter pieces, mostly short stories and poems. But let me back up a bit and explain the group’s “common ground” and purpose. Simply put, we’re a group of people who appreciate literature and enjoy sharing our ideas about and reactions to it. For most of us, our professional lives in DC, as challenging and rewarding as they may be, become increasingly demanding on our time and energy and cause us to focus more and more on our selected area of specialization.

SFP Editor: What is the goal of your literary discussion group?

Peter Costolanski: As one would suppose, the aim is to provide a forum for people who enjoy literature to get together and discuss various shorter pieces, mostly short stories and poems. But let me back up a bit and explain the group’s “common ground” and purpose. Simply put, we’re a group of people who appreciate literature and enjoy sharing our ideas about and reactions to it. For most of us, our professional lives in DC, as challenging and rewarding as they may be, become increasingly demanding on our time and energy and cause us to focus more and more on our selected area of specialization… Literature helps us recover our fuller humanity: it makes us think of the great themes - love, language, faith, discovery, loss, etc. - thereby reminding us of who we are beyond our professional selves with our particular identities. And we choose to discuss all these things in a group in order to benefit from others’ insights and to engage in the simple act of being a member of a group in which we can share this special interest.

SFP Editor: What types of work does the group review?

Peter Costolanski: We mostly read short stories and poems - perhaps a total of five to fifteen pages of reading for each meeting. We like to meet relatively often, perhaps two or three times a month, so we have to keep the readings shorter. If we read novels, we’d probably only meet once a month or so. Occasionally we read plays (e.g. Beckett’s “Waiting for Godot” and Chekhov’s “Uncle Vanya”), essays (e.g. Thoreau’s “Civil Disobedience” and Camus’ “The Myth of Sisyphus”), or a novella (e.g. Pynchon’s “The Crying of Lot 49”), but most of the time the “assignment”, so to speak, is a selection of seven or eight poems or two or three short stories that are posted on our group website. If I were to choose a category to describe our readings, I would say “modern classics” - Hemingway, Eliot, McCullers, Rilke, etc. with some Shakespeare, Rumi, Pushkin, etc. tossed in. Anyone who’s interested can find out more on our website - some of our recent readings are still posted there: http://literary.group.tripod.com/

SFP Editor: Describe a typical group meeting.

Peter Costolanski: We usually meet on Tuesday or Wednesday evenings (although there are occasional Sunday afternoon potlucks) around 7pm at an area café - lately we’ve been meeting at Teaism at Penn Quarter. We chat and wait for stragglers until perhaps 7:15, and then we start talking about the work or the author; sometimes we go around the table so that people can introduce themselves (if there are newcomers) and give the group their first impressions. And then the discussion is somewhat similar to what one is familiar with from the classroom, i.e. we read one of the poems and then share our interpretations of it, stanza by stanza, or, if it’s particularly dense, line by line. Or if we’ve read stories, we’ll start with one of them, discuss the characters, the development of the plot, our experience reading the story, the questions that remain, the “main point”, and whatever else we can think of. We usually talk for about two hours and then chat for a while or go elsewhere for a drink.

SFP Editor: What is the process for choosing the literary topics for the meetings?

Peter Costolanski: I take suggestions from group members, but sometimes they’re difficult to accommodate: I post the material on our website for all to see, which typically means that the works have to be available on the web so that I can copy and paste them onto the site. (Much as I would like, I don’t have the time to hunt things down in the library or bookstore and type them in.) Often I end up deciding myself what we’re going to read and discuss if a particularly interesting or appropriate theme occurs to me.

SFP Editor: Name a few of your favorite writers and explain how they inspire you.

Peter Costolanski: The writers I admire fall into two categories: they either yearn for discovery, truth, salvation, love, etc. and have a strong streak of passion in their work, although their _expression of it may be somewhat reflective or subdued (I would put Jorie Graham, Carson McCullers, and e.e. cummings, among others, in this group), or they exhibit a fantastic, inspiring facility with language and ideas, such as Nabokov and Pynchon. Then there’s a third group that combines the two – most notably, Shakespeare and the English Romantics belong here.

SFP Editor: What brought you to Washington, DC?

Peter Costolanski: I was born in DC and then took a circuitous route through southwestern Virginia, Prague, London, and back through Prague to finally return in 1999.

SFP Editor: What is your favorite place in Washington, DC to read and why?

Peter Costolanski: For a day-long spell of reading, I like a sunny room and a comfortable couch; for some alternate reading and meditation, a café or a park with a path through the woods does quite well; and for browsing in this and that, the downtown bookstores are perfect.

SFP Editor: If you could meet an author (living or dead) to discuss a famous book, which author would you choose to meet with and which book would you like to discuss?

Peter Costolanski: For many of us (including me), to be able to listen to Shakespeare talk about anything at all would be a fantastic dream come true.

SFP Editor: What inspired you to start the literary group?

Peter Costolanski: Actually, I’m not the one who started the group - it was the brainchild of one John Craig. At the time that he began it (fall 2001), he’d been out of work for a short while (he was one of the beneficiaries and casualties of the dot-com boom & bust). He found his work-oriented, suburban life unsatisfying and lacking in a spirit of community, so he decided to combine two of his passions - group discussions and literature - and see what would come of it. Our first meetings were held under the auspices of Euronet, the DC-based social and networking group, but now we have our own mailing list. We’ve been meeting for three years now, and hopefully we’ll continue to do so for quite a while. Anyone who’s interested in learning more or being added to the mailing list so that they’ll be notified about upcoming meetings can write to me at petercostolanski@yahoo.com