Dystopic is not a tone of voice
What it's like trying on some other ones.
I didn't pick a word for the year. Instead it was a sentence, scribbled and tucked under my crystal along with the words and wishes of 16 other women as we wrapped up our retreat a month ago: "Protect and preserve your time, energy, and pleasure."
To be more precise, I should have written: write more poetry.
Although I fell short of getting this newsletter out in January (a month that felt like a year), the good news is that so far I’ve been holding up my promise to myself on this intention.
To start, I purchased several poetry craft books to guide my creative practice and fill my well of learning. Mary Oliver’s A Poetry Handbook is teaching me about the connection between sound and deliberate craft (rhythm, meter, assonance and more). The Poet’s Companion has been fascinating, and already inspired the start of one beefy poem that may take a while to get out. And The Magic Words, basically Mad Libs but for poetry, is bearing fruit by fostering a connection to my inner child.
On the second Sunday of the month, I circled up with friends to vision board, opting to spend my time sketching a year-long “poetry syllabus” for my year ahead. And on the 16th, I started a new session of the intermediate Writer's Studio class, sharing with my peers that I’m looking to hone my craft of poetry writing.
So far, I’ve produced two poems through the class, which helps us develop our voices by trying on another writer’s voice, or what we call the persona narrator. The beauty of the approach is in how freedom meets constraint — while we can write about any topic, we must do so through the PN assigned, which compels us to go outside of our own narrow perspective.
While my writing material (for instance, this newsletter) tends to focus on personal experience, everything I bring to the Writer’s Studio is fictional. We’re certainly welcome to bring in memoir-based material, but if we do so, our instructor says, it’s best to withhold this information for the sake of a more objective critique. We humans (well, most of us) are wired for connection and empathy, but this isn’t therapy — it’s a writing workshop!
For our first assignment, the PN is based on one used by Tony Hoagland in a poem about his experience having dinner with a friend living with HIV/AIDS, titled, “What Narcissism Means to Me.” My task is to reveal the PN's distinct take on an uncomfortable encounter by staying within a single scene. I end up writing from a first-person PN of a young mother who has dropped her baby off at daycare for the first time so that she can interview for a job that she desperately needs only to contend with a male interviewer who asks illegal questions to determine whether she will be a compliant, profitable addition to The Company's workforce. I state that the mood is “anxious” and the tone is “dystopic.”
My peers offered their critique, many pointing out the lines that followed with the preamble to a tee, until eventually my instructor pointed out, “The only thing is that the tone you have here…dystopic…this isn’t a tone.” She reminds us, the tone is how you’re telling the story. Is it conversational? Academic? Lyrical? Matter-of-fact?
Take two TV shows for example: post-nuclear war "Fallout" and post-pandemic "Station's Eleven." Both are views of a society post-apocalypse, but the former is told through the tone of absurdist comedy, while the latter is told through the tone of contemplative sincerity.
We ultimately conclude that the tone of my poem's PN is controlled, guarded, mechanical, or potentially even…corporate. The perfect tone for a woman whose body is “on the clock.”
This is a good time for me to mention that what draws me to memoir-writing as a genre (both reading and writing) is its earnest endeavor to access the truth. In fiction, the author is speculating about a character’s experience. With memoir, the author is channeling their own. And yet, a-ha, one might argue, it’s exactly the narrative distance that a PN provides an author who is crafting a work of fiction that allows them to access and reveal their own truth in such a way that perhaps even the bravest memoirist might not dare. The ability for a writer to practice both memoir (or personal journaling, etc.) and fiction, each for the benefit of the other? Chef’s kiss!🤌
Last week, we were given another heavy assignment, drawing from the first-person plural collective narrator prologue of Ling Ma’s post-apocalyptic Severance. I ended up writing a poem from the perspective of a beloved desert species that goes unnamed in the poem, told from post-extinction. The PN used a conversational tone that spoke with authority. What the exercise revealed to me was how much breadth there could be to a tone of voice, while still conveying a story that was ultimately…really god damn bleak. It also revealed to me how subjective the mood of a piece can be. I’d imagined the piece would evoke a forlorn mood, but actually, my peers shared, it felt heroic to them, a spokesplant reaching from the passage of time with an urgent message.
I’m still editing it, but here’s an excerpt:
Those of us who made it to the end were quite the spectacle — nearly seven stories tall, some of us were. Our taproots solid, our fibrous roots vast, our spines sharpened, our branches abundant. We were designed for hard times, but we weren’t designed with legs. And where would we have gone, anyway? We were home. Though we weren’t easily confused, as the monsoon got shorter and shorter, we started losing track of the seasons. Though we weren’t particularly social, each year we’d make fewer fruits and and our old nests went unoccupied. Though we weren’t all that vain, as us older folks stopped blossoming, we watched as fewer babies were born and saw that those who were hardly ever made it to their first flower. The heat came on slow and we did our best to withstand it, to evolve. But the lack of rain came on too quickly.
If you told me that things feel dystopic right now, I wouldn’t disagree. I mean, as you can see, it’s seeping into so much of what I’m creating lately. But if that is the story that feels most genuine, what I’d encourage you to do is to play around with your tone of voice. How are you telling the story of our time? What is the mood that your words are creating? There is no right or wrong answer, but it’s worth paying attention to it.
Speaking of attention, one of the many benefits of writing more poetry over the last month has been that I’ve spent a little less time on my phone, a bit less time on social media. The few times I’ve gone on, I’ve often felt time, energy, pleasure draining out of my body. These platforms and devices are so powerful in that way; we’ve helped to train them on how to best manipulate us, so now they can exploit our deepest insecurities.
But, I’m starting to reclaim more of my attention, and when I do, I can’t tell you how powerful it feels. Of course, our attention is our power. Of course, our attention is why the people in power right now got so powerful.
As this idea rolled around in my brain last week, I decided to start class with my yoga students by talking about how we live in this near-constant news cycle and information overload with so many things always vying for our attention, but one of the few times of the day that many of us put our freaking phones away is during yoga class.
Damn, I pondered aloud, I never really considered how much power that attention gives ME… Luckily, they got the joke!
That’s what you can do with your tone of voice. Make it funny. Make it scientific. Make it rich in imagery and rhythm. But be deliberate. We may not always feel like our voice is being heard, but we are the only ones who can craft the story of the world we find ourselves.
And if the stories that we tell are true, may they help those who are not endangered —but who have in fact been manipulated with a story of fear — to re-focus their attention on the nature of their own reality.