This Friday, on the off-chance that one is driving through Williamstown at around 2 a.m. with the radio on, they’ll stumble across a happy surprise: the middle of a 24-hour read-aloud of James Joyce’s Ulysses.
Organized by WCFM board members Sasha Tucker ’25 and Julian Spiro ’25, this is the second annual read-a-thon held by WCFM 91.9, the College’s radio station. The first, held last year, was a reading of Herman Melville’s Moby Dick. “Last year, we read Moby Dick because two places — one of them being Herman Melville’s house in the Berkshires — do a 24-hour read-a-thon, so we knew it’d fit the time that we had allotted for it,” Tucker said. Tucker hoped to foster community among radio DJs and the College community at large, envisioning the readings as an accessible entry point to the station. The read-aloud format is also well-suited for on-air programming, allowing readers and listeners to dip in and out of a larger project.
“The thing about WCFM is that we do events, but a lot of them are sort of separate from the radio itself,” Spiro said. “We wanted to do more … on-air, novelty programming.”
For Spiro and Tucker, the success of last year’s reading was immediately clear. Fueled by donuts and coffee from the English department, around 50 participants read for 30-minute intervals. Tucker and Spiro covered empty shifts, and some faculty members got involved as well. At the end, those who read or tuned in asked that a similar read-a-thon be held again.
“People just kept on being like, ‘Woah, that was so fun,’” Tucker recalled. “And I know people who proceeded to have shows going forward… They just loved the sound of their own voice on air so much.”
According to Tucker and Spiro, the excitement for the event this year has been palpable, and time slots to read were filled in hours. “Last year, I spent a week groveling, being like, ‘Come on, please, I know you want to be awake at 3 in the morning reading Moby Dick, I know you do,’” Tucker said.
Ulysses was the obvious choice for this year’s event, with Spiro noting that it was a nearly unanimous decision. He attributed this in part to the book’s timeline, also contained within 24 hours, and how it is conducive to fragmented readings.
“The fact that it’s so famously unintelligible for large swathes of it works well, in that you can come in and read half an hour of it, and you don’t miss that much,” Spiro explained. “It’s the same way that Moby Dick worked well, because half of the Moby Dick chapters are just a Wikipedia article about whale facts.”
Tucker and Spiro are again working with the English department to request funding for snacks. They also noted that people are particularly excited to do group readings for the more theatrical sections, potentially including forays into accent work. The reading is an example of what WCFM hopes to achieve: programming that is both reflective of and created by Williamstown itself, Spiro said.
“It feels good to do things that bring in community members,” Spiro said. “Even over the past couple years, we’ve actually tripled or quadrupled the amount of non-Williams affiliated people who have radio shows, and the amount of DJs has totally ballooned” — including the owners of a record shop in North Adams, he added.
“That’s been great because it’s a real service that goes beyond the campus,” Spiro continued. “It’s nice to feel like we’re not just giving that to people, but that people are creating it themselves.”
