Drawing the Chicken 18: On Voice

Voice. That elusive thing that artists and writers keep talking about— the one that’s supposed to make your work unique, separate from all the other work out there. The thing that is supposed to make your work yours.

I understand the search for voice, but I think we may be on to the wrong metaphor here. Our unique speaking voices comes to us without searching, without attempting. Of course, society moulds it, teaches women to speak in higher registers than their “true” voice, for example, but by and large, we speak uniquely without trying. It’s just our voice. In art, on the other hand, people can spend a lifetime looking for voice, looking for a way to be honest, uniquely oneself, transparent, almost. It might be the hardest task an artist ever sets themself.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot this past week, as I pummel through chapters of my oral history book, moving back and forth between eight women’s voices, and trying to figure out where and how much mine belongs. I want to stay true to the unique ways in which these women told me their stories, across language— to capture a little bit of their intonation, timbre, and quality of their storytelling. And even this actually turns out to be easier than figuring out my own voice as in intersects with their storytelling. I want to capture the lightness of some of these conversations, the laughter and resonance as we swapped stories about being raised by single mothers. I also want to capture the quiet waiting for a difficult story to emerge, the partnership, almost, between me and the respondent, the silence before, and between, the speaking. I want to capture the way in which I tell strangers about these women in conversation, so clearly fascinated by this collection of stories, so clearly their friend now. But the voice that comes out on the page is often dry, academic, objective in the worst senses of the word. I know this first draft, terrible as it is, just needs to get written, but I cannot wait for a subsequent draft where I get to play with voice, work on brining my writing closer and truer to how this all plays out in my mind.

In the past week, I have been thinking about this even more in clay. I finally got back to my pottery studio after over a year (yay!), and as I asked myself what I want to develop over the next few months, I found myself returning to the question of voice. I’m tired now of just making mug after mug, bowl after bowl, but I’m also committed to my pottery staying functional rather than sculptural (for now anyway). I also really, really don’t like making sets of things— I try, but I’m always bored by mug number 2, and I don’t ever buy or own sets of mugs anyway. So I’ve been asking: What does that leave me with? How on earth does one figure out a voice in clay anyway?

Here’s ny answer for now. For the first time in my life, I’m using poems to think about pots. I want to make a set of pots like a ghazal. Each couplet is unique, but they are tied together with a refrain and a rhyme— one element that returns prominently in each piece, and one softer shoutout to the other pieces in each piece. I’m still figuring out what that translates into when making mugs, but I know that for starters, it gives me permission to make similar forms on the wheel and then pinch them, dart them, fold them, cut them, and alter them to something that speaks to me far more than the monotony of the perfect shape over and over. More importantly, it gives me new questions to explore, new directions towards finding, for the first time perhaps, a voice in clay.