By Celia Cook
Whenever you drove long-distance–another broken relationship funneling out behind you–you noticed every phone booth you passed, or every opportunity for a phone booth, exits blinking by like pauses in your sadness. Every phone booth setting off a ping your chest, igniting that desire to call, to hear a voice one more time, to get some closure. But you could never have enough change to bridge these particular distances, these breaks in the line.
– “Telephone” by Brenda Miller and Julie Marie Wade (River Teeth 18.2, Spring 2017)
When I imagine my favorite writers scribbling or typing away, I can’t help but picture them behind a beautiful wooden desk in the solitude of their homes à la room of one’s own style. It’s an image most of us have for writers, even when we find ourselves writing verses on the bus or taking notes at the deli counter. The other thing we tend to forget is how collaboration is essential to the writing process, from the exchange between writer and reader to the exciting conversations in workshop–but why stop there?
What first caught my eye about Brenda Miller and Julie Marie Wade’s “Telephone” was the dual authorship of the essay. How many essays do you know that include multiple authors? The closest I know of is Joan Didion’s “Goodbye to All That” and Eula Biss’s response with an essay of the same title, and now I can’t unsee the essays from one another. Biss responds to Didion like I respond to voicemails from my mother, but Miller and Wade take a different approach dialogic in search of a communal voice.
In describing their process for their larger collection, Telephone: Essays in Two Voices, Miller and Wade write:
“the inciting work (usually the title) spurs associative images from our personal and cultural histories. We build our pieces by responding to each other’s writing until a natural endpoint occurs. Our interactions build a relationship, too, with each gesture requiring trust and vulnerability, not only to each other, but to the writing itself. We have chosen not to label the speaker in each section so that our individual voices surrender into a more collective, and communal, authorship.”
Miller and Wade clue us into the multiple voices through section breaks and employ repetition to create a web of association. The opening lines of “In the beginning was the gray, and it was called Elisha. In the beginning was the bell, and it was called Alexander,” return later in the essay as “In the beginning was the gray, and it was called weather. In the beginning was the bell, and it was called school and church and dinner.” Notice gray / bell / beginning taking new shapes as the essay progresses. As I moved through the sections, I noticed cradle / imperative / yellow pages / erasure / rivals / silence / interrogative, repeated across the essay, sounding in my ears like gentle bells. “Telephone” travels great distances, from yellow pages to fighting with the operator to the games children play. The careful layering of these images, emotions, questions, and memories lulls the reader into a liminal space where Miller and Wade’s voices and experiences coexist and merge into a larger, disembodied voice, the kind that transcends the telephone wire.
Miller and Wade’s decision to remove their names from each section, to remove possession and vanity, also highlights the level of trust shared between the writers. The vulnerability required to allow your story to be cradled in the palms of another, to be listened to and understood, is difficult enough. To ensure your story’s non-erasure when your partner’s story appears is a task of great responsibility and precision, and these two writers have nailed it. The dual authorship between Miller and Wade stands in sharp contrast with the ownership duel of the opening paragraph, where the feud between Elisha Gray and Alexander Graham Bell over the telephone patent begins the threads of all the connections that follow.
By the end of the essay, Miller and Wade invite Gray and Bell to see the larger voice at play, the heartbeat of their efforts:
“Imagine: all language is code, and we spend our lives on the line, waiting for the right voice to reach us. A voice we can understand. And every message, decoded, means: I love.”
Two voices, as in dialogue, as in I love, as in I listen. Jill Christman likes to say, Before the manuscript there is silence. The manuscript breaks the silence. Why here? Why now? To break the silence is to pick up the phone and dial. Nothing is more terrifying as a young writer than breaking the silence and allowing our innermost thoughts, fears, and desires to traverse the telephone line into the waiting ears of those we may or may not know. Sometimes we are lucky and who we intended to hear is on the other end. Sometimes all we can do is leave a voicemail and hope.
Or, we can do as Brenda Miller and Julie Marie Wade have and answer the call to respond in kind. What can we discover when we work towards the communal?
Writing Exercise:
- With a partner, pick an inciting word (moon, bell, distances, or something else) as the topic of the essay.
- One writer will write a section of the essay on the topic then share it with their partner. The partner reviews the previous section carefully, noting images and words of inspiration, and responds in a new section.
- Repeat this process until you’ve reached a natural end. Don’t be afraid of what you discover about yourself and each other. Don’t be afraid to break the silence.
- Remember, no voice is more significant than the other. Consider how your voices may combine, merge, transform into the communal/universal.
Celia Cook is a recent graduate of Ball State University’s Creative Writing MA program, where she worked as the Assistant Director to the Creative Writing Director and was an intern at River Teeth: A Journal of Nonfiction Narrative for two years. She was an essays reader for The Rumpus from 2022-2025 and is now the Images Editor for Beautiful Things. Currently, they are busy writing two books, buying too many cardigans, and baking banana bread out in Baltimore. You can find her work in Michigan Quarterly Review, and follow her on Instagram @belia.book.
Photo by Himanshu Ranpara on Unsplash
