“When I first heard, as a young person who liked to write, that writing was about “finding your voice,” I got nervous. That seemed very risky: what if I picked the wrong one?”- Susan Huber
Susan Huber starts off this article with a very relatable question. What if I picked the wrong one? The wrong voice that would lead my writing. That’s a very real fear I had when learning about writing with voice for the first time in Professor Lisa Sislers’ Advanced Composition course during my undergrad. It was the first time I heard about voice being your own distinct personality in your writing.
I felt behind as a writer, even though I wasn’t even calling myself one at the time. I thought I had to pick one voice and stick with it forever. Famous authors I recognize, like poets Sylvia Plath or Margaret Atwood, and novelists Stephen King and Ocean Vuong, have distinct voices that I look up to. All of which seems to be unmoving or unchanging. Huber offers a new, refreshing perspective:
“I believe that we often hold this sense of voice as “self” or “essence” a little too tightly. The idea of one “authentic” voice is a holdover from a time when we saw each self as singular, isolated, and separate. These days, we’re moving beyond ideas of simple subjectivity and objectivity, and we’re more likely to see the self as constituted in relation to others, in community.”
Voice is not subject to stagnancy because we are not subject to stagnancy. We are ever-changing beings; therefore, our writing, and in turn, voice (or voice(s), may I challenge) can go through change too. This is how we embody our writing, by letting it embody our natural human nature, exploration, and creativity. This is how writing becomes a living, breathing body of work, even long after the words become stuck letters on a page.
Our writing can hold many voices and names.
“Language intersects with life.” -Mikhail Bakhtin
Mikhail Bakhtin, another notable literary theorist Huber mentions, also believed, like myself, that we have many voices. Even if a text were written by a single person, he argued that it can still hold many voices. Those of resonance and dissonance; of relevancy and hypocrisy.
Huber expands on this theory and calls for freedom of expression when writing and teaching it. She goes as radical as naming the many voices that take shape in her writing:
“And now I can’t stop naming voices: Hayseed Punk-Rock Girl, I’ve Lost My Shoes, Fierce German Peasant. In letting myself loose a bit, in looking for the weird voices in my own life and head and letting them out, I found new ways to say things and new perspectives on my life.”
I like the notion of naming your voices and reflecting on the different perspectives they bring into your life. If I were to name a few, I think some of mine would be: Slow Panda, Adhd Zoomies, Worry Man, Spirit Divine, Teacher Rivers, Stagnant Steed, and Inspired Butterfly. All are me, yet offer various ways in which I view the world and describe my processes.
When I become a professor, I’d love to incorporate voices, their importance, and how to find them, into the classroom and my writing exercises, the way Huber suggests.
