Reading & Contemplation | “The Art of Language” with Marilyn McEntyre
Shownotes:
Continuing our series reading and contemplation, Chris and Eddie are joined by Marilyn McEntyre, teacher, author, and lover of words. They primarily discuss two of Marilyn’s books, Caring for Words in a Culture of Lies and Speaking Peace in a Climate of Conflict. Throughout this episode, you’ll hear how much love and care Marilyn has for words, for language, and for the lost art of conversation. She gives practical ways to shift the tone of conversation, taking it from accusatory to something open-ended and compassionate.
Marilyn considers herself to be a writer who teaches after being a teacher who writes. Although she no longer is a full-time teacher, she continues to teach and speak and offer writing workshops throughout the year. She is the author of 18 books, including Make a List and When Poets Pray. She remains interested in the intersection of language, spirituality, and healing, and her writing reflects that.
Resources:
Find Marilyn on Twitter and Facebook.
Learn more about Marilyn at https://www.marilynmcentyre.com
Find out more about her books at https://www.marilynmcentyre.com/books
Transcript:
Chris McAlilly 00:00 Hi, I'm Chris McAlilly.
Eddie Rester 00:02
And I'm Eddie Rester. Welcome to The Weight.
Chris McAlilly 00:04
Today we have Marilyn McEntyre, and we're talking to her about language and conversation. It's a part of our series called Reading and Contemplation.
Eddie Rester 00:14
And I really was not familiar with her at all. And so I, you know, I do what I always do in prepping for a podcast and just went down this incredible rabbit hole of the books that she's written. I've actually ordered one. And that's not one of the books we talked about today, but one about making a list. But she's written a couple of books one, about 10 years ago, "Caring for Words in a Culture of Lies," and one just a few years ago, "Speaking Peace in a Climate of Conflict."
Chris McAlilly 00:47
What did you take away from the conversation, Eddie?
Eddie Rester 00:51
I think there are two sides of it for me as I think of it. One is grief that we have broken our ability to use language in a way that helps us find a better life and peace and hope with one another. We use language to tear down, fight, win. And I think that's part of it for me, which we all know that. But the other side of it is just the little things that we can do, within conversations, how we treat each other, how we are playful, that I think can help us recover community and places where we can have safe conversations with each other, even if we disagree over things.
Chris McAlilly 01:44
Yeah, I am struck similarly by just the immense challenge of caring for language as a way of caring for culture, and, you know, the ways in which our language is polluted, distorted, you know, corrupted. But, you know, I think I was really drawn to the image that she used of being a steward of language. And just like you're stewarding anything else, you can care for it in small ways and create order and beauty and goodness and truth, even within a single conversation. Or within the context of your family. She talks about her grandmother, as a person from whom she learned how to be a good conversationalist. Her grandmother's from Virginia, Vuhginyuh. She used to go visitin'.
Eddie Rester 02:37
And she talks a little bit about the 20th century mass media, what it did to how we use language. And then we talked some about the rise of social media, which is a great disrupter in how we utilize language and receive language. There's so many, we could have spun off in so many directions. Before we started, we were talking about the evolution of words, and I thought we were gonna go there. And this is one of those conversations that I think went for me in the direction that it needed to go today.
Chris McAlilly 03:08
Yeah, I'm validated by the work we're doing here on the podcast, creating a better conversation. Seriously. I mean, I do think that it's been... I think that's one of the convictions that we have in doing this is that there's a way of having a conversation, especially among Christians and the church, that is deprived or depleted. You know, one conversation time, Eddie Rester. We're going to make it.
Eddie Rester 03:34
One conversation at a time. And just to let the listener know, recently, we had some folks share with us who very unexpectedly saw both of us together and they said, "What we love about the podcast, is that you're creating space for people you may not agree with to have conversations." And you know, I think that's it in a nutshell. And so I'm thankful that the listener, wherever you are, if it's just my mama.
Chris McAlilly 04:03 It's just your mama.
Eddie Rester 04:05
If it's just my mama, or whoever you are, we're thankful you're in the journey with us. We don't say that enough. We're very thankful for that.
Chris McAlilly 04:12
Hey, Eddie's Mom! We're thankful for you.
Eddie Rester 04:14
We're thankful mom, Glinda. We're glad you're listening.
Chris McAlilly 04:17
And everybody else, you've got someone, I would imagine, in your life that you want a better conversation with, maybe you share this podcast with, but maybe think about the ways in which you use language, the way in which the habits you have around language or around conversation, and I think it'd be good. I think it'd be good. Thanks for being with us today.
Eddie Rester 04:41
[INTRO] Life can be heavy. We carry around with us the weight of our doubt, our pain, our suffering, our mental health, our family system, our politics. This is a podcast to create space for all of that.
Chris McAlilly 04:54
We want to talk about these things with humility, charity, and intellectual honesty, but more than that, we want to listen. It's time to open up our echo chamber. Welcome to The Weight. [END INTRO]
Chris McAlilly 05:10
We're here today with Marilyn McEntyre. Marilyn, thank you so much for joining the podcast today.
Marilyn McEntyre 05:11 My pleasure.
Eddie Rester 05:12
So, Marilyn, tell us just a little bit of your background. I know at some point you were a teacher, and you've moved out of teaching. So just kind of give us a thumbnail sketch of who you are in your life and what you're up to these days.
Marilyn McEntyre 05:30
Yeah, well, I grew up in a family of teachers and preachers, so I couldn't help myself. My brother and I are both teachers from way back. I began my career many years ago, teaching high school for several years, then went back to grad school, and spent most of my career teaching undergraduates, occasional graduate courses. And then I moved out of full time institutional teaching to be a writer who teaches instead of a teacher who writes is how I put it to myself and other people. And now, I do teach quite a bit in workshops, I teach a couple of semester courses at seminaries. And I teach a lot of courses that are workshops that are set up for adults who want to keep learning. And really, if I ran the zoo, all of us would go to school one day a week for the rest of our lives. I just think lifelong learning is really important. And I love working with grownups who want to read and think and talk to each other.
Chris McAlilly 06:33
Where did you discover that language was going to be a passion of yours and something that you cared deeply about?
Marilyn McEntyre 06:41
Well, not to be glib about it, but probably when I was, as soon as I could speak. We grew up in a three-generation household. My grandmother was an English teacher from Virginia, real careful with her own speech, and lovely about just gently correcting us and talking about words and reading to us. We got read to a lot. So I feel as though one of the big blessings in my life was to grow up in a verbal community like our family of people who enjoyed words. Everybody would groan when my dad made puns, but his puns were part of the language play that really made me very early on think this is fun. It's really fun to think about words and play with them and put them next to each other and see what happens. And so it came pretty naturally.
Marilyn McEntyre 07:37
And I loved my graduate work. And even though there were some challenges in going back to grad school when I did, when I went there, I was kind of praying through is this the right decision and so on, and one of the things that came to me was the question, if you just knew you had four years left to live, would you do this with it? And the yes just came up from the depths. And so I sort of feel like that's a sign of vocation, that yeah, this is the thing to be doing. You love it, you're called to it, you would do it no matter what.
Eddie Rester 08:13
And you said, you grew up in a family of preachers and teachers, so I'd imagine there's a whole lot of reading that was going on, a lot of discussions about reading, and then just a lot of words. I mean, preachers, speaking from experience, we use a lot of words. So I would imagine that had a pretty major impact on you as well.
Marilyn McEntyre 08:32
It really did, and growing up with the King James Bible, you know, I don't think that it's necessarily something we should go back to as the pulpit Bible and all that now. But I also think that the legacy of an antique language that connects us to the communion of saints and to former generations of people who have worshipped and that sort of takes us out of our ordinary language and makes us stretch a little bit into words that have had other shades of meaning is valuable. We can really get mired in the ordinariness of mass media. So, you know, even the many years that the Catholic Church maintained a Latin Mass, that's, I know that my parents, my dad especially, was sort of anti Catholic, and he was of that generation of Evangelicals were very suspicious of papyrus. But I came to deeply value what the Catholic tradition had held on to.
Marilyn McEntyre 09:36
And even though I'm not sure that at this moment, we should be, you know, promoting Latin masses or, you know, Hebrew services, I still think there's something about stepping into an ancient, sacred language that says what we're doing has been done by human beings for many, many generations, and it's been done in ways that are alien to us. And it just has to take us out of our historical moment and a sort of arrogance that goes with that, some notion that we're smarter than people used to be, or we understand what we're talking about more adequately than they did.
Chris McAlilly 10:20
I think that's interesting. Yeah, you jumped in there, Eddie, and I jumped on top of you.
Eddie Rester 10:25
Yeah, I was just gonna say, you talked about the Latin Mass. I grew up in a Catholic family on both sides. And my grandmother on my mom's side, from Deep South Louisiana, throughout all of my growing up years, was still bitter, that they weren't doing the the Latin Mass anymore. She loved the Latin Mass. For her, that ancient language spoken, I've never thought about it in the way that you just put it, that it kind of pulls us out of our historical moment and puts us in the line of the saints again, and I think that it's a great way to think about it. Because, you know, sometimes I've pulled back again, against people who wanted choirs to sing in different languages. And yet, the words that we maybe don't understand still find a way to speak into us.
Chris McAlilly 11:16
Don't you think it's the case that, I mean, this is part of what makes language so fascinating is that it can grow stale. Both ancient languages can grow stale in a way that precipitates the need to make the language more relevant or more common. You know, so you have the kind of the Common English Bible that was the King James Bible in its day. And then now you need to, you know, it needs to be updated. And I do think, as I've gotten to know you, Eddie, that you're always pressing for the language of the church to be available for people now. But I haven't thought about that as coming out of your experience of coming from a double Catholic family.
Chris McAlilly 12:04
But is it the case, and Marilyn, maybe you see this as well, that folks who grew up in the evangelical world at times do find themselves grasping for or stretching towards or looking back for something a little bit more ancient or grounded or rooted in the tradition, and not just something that's relevant now?
Marilyn McEntyre 12:28
Yeah, I think that it's part of the richness of the legacy of English, that we have 75 and more extant translations of Scripture. And some of them are better than others. But everything from King James, at one end of sort of formality and distance and say, Eugene Peterson, or The Message, or Good News for Modern Men are some of those translations at the other end. And translators always are working with trade offs in terms of how much you are to go for accessibility, as opposed to historical accuracy and how much do you go for the poetic cadence of the sentence as opposed to the literal function of the sentence and so on.
Marilyn McEntyre 13:25
And so I think the fact that there are so many translations is something the church can and should be celebrating, and occasionally, step out of whatever is the pulpit Bible, and read from other translations, and then raise the question of what difference do the differences make? Because the Living Word is living in the context of an ongoing conversation, and I have faith that if the Holy Spirit is at work in the whole business of bringing us into that living word, then that Spirit is at work in the conversation itself, and among the various translators. And so, I have translations I like much better than others, but occasionally, if I do that comparison, I find something even in the ones I don't like that wakes me up again. I think, oh, I hadn't thought of it that way.
Eddie Rester 14:20
I think that's what the power of Eugene Peterson's The Message translation was because he woke us up again.
Marilyn McEntyre 14:27 Yeah.
Eddie Rester 14:28
And there were places in there... I had a professor one time talk about how this is inaccurate.
But if you read it across multiple translations, it helped you read other translations.
Marilyn McEntyre 14:44 Definitely.
Eddie Rester 14:45
And I think sometimes--I'm going to make a jump with this, maybe and y'all will both slapp me down for this. That's okay. I think sometimes when we get into intense conversations with language sometimes we get so focused on what we need to say in a moment that we don't stop to think about how we could express that same thing, maybe in different phrasings along the way to give maybe ourselves or our listener, a better hearing of what we're attempting to say,
Marilyn McEntyre 15:17
One of the most useful questions we can and should raise for each other in conversations is, "What do you mean?" Could you explain what you mean? Because as soon as you say, "what do you mean," if you say it gently and open heartedly, and you're not just trying to nail somebody down, it invites them to revisit their words, and think of other words in which they could say the same thing. And so it adds a layer of nuance and complexity to what's being exchanged.
Eddie Rester 15:53
You wrote a couple of books, "Speaking Peace in a Climate of Conflict" and then "Caring for Words in a Culture of Lies." You know, extremely timely books. Words are weaponized now in such significant ways. What led you to write those two books?
Marilyn McEntyre 16:14
Exactly that. I really felt a sense of urgency about the state of public discourse. And I wrote that book, it came out of delivering lectures at Princeton Seminary in 2004. That was a long time ago. That was before some of the current urgencies around language, but even then, I was feeling as though the the number of verifiable inaccuracies that were just shrugged off in say, mass media, and the glibness and the ways in which so many important issues got reduced to euphemisms are over simplified. And the use of sloganeering and jargon in political discourse was just terribly troubling. And I think the problem goes back way beyond that.
Marilyn McEntyre 17:10
I do think that the rise of mass media in the 20th century has something to do with it. I think making language itself into a commodity that's bought and sold on airtime is part of it. So, you know, there's a lot of linguists have done much better analysis than I can of the sources of these problems. In some ways, I think they are uniquely American problems, but not all together. And so American culture, I say, there's somebody who's taught American Studies for a lot of years, but it's a huge generalization, but I think that historically, American culture has tended in distinguishing ourselves from the class systems in Europe, to privileged a kind of colloquialism, down home, aw shucks, you know, no frills, I speak the language of the people, kind of public discourse. We've had great statesmen. Lincoln was a marvelous rhetorician. But by and large, I think that we often don't expect enough clarity and precision and accuracy and even poetry from people who speak the things or write the things that we all count on.
Eddie Rester 18:31
You wrote in 2004. 2005 is the marker when social media truly began. YouTube launches in 2005, and I think Twitter in 2007. Facebook is kind of evolving at that time. And so the ways that mass media could distort language was the 20th century. This first quarter of the 21st century has been how can I distort the use of language? And so, as you think about how we can reclaim, I mean, caring for words and speaking peace, how can we individually begin to do that?
Marilyn McEntyre 19:14
Yeah, that's what those books were about. And just to clarify, the "Caring for Words" was ultimately published as a book in 2009. So I had time to reflect on it then. And then "Speaking Peace," I don't remember, came out a couple years ago, two or three. You probably know.
Eddie Rester 19:31
Yeah, I was looking at it earlier. Yeah, it's the more recent one. Yeah.
Marilyn McEntyre 19:36
But it's a sequel. There is a continuum. And the way the books are organized is by what I'm thinking of as stewardship strategies exactly to address the question you just asked. So how do we do this? If we're going to get practical, how does any one of us care for the language and help preserve it from the kind of erosion or attrition that it's suffering? And one of the practices that well, the very first practice I listed in "Caring for Words" is love words. Just love words. Call attention to them. Play with them. Notice them. Invite other people to notice them. Read them out loud. Make conversation playful and interesting and a thing in itself. So it's not just something we do as a matter of practical exchange.
Marilyn McEntyre 20:32
I remember my Virginia grandma used to use the word visiting, in that lovely way the Virginians say that.
Chris McAlilly 20:39 Visitin'.
Marilyn McEntyre 20:40
People would come over and visit. And if you came over to visit, you didn't just watch stuff together or debrief the news, you asked each other questions, and you listened. And so that model is something I really cherish. And it's not confined to my grandma. People still do it. But I think conversation itself, making a point of making it a pleasure with people is one strategy, being conscious and intentional about that.
Marilyn McEntyre 21:15
And another strategy is don't tolerate lies, was one chapter. And the culture of lies part is "lies" broadly defined. I absolutely do believe that there are public people who are lying to us. And I also believe that there are a lot of slippages and inaccuracies that might fall under that broad umbrella of what's really just not quite the truth. And so to call those out and have the courage to say, in a public forum or in some public way, "That's not just a matter of opinion, that's inaccurate. There is evidence to the contrary." takes some courage, sometimes, especially I think, since we're talking from within Christian communities, where there's a certain kind of niceness that often passes for community building, when in fact, I think we need to have a much more vigorous, sturdy kind of community where we can challenge each other and not feel as though we're inflicting harm.
Marilyn McEntyre 22:26
But just to say, well, if that's what you think, I want to hold your feet to the fire a little bit, and I want you to show me why it is, how it is you got there. And I think we can ask each other those questions without being accusatory or aggressively challenging. But instead of "Why would you think that?!"if we just shift the tone and say, "Why would you think that?" and listen to each other, that's the beginning. Although it has come to my attention that a lot of people don't want to accept that invitation. I think we've become pretty scared to talk to each other.
Chris McAlilly 23:07
I think you're right about that. And I think the word that I wrote down on my notebook was just "safety." You know, I think the reason that we can't talk like that is because we're scared to and the reason we can't is because we're not safe to do so in a lot of contexts. I was talking to a therapist, kind of a mental health provider in our community, not not too long ago, and he was just talking about marriages that need to build or rebuild trust, that trust is not something that can be built directly. It has to be built indirectly. And what's needed is to create an environment where there's enough scaffolding where there can be safety. So you can begin to talk to one another in ways that are in the direction of building trust.
Chris McAlilly 23:55
And I don't know, it strikes me that one of the things about social media is that what has been disrupted is the forms of scaffolding and safety that you find in local communities and smaller conversations. And now we have a different kind of scaffolding and a different kind of environment that is very open. And so now everyone can look in or listen in on the conversation. And you know, and often we think of that as being a positive thing. We think of transparency, honesty and transparency as happening together. But there's something about, I don't know, the degradation of the political conversation on the Senate floor in the age of C- SPAN, where everybody's listening in. And so you can't have an honest conversation because it's not safe to do so.
Marilyn McEntyre 24:46
Or there are people who are grandstanding, so it's not an authentic conversation.
Chris McAlilly 24:51
Well, I guess the way... I think you're exactly right about that, but I guess the audience for the words are not the people in the room. So yeah, and I think in the age of C-SPAN, what you're doing is you're grandstanding, because now there's a platform to do so. But in a previous era, I heard a political commentator a couple years ago, basically advocating for the end of C-SPAN, so that there could be, it was actually kind of a counterintuitive move because it was advocating closed door meetings for the opportunity to have safety and scaffolding to have an authentic, honest conversation with the people who are in the room, rather than grandstanding. The problem with that is, you know, I mean, we know all the problems with backdoor meetings that are not happening in transparent ways. But I do think safety is an important part of speaking with the kind of authenticity and the the kind of integrity that you're getting towards. I could be way off base, but it's just kind of what your comment made me think about.
Marilyn McEntyre 25:55
No, I think you're quite right. And I don't think Facebook is a safe place. I have an account. I go there occasionally, because publishers kind of insist on it, and it's convenient for some things, but it is performative more than it is actually inviting, authentic conversation. And there are little groups on Facebook that I think function fairly well as human communities. But the medium itself makes it very challenging for it to be safe. And so I think we're at a moment of having to really take a very layered approach to how we build community. The word community itself has become a kind of cliche for Christians. But I think we need to keep revisiting what are we talking about when we talk about wanting to build community, wanting a healthy community, and to commune.
Marilyn McEntyre 26:50
You know, one of the things, the strategies I talked about is to go back to etymologies a little more often. It's pretty easy, you can just go to Mr. Google, and, you know, go in and click on an etymology. But where did this word come from? And to connect community with the common good and with communion, and all of those other lovely words that grew up around community, from which it comes, helps to restore a sense that it's not just a word you toss off in the name of gathering a group of people and making something nice happen. But you're really trying to make a safe space with clarity and intention and get to know the people who are there and what gifts we have for each other, and so on. Weaving words like community is an important piece of the work.
Eddie Rester 27:44
Yeah, I think about, as we think about creating those safe spaces, I just think about in my own marriage. It took us years to get to the place where we could, you talked about sturdy. It took years to get there, for us to be able to have honest conversations where I didn't get my feelings hurt or I didn't worry, if I said something, she would run away or something like that. Chris knows my wife. I'm just, I'm just thankful every day she hasn't run away. But we don't have that opportunity much anymore.
Eddie Rester 28:25
And I think COVID broke us in a more significant way than maybe we realized, when we were apart and not able to have those moments where we ran into each other. We didn't get those. We didn't get the byproduct of trust. We didn't get the byproduct of giving people the benefit of the doubt. Our Annual Conference, Methodist Annual Conferece, met for the first time in three years recently. So it was the first time all the pastors from our state, Methodist pastors, were in the same room. And there was something that was percolating, that I sense beneath the surface. If you know anything about the Methodist church right now, we're in the process of splintering in a thousand ways. And I think that has ramped up the last few years as we haven't been in the room together. So we could say things without the accountability of having to look one another in the eye.
Marilyn McEntyre 29:28 Yeah.
Eddie Rester 29:30
We could respond to people not having to worry about their response to us. And I just think
more about your grandmother visitin'.
Marilyn McEntyre 29:40 Visiting.
Eddie Rester 29:41 It isn't.
Chris McAlilly 29:42
No, there's a texture to a community that happens when you're visiting. You know, when you have front porches in your area. I do think that that's one of the lovely dimensions of particular kinds of southern culture. There's a conference in Oxford. What is it called? It's like On the Front Porch or something.
Eddie Rester 30:00 Conference on the Front Porch.
Chris McAlilly 30:01
Yeah. And it's all about the front porch as a cultural phenomenon, the ways in which it did create a layered, relational dynamic within the context of a community.
Marilyn McEntyre 30:16
There's a famous article, I don't remember where it appeared, about how southern culture changed when air conditioning was invented.
Chris McAlilly 30:25 Oh, that's fascinating.
Marilyn McEntyre 30:27
They used to sit on their verandas, but went inside. And they used to greet each other on the street. They didn't do that anymore. And domestic architecture changed.
Chris McAlilly 30:38
That's fascinating. I would love to run that down. You said it's an article?
Marilyn McEntyre 30:43
Yeah, I'll see if I can find it for you. It's kind of a landmark article in academic circles.
Chris McAlilly 30:49 Yeah, that's fantastic.
Eddie Rester 30:51
Marilyn, is we think about the work of organizations like the church. And we think about kind of getting back to the roots of community. Do you see things that are effective and faithful ways that we can draw people together? We can begin to build conversations that work towards peace instead of conflict? What is it that we could be about?
Marilyn McEntyre 31:17
Well, I think churches need to, you know, there... I'm a person in the pew and I have a lot of opinions. But I'll just ram it in here and say one piece of it. I do think churches right now really need good adult education programs. Going back to why aren't we all in school one day a week for the rest of our lives, but we're not. But churches actually have a very important educational function, or at least the possibility of serving to help people be more thoughtful, more literate. We say we're People of the Book and Protestants who rely on scripture, but the Bible is very badly read in a lot of circles, because people, we sort of many people shuffled through school at a level of kind of semi-literacy, because curricula are packed with other things.
Marilyn McEntyre 32:15
And I've had many college students wander in their first year to say, "Well, I kind of want to be an English major, but my parents just can't figure out what do you do with an English major." And you know, I have whole speeches about that. But the short answer is live your life. It equips you to read and listen and think about the words that are coming at you and ask questions, frame questions that take you to another level of reflection. It's hard to ask a good question. And think about how many times you've been in a group where the speaker finishes their formal talk, and then they say, "Okay, any questions?" and people just kind of sit there because it's hard to think up a good question. So helping one another practice that in the church, in the context of Bible studies, where you spread out several translations or adult ed groups where you read really good, challenging contemporary Christian thought on public issues.
Marilyn McEntyre 33:25
Or at our church, we have a weekly what used to be a dinner and documentary evening. Now that dinner isn't there, because we've been consigned to zoom. But we watch a documentary once a month and spend an hour debriefing it. And that way, we gather as a community of faith, but often to look at public issues like water use. We're living out here in a drought state, that's important. Or what's happening to bee colonies, or one time we did music therapy, or a documentary about immigration, and just saying, this is a place where we can reflect on public issues together as people of faith. And I love that. I love that we're doing it. It's not hard. And it isn't the same as a book group, because book groups tend to attract people who already have the time and inclination to read. But literacy really matters to a faith that's grounded in the Word, so we got to take some responsibility for that.
Chris McAlilly 34:31
Yeah, I think that's right. And I think that, you know, the challenge, I think of all the challenges related to that practically in terms of how people spend their time, but I do think that there is something compelling about creating a community where the language is honored and validated. I remember when I came out of school--I do feel validated in this conversation because I was an English major, and I'm like, thank you so much. This is wonderful--but I went into a religious publishing environment in Nashville. And I remember going to see the sacred books, you know, the sacred books were in a basement. They were moldy in this particular... You know, it was a consumer, I mean, it was a business. They were trying to sell books. They were trying to trade books.
Chris McAlilly 35:23
And then I went back to university setting and sacred books, in this case, it was at Emory University. And so there were, you know, like Flannery O'Connor's papers were held in the highest regard at the top of the Woodruff Library overlooking the canopy of Atlanta. And it was just like, yes, this is what you do with your sacred texts. I love that, just love language and honor that within the context of the community and create spaces for rich and vibrant conversations around matters of faith and culture, and politics and society. I think that's all really helpful.
Eddie Rester 36:02
Well, and I think when you're willing to have those conversations, I'm going to relate it something in the last chapter of your book about "Speaking Peace," is, you're not in it to win it. And I think we've been taught that if we enter into a conversation, the last word has to be mine. And I think about...
Marilyn McEntyre 36:23
... is the basic model. And I know people who find it hard to have a conversation that doesn't become argument, not in the sense of a bitter argument, but just well, you have a point of view, so I have a point of view, so we have to contest points of view rather than remaining exploratory and seeing how much we can learn from each other and what gifts we might have to offer one another. But I think that's, yeah, I think I called that chapter "Quit Trying to Win." It's not that argument doesn't have its place. We need it in courtrooms. We need it in all kinds of places where we're really trying to peel away whatever doesn't rest on solid evidence. But in our efforts to foster community, we really have to care for the nature of conversations that stay open ended enough to say, let's just explore this.
Marilyn McEntyre 37:26
And you know who's good at this, I think, are Quakers. I spent some years when I lived in Berkeley going to Quaker meetings and learned a lot from them. I loved their capacity for communal silence. But I also loved that not only in meeting for worship, but even in business meetings of committees and so on, they would allow each person at the table to speak once, clearly, briefly, and then they would just sit in silence for a minute or so. And then there would be no crosstalk and to till everyone had said something. And then people would proceed to raise questions. But the idea was, let's just hear one another first. And I'm not saying that can be a social model for conversation at parties or something. But I still think there are these little disciplines and practices that we can learn from groups that have maintained, with great intention, a style of conversation that we've mostly lost.
Chris McAlilly 38:33
As you move through the last couple of years, and these were books that were written some years ago, and then a lot of life has happened, you know, for all of us. And we've had multiple political administrations that have come and gone, and the conversation politically continues to evolve in America. But there are also people, I see people that want to engage kind of politics straight on or adopt a kind of protest language. And then what I also hear you saying is that you're drawn to kind of the texture of a communal conversation. And then there's also kind of the artistic side of language, kind of the way in which you know, formal poetry or fiction or the real care of the English language by those who can use it excellently. I guess, as you continue to be on a long journey of your own with language, which dimension of that are you drawn to at this season of your life?
Marilyn McEntyre 39:40
Well, one of the chapters, actually there was a chapter in both of those books on the practice of poetry. And poetry in some cultures is completely mainstream. Politicians do it. People do it in public occasions, but in American culture, it tends to be consigned to, you know, coffee houses where people go to each other's poetry readings. And so I think normalizing poetry and the way in which good poetry helps us to be surprised again by language and listen in new ways, that's a practice we could reintroduce and renormalize.
Marilyn McEntyre 40:22
And one place it's happening, interestingly, is in medical schools. I work for the Joint Medical Program at UC Berkeley-UCSF for 10 years, just on a part time basis, but worked with both pre- med and medical students on writing, but a lot of it was on how close reading of poems helps you become a better listener. And when you're listening to patients, or clients tell their stories, they're trying to articulate what's going on in their bodies, or the nature of their pain, if you can comfortably listen for the metaphors they reach for, for instance, or if you can watch your own language and notice how much of medicine is dominated by military metaphors, for instance, you can step back from the conversation and occasionally say, "Well, it's really interesting to put it that way. That has some implications."
Marilyn McEntyre 40:22
A story that is told in a book I quite like about this issue in medicine is about a young man who was a Quaker, and he develop cancer. He went to his oncologist who kept using all this language about we're going to fight this, you're a fighter, we're, you know, do battle, we're going to bombard it with this and that. And he finally said, "This isn't working for me. I'm a lifelong Quaker. I'm a committed pacifist. I'm not a fighter, I don't want to be a fighter. I don't want to think of my body as a battleground. This isn't helping me cope with my condition, and can you help me with that?" And to his credit, the oncologist sat down with him, and they changed the conversation to talk about the journey he was on and the turns the path might take. And just imagine what a difference that would make. So I think noticing metaphor and calling each other's attention to that imaginative, poetic dimension of language that's always there, even to notice that we're using metaphors, when we are, just, again, puts us at a slightly different altitude where we can notice what we're noticing differently.
Eddie Rester 42:36
One of the things in that chapter about, you know, you don't have to focus on winning, is that when you're not focused on winning, I can't remember exactly how you put it, but you can be more playful. And I'm a big fan of playful language and how we speak to each other. I always feel like there's something within humor that allows us safety. Not always my sarcasm, but within humor, people are willing to engage at a different level. And I've really appreciated that thought that we could engage each other playfully.
Marilyn McEntyre 43:14
I think playfulness is the mark of the Spirit. I really think that people who can afford to play, you know that even in the darkest part of the valley, there is hope and promise that transcends the mess we're in. There's a place from which we can afford to laugh, and it's gentle laughter. And I think about that laughter of delight when you hear a funny story or you kind of get it when a poem is read. Like, I'm thinking of Billy Collins' poetry. He was the Poet Laureate for a time, and his poetry is very playful. I think one reason he was elevated to Poet Laureate is because he addressed a need to be childlike, and not childish, but to take delight in language in ways that poets do. I really think of the poets as the keepers of the soil. They're the ones that really care for it. They kind of plow up the words and use them in new ways so that they become revitalized.
Chris McAlilly 44:27
Yeah, no, I just think about I mean, all of this kind of brings me back, similarly, as you mentioned, your grandmother, I think about my grandfather, and it was from him that I learned that language was playful, that a family should be a place where just, you know, endless stories get told, and they get told over and over and over again. And that storytelling is a way of forming identity and kind of shaping the trajectory of the family and the community.
Chris McAlilly 44:56
But yeah, I mean, I don't know I do think that I was thinking about kind of resources like, where do you go if you want to work on this? And I do think that it's within the context of very... It comes back to very small communities, very small groups of people who gather to talk about important issues within the context of a small group. It's a family that's navigating a journey together through time. And, you know, I wonder, yeah, I wonder kind of what you think about, like, how you think about shaping the language of those who are very close to you? How are you intentionally trying to do that as a, you know, I'm making an assumption as a parent, as a grandparent, or, you know, as a person who has younger people in your life that you want to kind of shape in this direction?
Marilyn McEntyre 45:52
Well, I certainly think children need to be read to, from very, very, very early on, but not just children. It's funny, my husband and I read to each other all the time. And when I tell people that, sometimes they kind of look startled, like, "You read aloud? Isn't that quaint." But I think you're gonna sustain conversation with somebody for a lot of years, reading aloud and pausing over what you're reading and commenting on the paragraph you just read and laughing together about what's there on the page is part of stepping into that field of discourse. So that when we are in Wendell Berry together, we're taking a common delight in something that continues to surprise us, even if we've read the book before. Or when we're in George Eliot, together, we're kind of doing this strenuous journey through her 19th century long sentences, because it's rewarding and we can share the feeling of being rewarded after a good scene.
Marilyn McEntyre 47:02
So I think that reading together as one thing. I think book clubs really serve a great purpose. And I'm surprised at how many adults really do take the time to be in book clubs. But in smaller ways, I'm thinking about, I don't know, when this movement started, it might have been back in the 1960s, or 70s, when people started putting little bits of poetry on the inside of subways or buses. Do you remember that?
Eddie Rester 47:32
Not a lot of subways and buses in rural Mississippi.
Marilyn McEntyre 47:36
Well, this was a big movement in some cities. And it was quite a while ago, but I'm old enough to remember some of it, where people just started putting little tiny poems or verses from poems up on the subway, where the ads sometimes go. And poetry in public places, I think it's pretty fun. Imagine if you put a poem you think is worthy in the church bulletin, and just let it sit there, or put poetry in odd places, you know, or brought up quotes for people like, "I just read this and I wrote it down. You want to hear it?" And kind of drew the value of the long conversation that is a literary tradition into the present and harvested some things from whatever you're reading at the time to say, "Let me show you this. This was, this woke me up. And now I'm going to offer it to you."
Marilyn McEntyre 48:37
So I guess the word I keep coming back to is that part of our mission is to normalize this stuff so it doesn't seem as though it just belongs in the academy or belongs to intellectuals or effete people who write poetry off in their corners. But, we really need to have a dream of a common language as Adrienne Rich put it.
Eddie Rester 49:01
Well, it gives us a chance to talk to each other without... It just gives us that opportunity to create that community without having to say "we're creating community right now. We're building trust right now. We're going to create a safe place right now." Well, no. We're going to talk about something that we can engage together that then allows us as an off shoot of that to have safety and trust and community. So.
Marilyn McEntyre 49:32
And I think one pretty deep, ancient way of doing that is Lectio Divina, which is the practice the Catholics have held in trust and now a lot of Protestant groups are practicing it, too. But for those who don't know, this practice of reading a short passage of scripture--and you can do this with poetry and other things too--but reading a short passage and listening for the word or phrase that speaks to you. And it's so important that it be a word or phrase, not a whole idea. It's not about ideas. It's about letting a word open a door. And so the word or phrase might be "my shepherd," or it might be "in the beginning," or it might be "high mountain" or something.
Marilyn McEntyre 50:19
But you just assume that if you enter into reading in a prayerful spirit of asking to be addressed, that something will come forward for you that says, "Come here." And then you notice, you kind of reflect on why you noticed that, what the invitation is, and what it connects to. And it's such a deeply subjective process. And I think of it as an essential form of prayer. But it's also a practice of prayerful reading. If you're just reading the New York Times, you know, going down the column, but asking that, you notice the things that really need to be paused over. And then maybe you carry a phrase with you through the day to think about it, wonder about its implications or impact. I think that's a marvelous practice.
Chris McAlilly 51:15
You mentioned poetry. And Eddie, I cut Eddie off when he was going to ask the question of where do you go if you want to find poetry and you don't know where to go? Where would you look? What would you suggest?
Marilyn McEntyre 51:30
Well, if people are just fishing around, one really good resource is online. If you go to poetryfoundation.org, you can just look for poems by keyword. You can look by poet. You can look by theme. But then, you know, you'll come across a lot of poems you don't like, and you'll find a few that just that really speak to you. And so I think, rather than getting, again, staying out of a place of judgment, this is a good poem/this is a bad poem. Especially if you're not in the habit of reading poetry, I think it's kind of fun to just pick up a poem and say, "Well, let me see what I noticed here." And learn to ask some things about why might the poet have made the line break there, instead of why did she break the line there? It's not even the end of the sentence. So just "why might somebody have done this in this way?" keeps you in that playful place of noticing and wondering, which I think is essentially childlike. "Oh, look at that."
Marilyn McEntyre 52:41
So that's one place, because it's a big repository of available poetry. I could recite my favorite poets and say, hasten out and read them. And they're certainly worth reading. But any good ontology will give you a range of choices that you can then notice what you value.
Chris McAlilly 53:03
Since we're on a podcast, I'll just drop one other podcast. There's a podcast called Poetry Unbound, which is by the poet Pádraig Ó Tuama, wonderful poet, and he immerses you in a single poem, and it kind of guide you through the process that Marilyn's talking about.
Marilyn McEntyre 53:20
Oh, yeah. And close reading of poetry is a lot like exegesis or people in seminaries right, you just look at the text and notice and notice and notice. So I think one of the things we can do for each other is retrieve that business of noticing from some dry, classroomy language about analysis where my poor students, these undergraduates who come in saying that something about dissecting poems. That's not what we're doing. It's a living entity. We're petting it like our pet. And then we're noticing this habit.
Eddie Rester 53:55
Marilyn, thank you so much for the conversation today. We didn't even get to talk about the book I really wanted to talk about, which is "Make a List." I didn't know that was your book, but I've ordered it because I'm a list maker. I've got sticky notes everywhere with lists on them. So I need to see how to redeem my list making so I'm looking forward to reading that.
Marilyn McEntyre 54:19 You would start to write.
Chris McAlilly 54:22
This has been delightful Marilyn. Thank you so much for your time. Thank you for the care that you take with language and with words and for encouraging the rest of us to do the same.
Marilyn McEntyre 54:33
Thank you both for what you're doing. What a pleasure.
Eddie Rester 54:35
[OUTRO] Thanks for listening. If you've enjoyed the podcast, the best way to help us is to like, subscribe, or leave a review.
Chris McAlilly 54:43
If you would like to support this work financially or if you have an idea for a future guest you can go to theweightpodcast.com. [END OUTRO]