The Conversationalist

Talk to me.

Texans talk about the weather, but not in the way it’s done in other states—especially states on the right coast, the region northeast of us that sees a cascade of colorful seasons that seem to start and stop with brutal cold. Or the left coast, the western shelf that experiences mostly blissful and temperate weather all the way up until it gradates into the wet chill of the northwest.

In Texas, we tend to lack those gradations. It’s hot or it’s cold. It’s humid or it’s dry. It’s stormy or it’s still. The leaves are green or they are brown, and the same is true of the grass.

That’s an oversimplification that makes the state sound dreary, but honestly, I’ve only lived here for all of 52 years, so I haven’t seen the whole place yet. I do know that there are zones of lush green forest, hills covered in low-slung cedar and sage, waterways faced by sheer walls of rock, and sometimes there is ice and snow right where the sun was just baking the ground to crispy, crinkly salad topping just a couple of months earlier.

We’re a complicated ecosystem. That’s what happens when you’re larger than many European nations.

Casual conversation in the parts of Texas where I’ve spent the most time in study tends to center around work. “What do you do?” And that gets tricky for me. Because with moth jobs, you can answer with a title. My job description takes paragraphs.

Simply saying, “I’m a writer,” that doesn’t do it. I can’t let that stand. Because writing is the most important aspect of what I do, but it isn’t the entirety of it. There’s the podcasting, the speaking, the strategizing, the designing. I’m a man of many parts, some assembly required, and explaining that to strangers gets hairy. “I write thriller novels” tends to be about the depth and breadth of it, and really that’s fine.

It’s not even the only type of writing I do, but whatever.

I’ll say, I don’t even like the work, nor the challenge of the jobs, but I do envy the titles of electricians and plumbers, and baristas. People know what you mean when you say that. No further explanation necessary. No follow-ups of, “Oh, you’re a plumber? Have I flushed any of your work?”

The other hangup for me, as a conversationalist in Texas, is that I have neither interest in nor basic knowledge of sports and sports-related activities. I was nearly 40 before I knew what “fantasy football” meant. I played little league and soccer as a kid, but I’d have to use AI to tell me the particulars of either sport if I chose to write about it. The only basketball I ever owned had a hunk torn out of the skin of it and was used as a footrest under my desk for nearly twenty years.

I’m not opposed to sports, in general. I just don’t participate in them to any real degree. Though I’ve been to professional games and matches—baseball and hockey and basketball and even football—but I was mostly there for the hot dogs.

Kara and I have remarked that it’s exceedingly difficult to make friends. Not because we’re shy (God forbid, never), or we lack opportunity. It’s mostly because I (Kevin... Kara is different) end up being unrelatable to most people. Even among peers in the writing community, I’ve noticed that the conversation is work or almost nothing. It’s industry or awkward silence. Usually. Sometimes, miraculously, my geek overlaps with their geek, in the tiniest of Venn diagrams, and the next thing you know we’ve been chatting about obscure brands of journals and pens, or leather craft, or one-season shows we both happened to watch in the 80s. Miraculous.

I often joke that “all my hobbies become careers.” This is true. Writing started this way. But I’ve been a photographer and videographer, a caricature artist, a cover illustrator, a web designer, an electronics engineer, an ordained minister, and a voice artist, to name just a few lines from my CV. And all of those started with me being a little interested in something, enough to start looking into it and eventually trying it. And all of those led to doing it for work.

They also led to talking about those things. I love talking about my latest obsession. I can do it all day.

I think I’m a good conversationalist. I know that may seem counterintuitive, considering everything you’ve just read. But I am interested in and conversant in an incredibly wide array of things. I can talk about any or all of them at length, even draw parallels and connect dots. It’s just that most people are not similar in this way. And so, when you’re talking to them about the ways in which disparate cultures around the globe all somehow came up with the same iconography to mean the same concept, or when you can demonstrate how a mind palace works, or when you have been studying the various species of owls... you tend to lose most people. Even if you just bonded over your mutual enjoyment of Grisham novels.

Relational conversation can be hard.

I can be challenging. Just ask Kara. Or anybody.

Having a conversation or relationship with me can be unorthodox.

Maybe that’s why I like to spend so much time being solitary.

Maybe that’s why I don’t like talking about the weather.

Books are a Conversation

When you’re reading a book, you’re willingly participating in telepathy. You, the reader, have opened your mind to directly receive the thoughts of the author. And, even more fun, this conversation transcends both time and space. You may be reading this while staying in a villa in Tuscany, in the year 2027, while I wrote it sitting in my home office in Austin, in 2024. Neat, huh?

Have more telepathic conversations with me at https://kevintumlinson.com/books

A Note at the End

I’ve made a career out of conversation, I now realize. The books, the podcasting, the speaking events... all of that is me finding ways to relate to and communicate with others. I use words on a page most often, and to good effect. But sometimes I have to look you in the eye to get my meaning across, and that’s ok, too.

Isn’t it wild, though? So much of our lives comes down to conversations. And we often fall back on the most mundane topics. The weather? Why did that become a thing?

Commonality is the answer, of course. It’s something we all have in common, so it’s a place to start.

Of course, we often have the same weather in common. It surrounds us, we’re buried in it at all times. So it’s not a very good conversation, because we already know where it’s headed.

Finding common ground is the root of all conversation, though. And it takes effort. So we often have a few easy ones in our back pocket, ready to go. Weather. Politics, if we’re brave. The necessity of having to do a task to make a living. Then there’s the less common ground—books we’re reading, movies we’ve seen, songs we like. We typically can find some overlap there, but not always. Not easily, sometimes.

I’m fascinated by this as a conversation, in itself. But rarely meet anyone with the power to keep their eyes from glazing over in the discussion of it.

And so, we talk about the weather after all

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