New writing CONVERSATION Guest Editor MICHELENE WANDOR introduces her pick of poetry and prose on the theme of conversation EVERYONE talks; even people who have a reputation for being reticent, shy, not very talkative. Conversation is the automatic, unthinking currency of daily life. It is the currency we use to conduct the everyday processes of survival: shopping, arrangements, exchanging information. It is the currency of the private intimacies between us and our loved (or hated) ones. We all use language all the time, without necessarily being conscious of the ways in which we use it. We interrupt, overlap, finish each other’s sentences, can tell what someone is going to say from the tone in which they begin a sentence. In a sense, we create texts as we speak, texts that disappear after they have interacted with the texts of other people: conversations. When I was young, I read voraciously. I had very bad asthma as a child, and reading was not only one of the ways in which I could spend time without too much physical effort, but was also a way of entering complex, exciting worlds, where people did and said things. I entered and left communities of people without having to leave my bed. In a way, my own personal socialising process consisted not of the ordinary everyday things which other children did, but of the faraway worlds of adults: Dickens, popular romances, war novels, anything I could get my hands on, or could persuade my mother to bring me. Looking back, I remember that while I read every word of a novel, I would rush over the long passages of description or philosophising until I came to the dialogue - the conversation. Here the fiction really came alive for me. Here people not only talked to each other, but conveyed all their emotion. However many subtle and gripping paragraphs there were about characters’ inner thoughts or motivations, it was in the dialogue passages that they really lived for me. For the complete essay, and for Michelene's full selection of poetry and prose on the theme of conversation, read issue 10 • Subscribe! Read a poem chosen by Michelene Wandor: He said by Nicola East For more on MICHELENE WANDOR, go to www.mwandor.co.uk
	Top of page | Home | Contact | About | Subscribe | Submit | Advertise | Tell Us