Welcome to A Year of Conversation.
We’ll use this News page to keep you up to date with everything we’re doing, new events, initiatives and so on, but you will also find longer reflections on conversation from our partners and from invited writers, here and elsewhere on the website.
Please join the conversation on social media too (links at the bottom of this page) where you will be able to post your own ideas and experiences, as well as share and comment on what we’re up to. It all feels a bit echoey at the moment, doesn't it? A bit like a house with very few pieces of furniture in it; but one with lots of potential. We hope that, after a couple of months, it will feel lived in – a place to which you'll want to return to find out what's happening in A Year of Conversation and how you might be involved. By the way, having a conversation about anything you find here is 'being involved'. But our 'Get Involved' page will point the way to many others.
On 22 January, at the first event of A Year of Conversation, Allan Little, the respected journalist and foreign correspondent with the BBC, will be in conversation with me at a Crichton Conversation about The Power of Conversation (Information on the What's On page). Then, on Saturday 26 January, I'll be taking part in an event at the Bakehouse, Gatehouse of Fleet with the title Conversations with Burns (Information on the What's On page).
To open a book is to start a conversation. (You may like to have a conversation about that!) And, like many Scottish poets, I have had many conversations with Burns. At the Bakehouse event, I shall be reading poems of my own that respond to his. But conversation itself was vitally important in Burns' life – socially and creatively. This is the subject of the engaging and perceptive piece that we asked Rab Wilson to write which appears below (and which was also published in The National). It ends with a question which might start an interesting conversation.
Tom Pow