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Issue XX
Introduced by Marianne Janack, Editor-in-Chief
The inspiration for our issue What We Talk About When We Talk About is the short story by Ray Carver, “What We Talk about When We Talk about Love”. It is a story about two couples who sit around a table drinking and talking about the people they love or have loved. If you haven’t read it, you can listen to Carver reading the story here (I don’t think he’s a great reader, by the way—you might want to read it).
The story is a dialogue, and some of us read it as a way of talking back to Plato—particularly to Plato’s own dialogue about love, Symposium. Like Carver’s story, Symposium is a discussion of love carried on as the participants drink and discuss love. But unlike Carver’s story, the discussion is carried on between men, and reaches toward a universalizable account of love. But it is in this dialogue that Socrates mentions Diotima, and gives her credit for teaching him about what love really is. Carver’s dialogue leaves us with a sense that such definitions might be beside the point.
Our selections for this issue all focus on the definitional challenge, but they also take up issues about dialogue, talking, and what it means to love.
Casey Flynn is a graduate student in religious studies, who loves writing in any genre. You can find Casey’s writing and a more detailed biography at caseyflynn.com. Casey’s poem “What We Talk About When We Talk About Dad Sleeping the Big Sleep” was created out of a reading of Aristotle; “What We Talk About When We Talk About Bathtime” is a poem any parent will sympathize with and is both a funny and accurate picture of bathtime and a meditation on time; “Forgetting What We Talk About When We Talk About…What Was It?” is a poem about memory, listening, paying attention, and forgetting.
Mari Harrison’s story “What We Talk About When We Talk about Forgetting” is also a dialogue, and is also about forgetting, but it looks at this phenomenon from a different perspective. Mari is a Los Angeles native now rooted in Massachusetts, who spent decades composing government documents (which she insists are just speculative fiction in disguise). She now edits novels and writes short stories, cheered on by her husband, children, and a Great Dane who refuses to respect lap boundaries. Her poetry—published under various bylines, past and present—has appeared in Clamor and won multiple awards. Her fiction can be found in Apex Magazine, manywor(l)ds, and elsewhere.
Emma Wilkins’s essay is about a particular kind of love: parental love. Emma is a Tasmanian journalist and freelance writer who's been published by magazines, journals and news outlets in Australia and beyond. Emma has a particular interest in relationships, culture, belief and ethics. You can find Emma at: https://emmahwilkins.com/
Tom Salmon’s piece, “What We Talk About When We Talk about Love(craft)” plays on the title of Carver’s original. Tom is a disabled author in England who was a philosophy major as an undergraduate, and is now working in healthcare. This is Tom’s first publication.
We hope you enjoy the issue—there are laughs to be had, serious things to think about, and creativity to admire in all these pieces. What we talk about when we talk about what we talk about creative philosophical writing.