The Voice

Good morning one and all.

The weekend seemed to fly by and here we are again on Monday and The Voice.

Last Monday I talked about how we find our voice through experience, and I mentioned that we should look after it well. It's a very important part of who we are.

I was reading the article, "To Make Me Who I Am," in the current issue of Poets & Writers Magazine and I found some very important comments by Reginald Shepherd that I feel apply to how we develop our writer's and poet's voice.

For Shepherd, poetry was a way out. You may think a way out of his environment and I think it was that as well, but for Shepherd it was a way "to get out from under, to somehow get over, around, anything" his self. He did not want to affirm that self and this comment, among others in his article, really made me think.

I can relate to what Shepherd meant because he didn't ever feel as if he fit in as a child. He found the inside of a book and a blank sheet of paper the only space he could claim as his, and I can definitely relate to what he means.

I think our childhood influences what we write and also what drives us to the need to write. Adversity and feeling like an outsider can come in many forms. It is not only related to background and skin colour and gender and sexual orientation, there are many more subtle forms of alienation as well.

Sometimes no one is really listening to who we are as we grow up. And there is an intense need in everyone, I think, to be heard. As we grow older we realize that no one else can ever really understand all of who we are. Shepherd goes on to comment on this as well and when he enters the workforce he finds that his poetry sustained his sense of self while he was scooping ice cream and working at other mind-numbing jobs.

Writers must write. I have no doubt that it is not a choice. Somewhere, somehow our past has forced us to express ourselves. Maybe we felt like outsiders, I'm sure everyone has their own unique story, but, for whatever reason, that drive is there pushing us to keep going.

Exploring where our voice originated can give us some very important insight into why we write what we do. His culture, as Shepherd says, "means something to me--it means everything to me." And so it should.

Where we came from has made us who we are, maybe not entirely, but it's been a huge influence. And speaking of it, writing it down in stories and poems, is a form of victory. Whether we were heard or not then, we will not be silenced now.