As you might recall, last week’s “Voice of the Chieftain” editorial was on the importance of communities learning how to talk about their differences without falling prey to polarization.

In this week’s Chieftain, you can read a story previewing this weekend’s Winter Fishtrap conference, which couldn’t be more timely: The theme is “Can We Talk?” and one of the sessions during the conference is a panel discussion titled “Working Together When We Don’t Agree.”

Shannon McNerney, the executive director of Fishtrap, came up with the idea for “Can We Talk?” She said the goal of the conference boils down to this question: “Can we talk about how we get past the things that divide us and actually see each other as people?”

McNerney will be moderating that “Working Together” panel discussion, which will feature three local notables.

The three people scheduled to be on the panel — Nils Christoffersen of Wallowa Resources, Beth Estock, the pastor at Joseph United Methodist Church, and Chantay Jett of the Wallowa Valley Center for Wellness — have been in the middle of hot issues over the last couple of years.

But don’t be misled, McNerney urged, into thinking that the panel will be diving into any of those hot issues.

“Let’s be super-clear,” she said. “The issue isn’t the topic.”

The topic, she said, is listening.

“It’s not about how do you get somebody to change their mind,” she added. “It’s about how do you get to the sense that you recognize that the person you’re sitting with is your neighbor and your friend or, at least, somebody with whom you share some values. And if you don’t sit down and talk to them, you’ll never see that.”

“That’s not easy,” she added.

No. It’s not.

Because, as we all know by now, talking is easy. Listening, on the other hand, is hard. And these are times when we all could use some practice in listening.

Fishtrap deserves credit for diving into this topic — and if you’re intrigued by any of this, consider checking out the conference, which starts Friday night and wraps up Sunday at 11:30 a.m. For more information, go to the website fishtrap.org.

About our websiteA quick note about our website, wallowa.com: It’s gotten a facelift.

The reworked site is meant to have a cleaner design and to emphasize the stories that have been most recently posted to the site. So that means you might see a sports story near the top of the home page from time to time, not to mention regional or state stories of particular interest to Wallowa County readers.

The revamped site will take some adjusting on our part as well, in part because it requires us to use a different set of tags to post stories. But if you have comments about the website (even as we work through any bugs that emerge), we’d like to hear them: Send an email to either editor@wallowa.com or mmcinally@wallowa.com.

Back to the pastAn alert reader noticed that last Wednesday’s issue of the Chieftain didn’t include “Out of the Past,” our weekly look at stories from the paper’s back issues, which now stretch out more than a century.

This is our fault: We simply failed to notice that the column had been left out of last week’s edition. To make up for the miscue, an expanded version of “Out of the Past” appears in this week’s paper, on Page A15 — and it includes items from last week’s missing column.