Healing, Teaching, Law with Wesley Enoch

Hoops of Steel is the podcast of the English Teachers' Association of Queensland, "a space where English teachers in Queensland and beyond can connect about the joy and point of learning, language and literature", and it is one of the podcasts we make here at Transducer Audio. We recently had the privilege of interviewing playwright and director Wesley Enoch who is one of the best communicators that I've come across. Having spent years editing interviews I've become highly attuned to the way people speak, so I can say with great confidence that Wesley's clarity of thought is unusual. When making an episode we typically record a little more than we need and then we cut down the interview to fit within a predetermined length, but Wesley made this task impossible because he plaited multiple threads of thought into one coherent idea. In addition to this he rarely stumbled or repeated himself so there was not much padding to remove. The interview itself touched upon communication styles. Wesley said that when conversing within Aboriginal languages it's important to let a person finish their thought because there could be a negative or a reversal right at the end of the sentence. Editing this interview was similar, in that Wesley was building in layers of nuance to his core ideas, and so cutting this interview short would have undermined the whole.

I've only come across one other person who communicated so clearly and that was actually Wesley's Uncle, who I can't name for cultural reasons, and who I first interviewed during the live broadcast assessment for my 4ZZZ radio training course back in 2010. I interviewed Wesley's Uncle quite a few times, and unlike Wesley he was very easy to edit because he spoke in discrete, complete thoughts; one stacked after the other with a neat pause between them. This was also very unusual. I don't know the exact reason that these two men both communicate in a similar style but I think it's interesting to draw a link.

Wesley's interview covers languages, storytelling, and Wesley's relationship with education, but I'm never going to do it justice by describing it here. Whether you're an English teacher or not I highly recommend that you listen for yourself.

I've included an excerpt below and you can find Wesley Enoch's whole interview here.

A short excerpt from Wesley Enoch's Hoops of Steel episode