Hello beautiful human,
Yesterday on a whim, I made a voice recording of my small made thing and included it. It’s been an idea in the back of my head for a while now to play around with adding audio to these daily dispatches, and like most of the innovations and experiments in this Space, I simply had to wait until the time was right for it to blossom into next and manifest. What, you thought I was in control around here? Au contraire.
Voice has been an important aspect of my creativity for a long time. Back when I was a teenager I sang and participated in every theater production I could find in my small town. I took all the speech and drama classes in high school. I took that passion and preference with me to college, where I continued to sing. Post graduation, vocal expression folded itself into my writing. Music folded into meter, rhyme and rhythm, verse and stanza, and singing morphed into reading at open mics and other events.
Writers spend a lot of time worrying about voice, about the voice of their words on a page. In the early years like most of us I hadn’t found a writer’s voice that felt coherent. For me, that came simultaneously with parenthood. I can’t tell you why exactly that was but I have a few ideas. I think now that the writerly angst around voice is misplaced. The real important thing is not to find a voice but to know ourselves, and by this I mean not only to be able to recite our values or our achievements, but to be embodied. From there, it becomes so much more clear what we want to say. Voice will inevitably be part of that embodiment and knowing.
All that took a long time to come round to. And somewhere in there, I began to explore the differences between written communication and oral story-telling. The patterns are very different and the use of voice as well. Somewhere in there I began to think about the use of voice as it danced with the art of listening. Somewhere in there, I became fascinated by how our voices weave into and out of the broader sound fields of the day around us. Somewhere in there, I became more interested in holding space for other voices to braid together. I used my voice as a way to encourage and invite others, and lost track or willingly gave up—for a while, anyway—the idea of voice as my own expression.
So yesterday pushing that record button was a coming around full circle. I recorded my small made thing and played it back through my headset and heard my voice again for the first time in a long time. Later that day I had a phone call with an old friend. You sound so relaxed, she said. You sound really good. Grounded. There used to be, she contnued, a defensive edge to your voice and I don’t hear that today.
I don’t hear it either.
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