I wanted to explore my possible voices. My other voices, the ones that I don’t use here. That I don’t use at all. I’ve shied away from it, written regular posts, manic posts, boring posts, eager posts. I’ve toyed with the idea of buying a camera voice recorder phone so I can mix sounds and words and maybe images all in the same space, as Andrew suggested over coffee once. But I’ve not done anything. I’m scared, I think. What if my other voices are ugly? Hoarse? Inadequate? Screeching? Too challenging? Too powerful?
Perhaps I should try singing lessons.
Lisa
Jill, do you recall the movie Children of a Lesser God? Marlee Matlin’s character, who is deaf, is adamant about not learning to speak. She knows there’s a difference in the way hearing people and deaf people sound when they speak and she wants no part of it. When she finally is goaded into making a sound, it’s a scream.
I suspect we all have a voice or voices we think will be too ugly or primitive or off-key to make public.
Dale Emery
You may enjoy Hal and Sidra Stone’s book “Embracing Our Selves: The Voice Dialogue Manual”
Dale
meredith
I think it’s always a bit terrifying to let other voices “speak” in different contexts- using a “home” voice in an academic setting. But if ever there was an environment for experimenting with other voices it’s the blog. If you were really concerned about it perhaps you could set up an anonymous blog and test out how things go in that environment first.
Alex
It’s facinating where different parts of our personality rise to the surface, or in which situations others subside. I’ve found that when you establish a writing “voice” you’re never able to discuss something that properly reflects everything that happens in your own head when you think about the same thing. I wrote a bit about that, here:
http://www.nonphotoblue.com/archive/index.html#021003
Elin
Hmmmm – but on the other hand, if we don’t use those voices, are they really “ours”? If we choose not to use them, does that not tell us something about who we are (well, at least 90% of the time…) and who we are not?
No?
Jason
Speaking of singing lessons – my absolute favorite film about finding a voice: Little Voice
jon
Finding your own voice (voices) is part of the writing journey. But voices change, of course. Each time we write the voice is different.
I’ve always liked the idea of writing freely, recklessly: letters, postcards, journals, novels. The thing that intrigues me is that what I write is just a reflection of a “me” at any given moment. That “me” does not exist the moment my pen/fingers move on. That’s why editing is such fun because you reshape the voice.
Academic discourse pushes us to conform to a certain paradigm. I think the great thing about blogging within a literary academic context is that some of us might actually push and change the way we write. A new voice on the block might actually shuffle forth.
mamamusings
to think, perchance to write?
So many interesting topics swirling around out there in my ever-expanding world of blogs. Voice and authenticity, truth and lies,