My name is Julia Guez. I’m a writer and translator based in Brooklyn. And by day, I serve as the Senior Managing Director of Design and Implementation at Teach for America, New York.

What is communication anyway? What’s important when it comes to making it work well, on the page, or when you’re in front of somebody in a room, or a Zoom room, as the case may be?

It’s not simply verbal.

It’s a mix of the verbal and the nonverbal. It’s not simply what you share. It’s what you take away. And yet, for so long, I thought the real emphasis was on finding the right words, framing them clearly and directly enough. Meaning that I could check off all the boxes, when it comes to communicating effectively. Communication in my mind is all about exchange, energy, information, feeling, certain tones, certain textures, certain timbers of voice. They all register, somehow. Whereas before, I used to think about it in terms of lines, vectors, meanings with certain velocities. I think about it more complexly now. I think about it in terms of flows. I think about it in terms of circles and swirls. And I don’t simply think that’s the case when you’re engaging somebody sitting across from you. I think that’s true on the page as well.

About a year ago, Four Way Books published my first collection of poetry. And a lot was made of three poems that seemed to give the reader a lot of room. That was by design. One piece was composed of a single sentence, and another, a single word. The final piece in the collection is a title that drops off into the blank space of the page. It means to be quiet enough to give readers room enough to find their way in, to bring and to make their own meanings in ways that I think really healthy, really vibrant communication does. It invites somebody in and it gives that somebody this sense that you’ll be listening. And that’s where my emphasis is these days. It’s on listening. It’s on attending to what is said and what isn’t. It’s in attending to the body, and the breath of the person who’s speaking. It’s attending to what they say. When they say, how they are, where they are, when they bring me into their thinking, their feeling, their practice. That’s where I endeavor to be most skillful, is in holding space that way, in doing that quietly and patiently with a lot of care. And I mean, to do it in person, and on the page, exploring the possibilities of saying less, saying what I need to say and only half formed ways, saying what I need to say and then seeing what emerges in the interplay between my ideas, and the ideas that someone else may offer, if they trust me in this communication, to make room for them.

Skimming through Julia’s poetry really helped me to better understand her message. She defines two skills that enable effective communication: listening and attending. So, we should attend to other person’s thoughts and listen to them, rather than, let’s say, elaborately picking words and try to use them the right way. Similar to her still-life imagery in her poetry, she thinks that we all should listen and enable other people to let us into their thinking and be mindful to let others do the same. With this, we can enable ourselves to convey more than what’s being said. She also stresses that there is not a checklist of things we should check away, we should instead be mindful of small things such as textures, energy, and, timbres of voice that accompany personal communication.

Julia also warns us to be mindful of the space people create as they speak, as in, the feeling they emanate, how they speak and use their body. Just like the title that drops off into the blank whiteness of a poem’s page, one should give others the room to let themselves in and contribute to the act of communication. We tend to think that communication is by nature an active process, but what Julia helps us realize is that the important part of it is passive, as in listening and attending whoever we are communicating with. This made me remember people who only likes to talk about themselves or divert the conversation to the topics they like to talk about. And you would appreciate that it is very challenging trying to talk to people like these, now I see what they lack is the passive part of communication, attending and listening. In her words, communication “…is not simply what you share. It’s what you take away.”