EDITORIAL

You call hearsay and let the sound echo, I whisper rumours, halftruths. Your sounds are snatched at, hurried out, by an agitated woman who sweeps her hands wide, a bird, and moves them in, closing the doors I realise, closing the building from us. Not really though, everywhere is open to us.

To tell a story, I’ve been asked to think about that a lot recently; to question how word choice transforms, how meaning twists through generations. Really, I just want to give you small comforts, here and there.

I want you to read this, maybe in the winter rain, and find yourself warm, speaking quieter for the afternoon. Or bolder, lovely and moving toward spring. I want you to call back to Mary Oliver’s Wild Geese: ‘over and over, announcing your place in the family of things,’ because you’re welcome here, and quite cherished.

Call. Return. Every melody has a motif; every book a conversation. Virginia Woolf, Thomas Pynchon, Allen Ginsberg. Any author. Every author. One speaks to the other, the other speaks back. Conversations mumbled in your mind; words, sentences, paragraphs, entire books gossiped left-to-right.

Hearsay is a conversation. The chit-chat hum of the students in the Hub at the start of the semester; the redoubled clip-on microphone voices of our lecturers fed through to lecture hall speakers. You, flicking and dog-earing these pages.