In less than 3 weeks UNP will be exhibiting at the Association of Writers and Writing Programs’ (AWP) conference! The AWP Conference & Bookfair is the annual destination for writers, teachers, students, editors, and publishers of contemporary creative writing. Enjoy a sneak peek of the UNP books you can grab there.

Voice First offers writers and teachers of writing an opportunity not only to engage their voices but to understand and experience how developing their range of voices strengthens their writing.

We will be hosting an author signing with Sonya Huber on February 9th at booth 1334/1336 from 10am-10:30am as part of our programming. Mark your calendars!

1. Listening to Voices

When you’re inside a piece of writing that hums and crackles and sparks, when a real person is talking to you from the page, you’ve encountered a voice. “Voice” is what writing feels like. It sets off sympathetic vibrations in readers. It gives us a sense of connection to another live human presence, creating a real and complex moment of communication.

We all naturally speak with voice, which in verbal speech animates the larynx and the lungs; the ribcage and the lips, tongue, and teeth; gestures and expressions. In sign language voice comes from the fingers and posture, and gestures and expressions, or when using an assistive device, voice comes from expression and gesture, from the bodily movement of eyes or fingers using a keyboard, and in each case from the unique string of expression that is produced. The poet Adrienne Rich writes that words written with voice “have the heft of our living behind them.”

We have voices already, which makes the guidance to “find” one’s voice confusing. Somewhere between the body and mind and the page, this singular voice vanishes like a wisp of fog. Somehow the heft of our living gets stripped from written communication. My assumption in this guide is that you already have a full range of voices and they are already fantastic. Through these chapters we will name them, exercise them, watch as their stems and roots grow and branch and strengthen. When you can identify the huge range of voices you have, you can make choices about how and when to use them, how to draw on them, which voice to channel, how to create text that sounds like you, with the heft of your living and imagination, with syntax and style and snap and verve.

As Janet Burroway writes, “Begin by knowing, and exploring, the fact that you already have a number of different voices.” You can borrow voices, learn to listen to your own, exercise them so they grow stronger, trade them, try others on for size. And you get as many as you want.

When you use one, two more appear. And yet they are all connected and shifting. Once you appreciate all the voices you have to work with, you can mine them, and discover others, for writing in all genres. Your web of voices is you—but it’s also other people’s impact on you, what you’ve read, and what you’ve experienced. As Walt Whitman wrote, you “contain multitudes.” And as Felicia Rose Chavez writes, “How we speak is as abundant as we are.”

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Throughout my years of teaching writing, I have tended to skip the question of voice with my students because it didn’t seem to help writers. Instead, I gave writing prompts and asked writers to inhabit perspectives, real and imagined, past, present, and future. As these writers exercised and stretched, they began to feel something flow that had been frozen. They began to inhabit their writing, and that comfort on the page—with all the different selves that sounded like them—often transferred far outside the world of memoir or the personal essay and enlivened their academic writing. But I didn’t yet have a theory about why this worked.

If you’ve read about voice, you might have encountered the idea that it is a singular essence that animates writing, made up of craft and style choices and tone, and that it is somehow connected to our “real self.” As a young writer, this advice sounded to me like I had one “authentic” voice, the “real me,” with the rest of my expression somehow impure or fake.

I knew that I had a certain style, a set of phrases and an underlying grammar that united much of my writing, but when I thought about my voice, I felt self-conscious. That “one voice” concept made me feel like I couldn’t stray far from my roots, like I had one crayon to color with. Following that idea, it seemed like I’d somehow have to incorporate all of my being and influences into one mode of expression so that, no matter what, I’d always sound a little like a midwesterner stuck in the 1980s and my true style was a kind of anchor or tether, one I’d always circle around, with a limited range.

I couldn’t tell you much about my “singular voice” beyond a list of words I choose regularly, a few bad habits of sentence construction, and some influences of region and era. But when I think about my range of voices, I see very clearly how I use these strands in different situations. I knew as I grew as a writer that I had a voice that comes from my experience as a small-town midwesterner, a voice that comes from my background as a political organizer, a voice that is shaped by my time in academia, and many more. On a deep level those voices have been shaped by everyone I have listened to and read.

We each have a range of functional voices that help us get through the day in our present life. We have a voice we use to tell the dog how cute she is, which is different than the voice we use at work, and mixing them up is often fun. (Is bossy-wossy the cutest ever?)

Every voice we develop is an interface or cognitive tool to help us interact with a specific slice of the world in a specific time and place. All of these voices are definitely connected, and they’re united by a whole host of style and tonal habits. We move along throughout our lives, and we discard some of our old voices, or they are used to make new ones.