April - August, 2025

In March, 2025, I felt that current events necessitated a recommitment to community-building. After conferring with my immediate family, we had an idea: bring everyone into our family traditions by reading the book Watership Down aloud to them! I immediately set to work to make it happen by crafting a website, reaching out to our community members and their friends and family, and organizing recurring video chats. After only a few short days, we had launched our weekly Battel Family Readalouds.

Over the course of four months, we were joined by dozens of our family and friends who returned week after week while we, my mom and I, brought them into the world of our favorite story, complete with the accents and voices that my mom used when she read the book to my sibling and I as children. At the time, I could tell that we had landed on something truly magical.

Even though the live weekly calls have ended, I uploaded our recordings from Zoom onto YouTube, where friends and family can catch up or treat our sessions as a personal audio book until the next time we organize our very special readalouds.