In Praise of Overheard Conversations
An invitation to a fortnightly series for my paid subscribers
Yesterday,
and I released the final episode of the fifth series of our podcast, . For four years, now, we’ve been recording and sharing these conversations, and this time around, as we came in to land, I found myself reflecting on what it is we think we’re doing, prompted by the question, “Who do you think you are talking to?”The first answer is each other. And I think the podcast is at its best when we remember this, when it stays true to the spark that got us talking in the first place and the friendship that has grown out of this.
There’s a second answer, though, in as much as we record and share these conversations, and it has to do with a certain trust in the virtue of the form of the “overheard conversation”. As I say to Ed in the episode, I’ve no desire to play the game of seeking Jordan Peterson-scale audiences on YouTube. I don’t think I’d be good at that game – and I don’t think I’d like the person I’d need to become to get better at it. But having a thousand or so people around the world listen in, while the two of us talk over what we’re reading, making and learning, teasing out what matters to us in the process – well, that’s a privilege, and an undertaking that has life in it for me, and I have a trust in the quietly consequential character of this relatively humble undertaking, because I hear often enough about the places our conversations have taken people.
More than this, I realise, I have a trust in the practice of conversation, and that’s become clearer through making the podcast. I mean this in the sense that an artist might talk about their “practice”, but also in something like the sense that the philosopher Alasdair Macintyre means when he says that virtue is something we start to acquire within a practice. You could think of the journey of acquiring skill in a craft, the respect for the properties and resistances of material, the uses and abuses of tools and techniques, which this entails.
I don’t mean to claim any great skill in conversation, let alone any great virtue. We practice the things that we need to get better at, after all – and any skill I do have is rooted in the shyness and awkwardness that characterised me as a young person and that can still haunt me in new situations to this day.
But I realise that the parts of the work that I do that feel like they matter often involve bringing together and taking part in conversations. There are individuals or small groups that I get together with regularly or semi-regularly, where the accumulated practice of gathering, with the lightest of structures and often little fixed agenda, comes to matter a good deal over time, and to take shape in more tangible forms of work, without the space of conversation ever becoming just an instrumental means to the end of those other forms.
One of the people I catch up with semi-regularly, in this way, is
, the Solarpunk theorist, and on one of our calls a couple of years ago, he joked about embracing “catch-up culture” as an antidote to the excesses of “cancel culture”. There’s something here that crosses paths with ’s Dark Forest Theory of the Internet, a topic Ed and I keep coming back to in the podcast. And there’s something that resonates with the commitment animating ’s work at The Sacred podcast and , the deep conviction that we need to stay in conversation across our differences and keep faith in each other.An invitation
Over the past few weeks, I’ve been planning something new, a way to share some more of the conversations and friendships that animate my own work, and a context to create some new conversations that I’ve been wanting to have.
So I’d like to invite you to the Sunday Sessions, a season of “overheard conversations”, open to paid subscribers to this Substack. Starting on 10 March, once a fortnight, on a Sunday evening (Swedish time), you’re welcome to join me and a guest whose work gets me thinking. Sometimes it will be a friend who I talk with regularly, other times someone whose projects or writing I’m excited about.
The themes will range across the ground I write about here, picking up threads from At Work in the Ruins and the conversations Ed and I have in The Great Humbling, so we’ll talk about ways of growing and ways of gathering, making community and making life work together, under the shadow of climate change and the rest of the trouble the world is in.
Each time, there will be forty minutes of me talking with the guest, then twenty minutes where we take your questions. The recording of the first forty minutes will be released as a public podcast. If you’d like to join us live on Zoom and/or watch the full recording, then you’ll need a paid subscription to Writing Home. (These cost $7/month or $70/year – but if that would be a barrier for you, then drop me a mail and I’ll comp you a subscription.)
The first session will be on Sunday 10 March at 8pm CET (check your local time here), when my guest will be my great friend and co-conspirator
.Caro has been many things in her time, including an artist, tai chi teacher, the front-woman of several bands, a carrier of Taoist wisdom, a maker of pigments from scavenged materials and the longstanding, much-valued correspondent of a web of people including
, Iain McGilchrist, and myself.It’s been a delight to see a wider community of readers discovering the wild generosity of Caro’s words since she began publishing
, and to watch her stepping publicly into the role of writer, alongside all the other gifts she brings to the world.So join us for a conversation that will no doubt head into the matter of friendship, conversation and “practice”, with side orders of alchemy and initiation, and who knows what else? (We’ll have to talk about “using the false to cultivate the real”, for one thing.)
This session will be open to paid subscribers to either my Substack or Caro’s, so watch out for a paywalled post with the Zoom link, coming later next week.
Later in the season, I’ll be talking with
about and with about where Solarpunk and Dark Mountain meet. I’ll send out a full line-up soon, but meanwhile, if you want to join for the opening session with on Sunday 10 March, then make sure you have a current paid subscription to or .DH
Looking forward to a Sunday lunchtime chat around the fire
Dougald, I'll be keeping an ear open for this. A great conversation, even a good one, even a remotely held one, leaves me with very much of the same after-pleasure as a meal beautifully given to me.