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In high school, I knew a beautiful girl who wrote poetry. I’ll call her Lily.
Lily was a little shy until you got to know her. I too might be that way if I were constantly being asked about my looks, as she was.
I remember when Lily’s friend, who was pretty but not burdensomely beautiful, told me, “Lily doesn’t do small talk. She wants to have conversations about important things.”
Today, this stance strikes me as a typically teen thing to say. At the time, though, I was enthralled by the argument. I too wanted to be a beautiful poetess who eschewed small talk to discuss profundities. Fuck living on the surface! Let’s get deep!
I don’t feel that way anymore—or not exactly.
*
In her essay “Intimations: Debts and Lessons” from her short book of essays of the same name, Zadie Smith catalogues all that she’s learned from the people in her life, and from the artists and writers who have inspired her. Someone named Carol is included in Smith’s taxonomy. Here is some of what Carol taught her:
Mothering is an art. Housekeeping is an art. Gardening is an art. Baking is an art. Those of us who have no natural gifts in these areas—or perhaps no interest—easily dismiss them. Making small talk is an art, and never to be despised just because you yourself dread making it.
Let me repeat that last line for the folks in the back: Making small talk is an art, and never to be despised just because you yourself dread making it.
It’s notable that Smith’s mention of small talk follows a list that includes mothering—notice she didn’t say parenting—and then a few occupations that are coded as feminine: housekeeping, baking.
I’m thinking of the many times I’ve been in a room of women of multiple generations. All that chit-chat. The surface level speaking of inconsequential things: the weather, a sale, what vegetables are in season. The way we touch on more intense subjects—our bodies, for one—and then return to neutral topics. The way the profound gets tucked into the mundane, bright flashes that might burn you if you’re not careful. The stories of care (“He didn’t sleep well, and so I….”), of our own oppression (“No cake for me! I’m being good.”), the way we attempt, again and again, to find common ground. How two women might alight on a topic of deeper significance, and swim off into uncharted waters, heads bowed in communion.
Sometimes in these situations I get annoyed by the prattle; other times, I feel privileged to be a part of it.
*
I’m interested in the pockets of connection we make through easy conversation, and the effort it takes for for that conversation to feel just that: easy. Zadie Smith is correct; it is an art. A person who is good at small talk holds you gently inside the exchange.
Of course, not only women make small talk; it underpins all aspects of civil society.
This spring, I was a fellow at the Huntington’s research library, and one of my favorite aspects of the fellowship was the opportunity to chat with the security guards. At the Huntington, you have to check in upon arrival, and, in order to prevent the smuggling of rare archives, you can’t leave certain parts of the building without getting your bags inspected. Every day, then, I would speak with the security guards multiple times. I got to know their names and general schedules, and I had my favorites, with whom I’d discuss the weather, or traffic, or whatever book I was lugging around that day. How our weekends went. What our lunch plans were.
From one perspective, these were forgettable conversations. On the other hand, they allowed me and my fellow conversation partner to affirm our place in the world.
Professor Thalia Wheatley calls conversation an “ancient technology.” With it, we are “aligning our brains” to share an experience of the universe.
These kinds of conversations are an antidote to the multitudinous, warped, doctored, scattered realities of the internet.
Small talk is something humans make.
*
I appreciate when small talk remains small—skating along a smooth surface, cultivating a shared reality, confirmation that right here, right now, we exist—and I also like when a casual conversation provides an opportunity for a different one, one that surprises, heals, discomfits, alters. As a fiction writer, I’m always hungry for moments when the mundane veers into the revelatory, or the dramatic, or the highly specific.
(One guard told me he had clocks in every room in his house, and that they chimed every thirty minutes, including through the night. I will never stop thinking about this.)
*
I really hit it off with one security guard, I’ll call her Tina.
Tina and I liked to discuss shoes. She noticed mine, I noticed hers, we traded notes on foot complaints, style goals and obstacles. From there, we talked about our love of dance, our exercise routines, aging. Then we started talking about being tired. The reasons why we were tired. By the time we were talking about our marriages, it felt like we were real friends.
My Huntington fellowship lasted only two months and I haven’t returned since. I still think about Tina, though, and the talks we had, both the superficial and the deep, and how the former led to the latter—how the former was a path into the latter.
*
Have you ever stopped to marvel at how talking is the central past time of most adults?
If most conversations were transcribed faithfully, they’d be amorphous, (blobby), repetitive, random, illogical. And yet, in person, they feel anything but that.
The best ones seem to possess an unseen design.
*
The other night I was on a shuttle coming home from a concert when I realized the bus was cacophonous with the sound of conversation, dozens of them, everyone’s words disappearing as soon as they appeared, words scaffolding meaning, exchanging it, transforming it, until these meanings were, probably, forgotten, to be replaced by other conversations, also forgotten.
*
In The Book of Delights, Ross Gay writes that our imminent disappearance is the voice’s first subject. “Fading and disappearance,” he writes, “are sound’s essential characteristics.”
*
I was taught that dialogue in fiction should have multiple functions. (I believe credit goes to Janet Burroway’s Writing Fiction for this framing.) These functions might include: characterization, progression of the plot, deepening of relationships or conflict, foreshadowing, scene setting, and being funny. It’s not enough for your dialogue to characterize, for instance, it must characterize AND progress the plot. It must characterize AND progress the plot AND foreshadow.
When your dialogue feels rootless (blobby, boring, forgettable, disappearing) the best trick is to articulate its functions.
*
In his craft book, Thrill Me, Benjamin Percy recommends what he calls “triangulation” in a scene of dialogue. This means your characters should have their conversation while doing some other shared action—in his words a “lower order goal.”
For instance, a conversation between a married couple about their future is more compelling if they’re, say, riding on a ferris wheel, or trying to assemble a bed, than if they’re simply sitting across a table from each other.
Percy writes, “The outcome of the conversation (Character A wants to reveal his feelings to Character B, for example) is almost never enough. To make the audience want to push forward, to wonder what happens next, there needs to be something else at work. The lower order goal will serve that function, providing a healthy dose of momentum.”
*
I tell my students: How something is said is as important as what is said.
*
To my kids I say, “Don’t talk to me that way.”
*
In her essay, “Notes on Novel Writing,” Elizabeth Bowen announces, in that imperious way of hers, that dialogue “must be pointed, intentional, relevant.”
The opposite of small talk, then.
“Speech is what the characters do to each other,” she says.
(All those words are disappearing, mostly forgotten, except that one thing you’ll remember forever. Those words they can’t take back. Those words I can’t take back.)
Bowen goes on: “There must be present in dialogue—i.e., in each sentence spoken by each character—either (a) calculation, or (b) involuntary self-revelation,” she says.
Whenever I read that, I shiver.
I think: Is that true in real life conversations, too?
*
Maybe what I like about small talk is how it rejects this storytelling rubric of intention, subtext, and forward momentum.
The comfort of being a real life person, passing a silly blob of language to another real life person—
But also, I can’t ignore it: even the most meaningless conversation has the potential to reveal desire, lack, history, expectation. A conversation can change in an instant to unearth the sparkling gem of narrative promise at its center.
*
Over the summer, I saw my friend Molly, a poet and teacher who lives in Maine. We met up in North Carolina, where our mutual friend Doug lives. Doug is reserved by nature, and an attentive listener.
What I hold onto from our visit was the quality of our conversations. A transcription would show the typical blobs and asides, the stupid nothings, the tangents to nowhere. But a distillation of these transcripts would reveal the gift of a long, treasured friendship, where histories are already known if not shared. The efficient shorthands. The ways we push, probe, how we don’t let each other off the hook. The tenderness.
I want to always remember Doug driving us around as Molly and I circled topics, diving deeper and deeper. Occasionally, Doug weighed in with an insightful observation or a useful question.
Our conversation was a collaboration. Alone we would not be able to articulate the truth of a situation or an idea, but together we might be able to. The ancient technology: whirring, building. We made conversation.
We talked and talked, and it was the opposite of small.
*
During this trip, Molly confessed that she’d been working, for years, on a series of poems called The Minutes. She’d been taking the minutes at her faculty union meetings for eighteen years and had become skilled at taking notes on what was said, and then fleshing them out later. She decided to take this idea to her personal life.
“What if I had an archive of the minutes from particularly energizing or imaginative or nourishing conversations?” she asked.
Recently, she explained it to me like this:
“A few years ago, I started jotting down the dates of those types of conversations, recording who was present for them, and making a list of words, phrases, and images that might capture the important bits. These lists have become the starting points for a series of poems that hold my friends’ strange, funny, dear brains and hearts at their centers.”
What a brilliant idea for a writing project!
While I’ve been preoccupied with the narrative potentials of conversation (i.e., dialogue), my dear friend is off exploring the lyric potential of talk. A fitting task, considering the right-now-ness of speech. You talk and the words disappear, meaning shifting immediately. And a poem dilates a moment, just as speaking and listening do.
When I asked Molly more about this artistic impulse, what she described reminded me of listening: an act of heightened attention.
She directed to me to poet Joanna Klink, who writes of her own work like this:
“I want to place myself in a field of deep attention, and out of that attention come to feel and regard with more acute understanding what is there.”
*
Molly is currently writing a poem about the conversation we enjoyed over one particular dinner—the “sparse” meal, as Doug called it, a phrase we have since repeated in our text chain to unending delight.
(A text chain, is, of course, a conversation that is a transcription, a record.)
What will she include? What of our talk was central to the lyric moment? I want to experience that field of deep attention.
*
I wonder what Lily, that beautiful poet I knew in high school, would have to say about all of this.
If I ran into her, I’d ask, “Hey, are you still writing poetry?”
But only after we made small talk.
Lovely.
I want to read Molly's poems!