FORT COLLINS — The reader-in-residence position at Perelandra Bookshop doesn’t make sense on paper. Unlike an artist-in-residence or a writer-in-residence program, which provide a stipend and studio space for creating new work, the reader-in-residence isn’t expected to produce anything.
The reader-in-residence doesn’t have to write an essay. They don’t have to host a book club or moderate a panel discussion. They don’t have to contribute to a blog or create sponsored content. They don’t have to do anything, except show up to the bookstore a couple of times per week and read.
“I think the residence paralleled my own personal concerns about the extent to which we focus ourselves on production,” said Joe Braun, principal book buyer at Perelandra, and the person who dreamed up the position. “In focusing on production, foregrounding content creation, what we do is necessarily create a consumer in the process. The idea is: produce, consume, produce, consume.”
Braun wanted to break that cycle. Is the residency replicable? Maybe. Is it scalable? Probably not. But that has never been the point. The point is to envision what a bookshop can do, not what it already is, Braun said.
“Having gone through undergrad and grad school — even though they were great experiences — there was that constant drive to show that you understand. To make something of your understanding. I’m like, you know what, we kind of just need understanding. We don’t always need proof of it,” he said.
The reader gets a small stipend for their three-month stint — $50 per month for books, and another $50 per month for coffee. They also have access to Perelandra’s wholesale book catalog. The overt goal of the residency is to foster a space for people to experience literature more thoughtfully. The underlying goal is to make them want to smash their phones with a sledgehammer.
“We do so much reading now, but it’s mostly reading for information at best. At best. At worst it’s like a pure little shot of dopamine before moving to the next post,” said Steven Shafer, Perelandra’s current reader-in-residence. “It is almost the exact opposite of what I’ve gotten to experience here.”
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Shafer was selected the way all of Perelandra’s readers have been selected so far: Through word-of-mouth. The first book he read during his residency, which lasts through March, was “Brave New World” by Aldous Huxley. He had different takeaways this time around, almost 20 years since he first read the book.
“When you’re 18, you feel like ‘Yeah definitely, fight the man! Become a revolutionary!’ And then 20 years on it’s kind of like, ‘Eh, I’m definitely part of the system.’ I don’t know if I’d be the one necessarily to step up and try to burn it all down. I’d probably say, like, let’s take a breath, there’s a lot at stake here.”
That’s kind of the formula of the entire bookstore: A little bit of fight the man mixed with a little bit of let’s take a breath.
The bottom of a rabbit hole
Perelandra exists “spiritually at the bottom of a rabbit hole,” said Braun, and physically on Willow Street in Fort Collins. It shares a building and an ethos with Wolverine Farm, a nonprofit literary and arts organization.
Wolverine Farm began as an independent publishing company in 2003. Its founder, Todd Simmons, wanted to create a place for friends and fellow artists in Northern Colorado to get their ideas out into the world. A couple of years later, Wolverine Farm took on nonprofit status and opened a volunteer-run bookstore in the back of Bean Cycle coffee shop on College Avenue, a few blocks from where they sit now.
In 2015 Wolverine Farm picked up and expanded into a creaky new building in the city’s Downtown River District and called the place Wolverine Farm Publick House. Braun, who frequented the Bean Cycle location while studying for his MFA, wanted to revive the bookshop. In late 2020, Perelandra opened.
Braun thinks a lot about structures — about what structure Perelandra fits into as a bookstore, as an independent bookstore, as an independent bookstore attached to a nonprofit. He thinks about the way books are arranged and the way that genres can guide or limit a reader. He thinks about the way Wolverine Farm’s past is echoed in its newer space, and other poetic things like that. He also thinks a lot about poetry.
Perelandra isn’t a big place. Two skinny stories tall, with a coffee bar occupying half of the ground level. A 4-foot-tall portrait of writer Annie Dillard looms over the coffee bar, “the godmother of this shop,” Shafer said. On the second story are a cozy, dense poetry room and light-filled working room, with long communal tables where book clubs meet.
When Braun helped Wolverine Farm revive the bookshop, one of the major things he focused on was the shelves. The shelves in Perelandra don’t form continuous lines. They are short, choppy and offset, forming a mosaic of books rather than straightforward sections.
Genres, too, merge in unexpected ways. They are created in accordance with the “Three Pillars of Resistance to the Hegemonic Logics of Marketability, Prediction, and the Machine,” according to Perelandra’s website.
In simpler terms, you won’t find labels like “fiction” or “biography” on the shelves. Instead, you’ll find genre labels lifted from book titles (“Living by Fiction”), poetry lines (“Flood the Margins”) or wordplay (“Subject, Object, Predicament”).
Astrology and astronomy books are forced to play with one another in a section called “Cosmic Sandbox,” anthropology and science books commingle in “Anthropocene Blues.” Braun’s favorite section of the bookshop is a wall of books classified as “Technological Disobedience.”
Reading at altitude
The original motivations of an artist’s residency — which some attribute to wealthy merchants during the Renaissance, who invited artists and philosophers to work in seclusion at their private villas — were to remove the artist from their environment. The same is true of writing residencies, which still exist largely in deeply wooded, secluded regions a la Walden Pond.
In recent years, however, arts organizations have been turning their residencies into more public-facing positions. Museums especially, in trying to shake their reputation as stuffy, elitist institutions, have picked artists specifically for their ability to engage with a community.
The Denver Art Museum’s creative-in-residence program, for example, requires the artist to be available to the public during “office hours” at least six hours per week. RedLine’s artist-in-residence program emphasizes “socially engaged art.” In Breckenridge, artists-in-residence are invited to teach art classes at the local schools.
Perelandra’s reader-in-residence combines the solitude of the original residency tradition with the community engagement of contemporary ones, into a position that’s physically out in public, but mentally tucked away in a good book.
“The reader position is akin to a listener. I’m just taking it in, I’m not supposed to do anything except keep my mouth shut and my mind open,” Shafer said. “I think that’s a muscle that is societally atrophied. Just reading without having to jump to a judgment, or a smart critique, or a synthesis — which is fun to do, like that’s the way my mind actually works. It’s just really good to take a break from that.”
Shafer is married, the father of three and a full-time real estate agent. “Time does have a real scarcity to it, that’s just a reality,” he said. The residency has created a structure and an external motivation to carve out moments just for reading.
At home, when he reads to his kids, he notices the way they are immediately immersed in the world of the book. It’s a state that he’s recently been able to tap back into thanks to the reading residency. But it takes him a while to get there — sometimes he spends 10 minutes, sometimes the whole session below what he called “cruising altitude,” the state where the exterior world starts to fall away, and the setting, plot and characters of the book take over.
“The fact that I had to learn how to get back (to that state) is just because I’d unlearned it,” he said. “Kids naturally see things in these different dimensions.”
Asked about the byproduct of setting aside focused time for reading, Shafer turned the question around: What is the byproduct of reading the way we’re conditioned to now? Reading headlines, reading captions, reading quickly for the information we want or need, reading to form an opinion, reading to regurgitate.
“It overwhelms our capacity very quickly,” he answered. “A book might feel overwhelming, but I think it’s actually much gentler with our physiology and with our true capacity.”
“Two hours per week is not enough to change the way our minds have habituated into this other rhythm,” he continued. “The rest of my week is very much all over the place and scattered. I just wish it wasn’t such a novel thing to come and like, read a freaking book.”