Women in Tampa Talking About Alligators is now available for purchase through Lynx House Press.
Dear Heather Sellers,
“Being heard is so close to being loved, that for the average person, they are almost indistinguishable,” minister David W. Augsburger writes in his book Caring Enough to Hear and Be Heard.
This summer, I’ve been ruminating on how to better notice and listen more to the world around me. Part of this has involved taking up what you have used to create your collection, Women in Tampa Talking About Alligators.
I find the practice of a daily observation journal immensely interesting. While I don’t believe that the majority of people speak to be immortalized, we immortalize them in our journals. I wonder if hearing by way of recording the things others say, as Augsburger posits, we are close to loving them? I’d like to believe so.
A study from psychologist Matthias Mehl suggests that the average person today speaks around 12,700 words each day. While this amount has decreased slightly from a study in 2007, where Mehl and his colleagues estimated that the average American spoke 15,900 words, I still feel that 12,700 is an extraordinary amount.
What are we saying in these tens of thousands of words? What are we not saying, either by not speaking at all or by carefully tailoring our words to fit the expectations of those we’re speaking to?
In “Run,” you write: “My neighbor the lyricist wears a pink puffer and gator-appliqued
white shorts. He walks down our street, singing. He told me if he
can’t memorize the words easily, they aren’t the right words.” (45)
My first impression upon reading this was: respect. What sticks sticks. What doesn’t gets lost. Your act of immortalizing this, in a way, might contribute to his theory. This is why we keep observation journals: to make sure what sticks gets stuck.
In April, during a graduate nonfiction class at the University of South Florida, you instructed your students to bring a copy of their final essays to class. Towards the end of the session, after we read the drafts of our essays excruciatingly slowly to each other in pairs, you instructed us to slice and dice our work — to cross out words, phrases, and even paragraphs that didn’t move our pieces forward. I bring this up to say that it is clear Women in Tampa Talking About Alligators has been painstakingly edited. It is concise. Its words and the arrangement of them matter. You practice what you preach, which is beyond admirable.
Thank you for sharing this collection, and for immortalizing a handful of the 12,700 words we speak each day.
Very sincerely,
Carlin Steere
FanMail/Interview Editor
Carlin Steere
