Conversations with the Mute Chapter 2: Correspondences
Litzine, Laura K. Watson, 16 pgs, laurak-watson.com, [email protected]
This collection of poetry and illustration reaches for an open-hearted relationship with the world, trying to find it in the mundane and everyday: a stowaway spider in a kitchen full of ragged, green, houseplant foliage; a tree; a vintage photograph from an antique store; and the dust settling on shelves of books. Laura K. Watson, winner of the Litzine Category of the Broken Pencil Zine Awards in 2017, creates relational dialogue between herself and just this kind of speechless company, creating connection out of deceptively normal circumstances.
Conversations with the Mute is entirely handwritten and hand-illustrated in what looks like coloured pencil, bound by thread in a burgundy craft paper cover. It is comprised of delightful pairs of hand-written conversational poetry, each with an accompanying illustration. Each pair of poems represents an imaginary conversation between the author and either a creature or inanimate thing: the mundane companions that Watson talks with in rhyme. And it’s fun (often funny) poetry, chatty in its delivery with quick rhymes that could be rapped over a beat. Watson addresses a tree, the tree talks back, but apparently from behind a veil that prevents any real understanding when the tree says: “I do not know you. / I do not need to. / We do not speak the same language, evidently.”
Watson’s poems and illustrations inspire agreement when the author writes, “I feel that everything around me is alive, interconnected and intimate.” Perhaps even the zine itself, when you hold a copy in your hands. And I recommend that you do.