Just as people relate to events in a unique manner, art affects everyone in a meaningful way, whether its subject matter is kind or cruel, noble or vainglorious.
Author Joan Connor maintains that setting is the formal aspect that gives stories their mood, but I believe it is really the writer’s voice that is capable of creating a sense of intimacy, causing distress, or giving rise to a debate. In a collection of essays, The World Before Mirrors, Joan Connor writes about her stay at Thurber House; she loads her blatant adoration of the author with sexual connotations, such as sleeping in his bed under his quilt that was red and white, “primitive colors, red blood of hymen, menstruation, birth, death, and white of semen.” But Connor’s salacious voice is more an indication of her desire for love and not so much for the man, thus revealing a vulnerability that is quite endearing. Her true love, however, is her thirteen-year-old son on whom she lavishes quirky accolades for indulging her tears, cheers, and fears—there is no denying that they have a close bond.
As much as a sincere tone is meant to engender respect, a voice that is too confessional could be offensive.
In the same book, Connor gives reign to a stream of consciousness to an overbearing degree. But she is funny too, so it is hard to hold any flaws against her. In her essay, The Waiting Room, she scoffs at her dentist (referring to his “sausage-stuffed condom fingers”), she laments her boredom in the podiatrist’s office (“You know with a dead certainty that a man who trims bunions for a living does not have a story for you”), and she maligns Ohio (calling it “my sensory deprivation tank”). In Forsaken Places, her loneliness is poignant: “I am a missed opportunity.” Her raw depiction of her first sexual encounter (a rape) leaves me bleeding too. Connor has a thing for wordplay that is as unsettling as it is captivating: “Words are how I construct my self. Without them? Knock knock. Nobody home. Ashes ashes we all fall down. Selfhood is a knock-knock joke without a punch line. Dr. Caligari’s empty cupboard, Mother Hubbard.”
Joan Connor claims that you “cannot hide in an essay,” that it is a defiant way of transmuting “self-loathing into something of beauty.”
Although Connor cannot speak for all writers, in a new anthology by Kitchen and Jones, In Brief, seventy-three authors reach deep into their imaginations to give voice to their realities. In remembering the past, pondering the present, and speculating about the future, these authors generalize observations and distort facts, employ lyrical descriptions and conversational styles, unleash emotions and make unlikely associations. As they wield hedonistic sentences filled with verbs and adjectives soaked in honey and bitters, their creations play games with my mind so that I cannot help but remember “those summers at the beach,” weep for “a smell lost from childhood,” and I certainly lament for the Midwest belief that “a man who works hard can erase all his sins.”
In imparting his shock and anger about his newborn son’s faulty heart, Brian Doyle supplies cold-hearted facts—“a doctor will slice open my son’s chest with a razor, saw his breastbone in half;” he makes use of a powerful metaphor by comparing the blood vessels of the heart with a railroad station “where the trains are switched to different tracks;” he blasphemes: “I would kill the God who sentenced him to such awful pain;” he redeems himself by talking to God “more than I admit,” and then he lets God conclude with a poignant polarity: “I write death on all hearts, He says, just as I write life.”
When it comes to conveying information in a creative way, there seems to be a vast variety of writing styles and voices at a writer’s disposal. If I may venture an opinion, it would be this: whether writing or reading, mutual respect can make as much of a difference in the world of art as it does in real life—writers should be mindful of the effect their voice has on readers, and readers have an obligation to not only make subjective sense of a text but to also arrive at some understanding of the writer’s intentions.
As a writer, do you have fun with voice like a cat plays with a ball of wool, or do you approach it like a mouse—tentative, lest it upsets your readers, or even intimidated by the possibility that they may find it offensive? Go on, don’t be timid – tell us!
