In this episode of Conceptually Speaking, I sit down with Sara Hildreth, a former high school English teacher and the writer behind FictionMatters, a reading community devoted to a wide-ranging public conversation about literature and the life of the reader. Like many fellow travelers in the world of bookish new media, Sara’s journey toward becoming a “public reader” took off during the pandemic, with her sharing thoughts, analysis, and reviews of literature on Tumblr, Instagram, Patreon, and now the official home of FictionMatters—Substack. It began, however, as an outgrowth of her capstone project at Georgetown University, which wrestled with the importance of teaching fiction in high schools despite mounting pressure to emphasize nonfiction. A question that continues to haunt the field, albeit in new and more pernicious forms in 2026. Our conversation follows a line of inquiry I’ve been pursuing over the course of this whole season of Conceptually Speaking—what is the relationship between literary studies and the digital? While most of those conversations have been with academics working at the intersection of new media and the humanities, Sara’s work represents another important piece of that puzzle: the appetite for literary and intellectual community completely outside the academy. Over the course of our dialogue we consider the possibilities and pressures of contemporary online reading culture, from the hot-takeification of criticism, to the aestheticization of the bookish life, to the question Sara brings to every book she picks up—what is this thing trying to do, and how successful is it? Key Concepts from the Episode Reading as a Visible Practice One’s ability to read literature is often misrepresented as a fixed skill and/or a private cognitive act, but serious close reading is an ongoing practice of making predictions, locating patterns, testing possibilities, noticing disruptions, and revising one’s understanding as new evidence emerges. These practices aren’t natural, but have been inherited from previous literary communities.When the processes that support comprehension and interpretation remain invisible, students may assume that experienced readers arrive at meaning immediately. Making those processes observable helps reframe confusion, uncertainty, and rereading as evidence of intellectual engagement rather than failure.Consider how often students see the process of reading rather than its finished product. What might change if your classroom treated provisional noticing, genuine questions, and revision as central evidence of reading?Interpretation as Inquiry Literary discussion often defaults to judgment: whether a text is good or bad, enjoyable or unenjoyable, worthy or unworthy. These judgments do have a particular role and function, but they can foreclose inquiry when they arrive before readers have identified what a text is attempting to accomplish.Close reading experiences invite readers to attend to a work’s purposes, formal choices, historical conditions, genre expectations, and effects. Evaluation then becomes more precise because it rests on an account of what the text is doing rather than on preference alone.Examine the questions that organize your classroom talk and writing. Do they invite students to defend an opinion, or do they create room for students to investigate a text’s ambitions, methods, contradictions, and consequences?Criticism as Conversation Interpretation becomes richer when it is understood as a social practice rather than an individual performance. Readers bring different histories, vocabularies, disciplinary knowledge, genre expertise, and lived experiences to a text; those differences can expand what any one reader is able to notice.Contemporary digital platforms have created new access points to literary and cultural criticism, but they can also encourage speed, certainty, and the performance of a finished take. A more durable critical culture leaves room for response, hesitation, disagreement, return, and revision.Consider what your discussion structures reward. Are students primarily speaking to demonstrate what they already think, or are they expected to listen carefully, take up another person’s idea, and allow their own interpretation to change?Sara’s project, along with other digital literary communities, carry a utopian kernel that I find especially compelling—the possibility that platforms designed to harvest our attention and extract our data might also sustain serious forms of shared intellectual life. FictionMatters is a readerly hub rooted in reciprocity, intellectual generosity, and the belief that readers from different disciplines, generations, and backgrounds can make richer meanings together than they can alone, even if that work happens online. It is also a standing rebuke of the “Death of Reading” discourse. The fact that there are millions of readers in communities just like Sara’s make it clear that the appetite for close, rigorous, conversational reading was never the scarce resource—the institutional resources required to sustain it were. Here’s to hoping our efforts might make a difference, no matter how small. Links: FictionMatters — Sara HildrethReading in Public — FictionMattersFictionMatters Book Club — Patreon@fictionmatters — Instagram“Love’s Work: The Generic Pleasures of Romance” — Anna Kornbluh“Three Theses on the Literacy Crisis” — Becoming LiterarySupport the show
