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Voicing Consciousness: The Mind inWritingRebecca Luce-Kapler a , Susan Catlin a , Dennis Sumara a &Philomene Kocher aa Faculty of Education , Queen’s University , Kingston, Ontario,CanadaPublished online: 29 Sep 2011.

To cite this article: Rebecca Luce-Kapler , Susan Catlin , Dennis Sumara & Philomene Kocher (2011)Voicing Consciousness: The Mind in Writing, Changing English: Studies in Culture and Education,18:2, 161-172, DOI: 10.1080/1358684X.2011.575249

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Voicing Consciousness: The Mind in Writing

Rebecca Luce-Kapler*, Susan Catlin, Dennis Sumara and Philomene Kocher

Faculty of Education, Queen’s University, Kingston, Ontario, Canada

In this paper, the authors investigate the enduring power of voice as a conceptin writing pedagogy. They argue that one can benefit from considering Elbow’sassertion that both text and voice be considered as important aspects of writtendiscourse. In particular, voice is a powerful metaphor for the material, socialand historical nature of language. Drawing on current psycho-neurological litera-ture as it is used in literary studies, the authors suggest that voice can also actas a metaphor for consciousness. Using findings from a study that used writingpractices designed with a focus on consciousness, the authors offer examplesthat illustrate the potential in recognizing the relations among voice, text andconsciousness.

Keywords: writing voice; writing practices; consciousness studies

A perennial question for some writers and for many teachers of writing is why thenotion of voice has such resonance and endurance as a descriptive term. The discus-sions about voice range from it being a liberation of the writer’s self to dismissal ofthe conception as simplistic and too nebulous to be of use. More complex consider-ations critique voice as leading to a singular and immutable version of one’s iden-tity and as contributing to beginning writers’ anxieties about putting word to page.

As writers ourselves, we frequently use the term ‘voice’ as shorthand for under-standing writing in a style that is recognizably our own. While we acknowledge thecomplexities associated with the term, prior to this project we had not attempted tounderstand why its use is so pervasive even as it begs definition. In a study thatexamined literary practices in the light of current consciousness studies,1 we feltthat there would be a benefit to exploring the question of voice. We wondered ifnew directions in consciousness studies might help us understand why the use of‘voice’ continues to find resonance with writers and teachers of writing.

To explore the relations among writing, voice and consciousness, three of theauthors2 met as a writing group weekly over one term. We experimented with avariety of writing practices that were largely influenced by the work of VirginiaWoolf (see Jones 2007). Connecting our study to a writer who had been so inter-ested in understanding and describing the phenomenology of consciousness wasuseful because Woolf used literary techniques that represented the more fragmented

*Corresponding author. Email: Rebecca.luce-kapler@queensu.ca

Changing EnglishAquatic InsectsVol. 18, No. 2, June 2011, 161–172

ISSN 1358-684X print/ISSN 1469-3585 online� 2011 The editors of Changing EnglishDOI: 10.1080/1358684X.2011.575249http://www.informaworld.com

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nature of mind beneath the more collected narratives of self. For instance, her novelThe Waves uses text like a prism, separating the consciousness of six characters asmoments of focus even while maintaining a connected thread through their sharedlife experiences. We also read several of Woolf’s essays alongside theoretical textsthat linked literary studies and consciousness (for example, Lodge 2002; Zunshine2006).

Throughout the practices the group experienced we continued to notice howwriting in various genres and styles enabled different explorations of consciousness.Not only did the creation of personae such as narrators and characters give us theopportunity to imagine other minds, but our experiments with genre also affordedthe experience of shifting states of mind. Perhaps it is this connection to conscious-ness that explains our fascination with voice. Just as humans are curious about whatother minds are thinking, so they are interested in how those voices represent con-sciousness.

One of the most common usages of ‘voice’ in discussions of writing processesis that of developing and creating voice (Rief 2007; Romano 2007). This sense of‘finding one’s voice’ refers to encouraging a writer to ‘deliver interesting informa-tion’ through employing various techniques of narrative that exhibit ‘perceptivity. . . surprising information and observations . . . [and] quite often . . . a sense ofhumour’ (Romano, cited in Rief 2007, 199). In other words, the writing offers thereader a sense of a specific individual speaking in the text.

The suggestion of ‘finding one’s voice’ has also been important for those whovalue the expressivist (personal expression) writing, especially feminist, queer andcritical theorists (for example, Smith & Watson 2001; DeSalvo 1996) who argue forthe importance of hearing from those whose opinions have been suppressed, affect-ing their sense of self worth and participation in the cultural discourse. For instance,feminists have argued that when women are able to explore their experiencethrough writing, such a process can have a profound effect on their decision-makingand sense of confidence (Mairs 1994; DeSalvo 1999; Luce-Kapler 2004). Voice is asynecdoche for the expressive confidence that comes from recognizing that whatone thinks and believes is worthy of attention. While this argument is an importantdimension of the discussion, we wish to move past the notion of ‘finding voice’ tothinking about what a sustained development of a mature writing voice might mean.Beyond the sense of having something to say, how does our conception of voicehelp us to better understand the processes of writing?

Mary Ann Cain (2009) points out that teachers of creative writing have often letvoice uncritically represent an important element of their pedagogy, ‘encouragingthe development of unique individual voices that, by their very presence, wouldtransform the culture – the logic being that just being different was enough’ (231).With a modernist focus on development of the individual, writers become responsi-ble for the shaping of influences on their work and are under an imperative to con-trol what is at times an elusive and unruly voice. It is this assumption of individualcontrol that Cain finds troubling:

It positions writers as powerfully able to choose who and what will influence theirwork but, at the same time, leaves them wide open to influences that, in a word, havechosen them; this happens whether they want it or not, whether they even know it ornot. As a result, writers are more likely to identify within the existing binaries that aremade available to them by the dominant culture – either they conform to what is

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onsidered publishable by current market forces, or they rebel and write what theywant, hoping to create the next new trend. Neither position inquires into this binary,nor does it offer any means for creating alternative choices beyond what ‘reality’ pre-sents. (236)

Cain’s perspective reveals the complexity of voice that is further complicated whenone associates voice with the author. As Foucault (1984) argued, the conception ofthe author is an historical and discursive creation that is not isomorphic with thewriter of the text. Rather ‘author’ is an identifiable marker that can demarcate thetext as being attributable to one source who then can be held accountable for thattext.

Surely the sense of authorship that circulates in Western culture must, in part,explain the challenge of writing, the tenuous feelings that many writers have, andthe weight given to their texts. Common conceptions of voice and writing contrib-ute to the responsibility of the writer for her words – words that are attributed toher and yet construct an individual whom she does not entirely recognize. Ratherthan liberating, voice can be entrapping when one feels the weight of such account-ability.

Peter Elbow, in part answering the critics who have misinterpreted and dis-missed his arguments for voice, suggests that our desire to use the term ‘voice’points to the difference between words on the page and the spoken medium of lan-guage. He argues that text focuses our attention on the visual and spatial features oflanguage as print – an abstract system that does not take on its nuances of meaninguntil it is spoken. He suggests that we benefit from considering both aspects in ourdiscourse: text and voice. For instance, paying attention to voice in writing helpsrhetorical effectiveness. Elbow points out how we recognize when ‘voice’ in a pieceof writing is wrong and by analysing voice in text and reading those texts and ourown drafts aloud, we can learn to hear what our readers are most likely to hear.Many of these textual features are what can be described as style, but Elbow arguesthat the voice metaphor works better for many.

Not only do most readers hear voices in texts as they read, they tend to hear people inthe texts. Written words may be silent semiotic signs, but when humans read (andwrite), they usually infer a person behind the words and build themselves a relation-ship of some sort with that person. (2007, 180)

At the same time, Elbow points out how the notion of voice does harm because theterm has no stable meaning. He suggests that its ‘peculiar resonance’ comes fromits reinforcing ‘harmful mythic assumptions’ where writers can believe that if theyfind ‘their own unique voice’, they will be good writers and that this belief perpetu-ates the thinking that we have single and unchanging selves.

Elbow insists that we notice how the concept of voice, ‘tied as it is to the mate-rial body existing in time, is the appropriate lens or metaphor for language as mate-rial and historical – language as the stuff with which humans try to reach and affectother humans’ (2007, 186). He suggests that we consider both ‘text’ and ‘voice’ asmetaphors – both words having morphed beyond their initial meanings. As such, itis important to recognize the cultural assumptions represented by voice and text andto consider how the two metaphors can be usefully employed together to betterunderstand the nuances and potentials of writing. It was by looking to recent studiesin consciousness from the psycho-neurological literature and literary studies that we

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better understood the relationship between text and voice and the importance ofboth to writing.

Historical studies of the evolution of human consciousness conclude that thecomplexity and range of human conscious abilities both emerged from and weresupported by the development of human language, particularly representationalforms of language that facilitated the development of ‘intermediate range’ consciousabilities (Kerby 1991; Olson 1995; Ong 1982). In brief, these studies argue that itis through the creation of technologies of literacy such as writing and reading thathumans extended the temporal span of consciousness by distributing usable infor-mation across various archival and communication networks (Norrentranders 1998).

For educators, one of the most interesting issues emerging from consciousnessstudies is how human beings make the transition from having conscious perceptionsto creating a coherent, yet evolving, sense of self-identity. Donald (2001) arguesthat in order for this development to occur, individuals must learn to ‘mind read’,which he describes as the ability of one human mind to be aware of other minds,and to notice that these minds are also aware of other minds. The dependence ofconsciousness on intersubjectivity makes possible our fascination with other peo-ple’s lives – fictional or real – and creates the potential for empathy (Thompson2001). We become aware of the richness of our own consciousness by imaging theconsciousness of others. As we think about and imagine their mental life, we fur-ther discover our own.

Lodge (2002) argues that engaging with literary texts represents an importantmind-reading practice that helps readers not only to develop their conscious aware-ness, but also to notice how this development occurs and evolves over time. This isparticularly the case when literary texts are read or experienced more than once bya single reader, since repeated readings facilitate the representation and interpreta-tion of these developments. Zunshine (2006) also posits that literary experienceschallenge and develop our abilities to ‘read’ human consciousness. She suggeststhat becoming a more sophisticated reader or writer of literary texts depends ondeveloping meta-representational skills, what she identifies as the uniquely humancapacity to ‘tag’ the usefulness of information based on relationships that are ‘trueonly temporarily, locally and contingently’ (52). When reading literary fiction, read-ers actively create such ‘source tags’ in order to monitor and track information theyreceive from and about characters; that is, who thought what about whom and itsrelative ‘truth’ in the current context. As in our daily lives, such monitoring enablesus to assess others’ intentionality. Zunshine points out, however, that in our day-to-day interactions we typically have time to be aware of two or three levels of inten-tionality, while in fiction, particularly in complex texts, up to six levels can be por-trayed, offering a sophisticated representation of the ways memory, perception andthought are woven through past, present and imagined experiences.

In considering the relation between voice and consciousness, two concepts fromElbow’s paper are helpful: sincerity and resonance. Sincerity in writing, as Elbowdefines it, points to neither good writing nor truthfulness. Rather, sincerity is a styleof voice that makes us believe the writer is genuine in what she or he is saying.We sense a ‘real’ human being. As Elbow notes, ‘For many readers, one of thepleasures in reading is a sense of making contact with the writer’ (2007, 179). Res-onance is the quality of text where we feel that ‘the writer has gotten a bit more ofhis or her self in or behind or underneath the words’ (179). We might identify thesemoments as having ‘added weight, richness or presence’ (179). Such instances are

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not necessarily those of ‘good writing’ but rather are cracks in the structure of voice– a peek beneath the screen perhaps. Elbow admits that this is pure speculation onhis part, yet we find ourselves easily recognizing such moments. While all writinghas some sense of voice, it is those moments of sincerity and resonance that makethe connection feel more like ‘mind reading’, offering an insight into a ‘real’ per-son’s thoughts. The quality of sincerity and resonance in the writing voice alsohelps explain why sometimes we can be completely fooled by what someone haswritten, believing it to be a ‘true’ rendering of the writer’s experience (e.g. the con-troversies around James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces, 2005 or Forrest Carter’s TheEducation of Little Tree, 2001). While there is not a direct correspondence betweenthe consciousness of the writer and the voice in the text, literary practices enablewriters to represent qualities of consciousness so that the reader senses the characterof a speaker and his or her thoughts. In this way, voice can be thought of as a met-aphor for consciousness and, given the propensity for human ‘mind reading’,explains why it is likely to continue as a robust concept for writers. How some lit-erary practices create voice became part of our findings.

The writing practices that we chose were meant to challenge our sense of voicein different ways. At first, we retained narrative structures, but we deliberately chan-ged our style of writing so that we drew on different rhythms and diction. Then weabandoned the narrative so that those taming structures of experience were absentas we tried to represent a stream of conscious thought. Afterwards, we shaped thatstream into a narrative so that we were more acutely aware of the written conven-tions we used to develop a voice and represent consciousness.

Writing Practice One

Give yourself permission to experiment with style. Tell the story of Little Red RidingHood (or any favorite short tale) using long, meandering phrases and opulently poeticlanguage. The following day, write another version of the story using short, spare,concise language. Notice how word choice as well as sentence length and sentencecomplexity can change the tone and feeling of the story. . . (Jones 2007, 36–7)

This writing practice interrupted our usual style and challenged our sense of voice.Writing at either end of the style spectrum – from long and meandering to shortand concise – ensured that we would experience different levels of discomfort. Forthe longer piece, Phil chose to write from a female wolf’s point of view. Throughthis voice, the traditional plot is reinterpreted: ‘It had been a lean year. And thewolf was hungry, hungrier than she had ever been. She stretched her weary bodyand left the dark and empty den, which was the only home she had ever known.’For the second part of the assignment, Phil added a limerick version of the story toexperiment with the shortened piece. As a haiku poet, she was more comfortablemoving back into a more succinct version, although she was not comfortable actu-ally using the haiku because the assignment felt too frivolous for this form. As shereflected on her longer piece of writing, Phil admitted this was ‘something that wasvery different for me, and I knew that I wanted to use way more description than Iever use in my own haiku. . . . I was trying to expand the way I use language . . .so I was conscious of doing that. . . . I moved into the story where I didn’t knowwhat was coming and this was new for me . . . moving to an edge of this vagueidea . . . I didn’t really know paragraph by paragraph what was going to happen.

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The story is already there and yet when I was writing it I was feeling like this wasbrand new territory . . . it’s absolutely this most amazing thing.’

Writing in the new style took so much focus for Phil that the story idea itselffaded into the background. For her it became an experience of writing in a newway and also writing a new story, especially when she wrote in a more expansivestyle, something that was very different from her usual writing choice.

Susan approached the assignment differently. She decided to retell the storycopying the style of different authors, choosing ones who represented the rangefrom spare to more mellifluous: Hemingway, Woolf, Faulkner, Poe and Munro. Herpiece reads like a play or a book with ‘chapters’, each being written in a differentstyle. What the experiment showed Susan was how other authors actually representhuman consciousness. ‘I was surprised reading some of the writers this way howmuch thinking goes on. I mean I knew it about Virginia Woolf, but I was surprisedat how much thinking goes on in Alice Munro. I’d never really paid attention andher characters are always thinking and are conscious of the way their voice sounds,and Faulkner too . . . he too had been thinking about consciousness and how toshow it on the page.’ She added, ‘I was surprised too finding out that some of thosevoices can only tell certain kinds of stories.’ Depending on what part of the RedRiding Hood tale she was telling, some of the voices seemed more appropriate thanothers, and the style communicated a particular philosophical perspective.

Rebecca did not much like the tone of voice that emerged in her writing – the firstironic with sarcastic asides and the second laden with sinister shading. There was acertain uncomfortable familiarity that this exercise had opened up – a dark side of hervoice that was usually latent. This realization raised the issue in the post-writing dis-cussion that we are not aware of all that we are communicating through our writing.As the writer A. Alvarez noted in his series of lectures about the writer’s voice,

The authentic voice may not be the one you want to hear. All true art is subversive atsome level or other, but it doesn’t simply subvert literary clichés and social conven-tions; it also subverts the clichés and conventions you yourself would like to believein. Like dreams, it talks for parts of yourself you are not fully aware of and may notmuch like. (2005, 31)

By writing a familiar story and deliberately changing styles, we were more awareof how we constructed our writing voice and how we draw those expressions fromdifferent sources to suit our intentions. Over time, certain habits of practice becomewhat we see as part of our ‘voice’. We could also identify the places in our writingwhere, even though we had consciously adopted another style, we recognized ‘ourwriting voice’. Our experience showed that even with deliberate manipulation towrite differently, filtering the story through our minds coloured it with our perspec-tive. Virginia Woolf described the power of the writing voice this way:

Style is a very simple matter; it is all rhythm. Once you get that, you can’t use thewrong words. But on the other hand here am I sitting half the morning, crammed withideas, and vision, and so on, and can’t dislodge them, for lack of the right rhythm.Now this is very profound, what rhythm is, and goes far deeper than words. A sight,an emotion, creates this wave in the mind, long before it makes words to fit it; and inwriting (such is my present belief) one has to recapture this, and set this working(which has nothing apparently to do with words), and then, as it breaks and tumblesin the mind, it makes words to fit it. (cited in Alvarez 2005, 45)

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Woolf understood that for writers the words were carried on rhythms that echoedthe sensations of consciousness and the unconscious.

Writing Practice Two

Sit in a quiet place for five or ten minutes. As you sit, try to be aware of yourthoughts, images and sensations moving through your mind. Be alert to abrupt shiftsand unexpected juxtapositions. Then, as best you can, take up your pen or tap at yourcomputer keys and try to trace the pattern of the impressions as they showered overyou. Try to imitate in words the shifts and jumps of your thoughts. Don’t censor your-self. Allow changes in tense, abrupt disconnections, nonsensical phrasing. (Jones2007, 36)

This activity asked us to pay attention to consciousness and then to try to rep-resent those sensations, the ‘waves in the mind’, through writing. The processwas challenging; when we actually ‘looked at’ and tried to represent conscious-ness, it was difficult. All three writers used phrases, dashes, ellipses and littleor no end punctuation to capture the darting and uneven rhythm of the thoughtflow.

Phil: the sky is blue . . . the trees are bare . . . sitting here in my hard chair with Clare’sfootstool under my feet.

Susan: the wind is in the trees in different ways like yesterday in the big tree by theschool – like a locomotion right down the middle – and in other places nothing

Rebecca: I cannot believe how much attention I am paying to my state of mind as Ilay on the couch and oh the sun shines through my closed eyes and I see red my handjust moved why am I paying so much attention to. . .

Phil described the experience of attending to one’s consciousness as trying to ‘doa 360. I close my eyes at one point, so I was trying to see, listen and feel whatwas touching me, and feel my feelings, so I was conscious that I was trying todo the ranging or maybe the fishing in all ways instead of what might just bemy favourite mode.’ She also compared it to journaling where she wanders in thewriting, but it’s still ‘very sentence particular’. She added, ‘I know that when Isat down to write I probably felt like I had, you know, 5% of what had goneon.’

Rebecca explained that she had tried to use ‘real data that I had been thinkingof or sensing or experiencing and tried to give that sense of going out and cominginto the body, outside in the forest, right next to me in the room – all those differ-ent levels of consciousness.’ She noted that, ‘Our consciousness does not functionwell under scrutiny.’

Susan agreed and wondered about ‘what you catch and then it forms where yourthoughts go and you aren’t even aware. . . . When I went over to the bench to sitdown, on the chair someone had written beautiful . . . I didn’t take time to thinksomeone has written beautiful . . . but afterwards when I read what I wrote and Isaw that image of beautiful on the chair, I wondered how much my mind wasdirected by that word someone else had written.’ She explained, ‘It’s worrisomewhen you focus on your thoughts . . . that’s where the crazy making part is, that it’s

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frightening somehow that I couldn’t pull those back or couldn’t make the directionchange. . .’

There were two levels of discomfort with this exercise. First, our consciousnessdid not function well under scrutiny and thoughts seemed to hide from our atten-tion. Second, we had abandoned typical literary structures through which we repre-sent our thinking and that serve as scaffolding for our voices. Jan Zwicky, indescribing the differences between the narrative and the lyric, wrote that

To embrace narrative is to live into an image of the self, a construct of who we wish,or fear, to be. There can be nostalgia associated with such images, too: the point ofthe story, after all, is to comfort us, to help us make sense of what we think we were,or imagine we have become. (2006, 94)

Narrative tries to tame the wildness of experience, while it is lyric that affirms‘memory as wilderness, as the raw music of experience’ (Zwicky 2006, 96). By let-ting go of the narrative structures that we used to define ourselves and to expressour voices in writing, we moved closer to the lyric where, Zwicky writes, ‘the selfdoes not exist – what exists are moments of emptied, utterly open attention andaddress’ (94). Where narrative is explanation, Zwicky argues, lyric is witnessing,and the witnessing of our consciousness was unsettling; it was too raw. As a resultof this practice, we recognized the cultural shaping we give to consciousness whenwe invite others to ‘read’ our minds. We missed the literary presence, the orderingthat sorts our impressions into representations.

Writing Practice Three

Examine how James Joyce represents Molly Bloom’s soliloquy in Ulysses. Rewritethe consciousness writing to represent thought. (R’s field notes)

We decided to rewrite our stream of consciousness pieces in a recognizable literaryform and started by examining James Joyce’s writing, identifying the literary tech-niques he employed. Although there is a lack of punctuation and typical sentencestructure, Joyce develops a rhythm that brings more coherence and meaning thanour experimental attempts. In other words, his artful crafting felt like an accuraterepresentation rather than a mimicking of stream of consciousness. We also exam-ined a page of transcript and compared it to a page of dialogue from Hemingway’s‘Hills Like White Elephants’, a short story that depends almost entirely on a con-versation between a man and a woman for its realization. These investigations high-lighted the literary practices that have been developed to represent human mindsmore fully, techniques that include rhythm, diction and punctuation. Compare theopening of our rewritten pieces to those of our previous rendering.

Phil: It is the in-between time of autumn turning to winter. Most of the leaves aregone, and yet their brilliant yellow light just outside my window still lingers in mymemory.

Susan: In Arles the light was luminous. I’d like to describe the quality of light I per-ceived there but since I have no understanding of the factors that influence the vari-ance in light according to geographic location, I can’t.

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Rebecca: She lies on the couch, the sun warm on her eyelids. She swims through thered viscous depth, marvelling as she has since childhood that light can reveal the inte-rior of her skin. . .

This writing practice elicited an extended discussion among the group, some ofwhich follows. Rebecca began the conversation after the reading by noting that forher piece of writing she had ‘quite deliberately moved into the third person becauseI wanted to create some distance, and although it was taken from that experience,as I began to write it, she started to become a character for me. So there are piecesthat certainly came out of that time, but it feels now like it is somebody else andnot me.’

Susan commented that something she was thinking about when she wrote herown and which she noted in Rebecca’s was the sense of irony. ‘Last time we spokeabout the anxiety we felt writing and yet there’s a strange sense of it being yourself.[By creating a character] the anxiety we felt about writing it down and attending toour thoughts makes us feel at home in ourselves,’ she said.

Rebecca noted that ‘It’s interesting how raw experience does not seem asauthentic or as understandable even as crafted represented experience. . . . We learnour sense of consciousness through various cultural practices, so maybe we’re moreused to having this filtered interpretation of experience.’

‘So when you’re talking about something represented being more real, some-thing represented leaves things unsaid, leaves space for me to engage with my ownimagination [unlike our consciousness writing]. I have more of a comfort level firstof all with the sentences but also with images portraying something else than saylisting all those things. [I like metaphor] because it says so much more,’ Phil said.

Susan explained, ‘I picked up a few ideas that I was playing with – the businessabout Arles and the light and the anxiety. Those were issues in the first piece, and Iwanted to play around with them since cohesion is always something I am workingat . . . I [wrote] a paragraph and the sentence at the last paragraph led into the nextone, led into the next one, led into the next one, so I mimicked the idea of yourmind being attracted by one thing that leads you on to another thing.’

‘It’s interesting because doing that first exercise and then doing part two reallyshowed me that this would be an interesting way to develop the complexity of acharacter,’ Rebecca said.

Through these three writing practices, we articulated a clearer understanding ofthe writing voice. In the first, we realized the deliberate use of someone else’s struc-tures was uncomfortable, but so was the ‘anything goes’ of our second practice.Particularly striking was our sense of unbalance in writing about our consciousnessexperience. Susan’s mention of psychosis and our general discomfort were surpris-ing. What we understood was that our consciousness was the source of our writingvoice, but clearly an edited and structured version, that voice is constructed usingliterary techniques that we have learned from ‘reading’ the minds of characters/nar-rators in other texts and from years of crafting our own texts. We have learned howto sift and negotiate meaning and we use those skills to communicate a version ofconsciousness, what we might call ‘our voice’.

More skilled writers, like Virginia Woolf, are able to represent characters withcomplex consciousnesses; nevertheless, they still have an identifiable way of goingabout that creation – something we still recognize as the writer’s voice howevermultifaceted. We are attuned to reading each other’s minds – we daily partake of

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this through conversation, through attention to body language, and through partici-pation in cultural practices. Writing is one form of cultural practice. If we under-stand voice as a representation of consciousness, then it illustrates why voice as atextual metaphor might be important. While the language and the grammar arestructured to represent mind, it is the sound of that language that we hear in printand that gives the text its energy and human connection. We hear voice because wecannot see the author’s body language or read any other signs of consciousness.Over the course of literary history, humans have developed some sophisticated tex-tual practices that help us believe we are sharing someone’s mind. From our smallstudy with writing practices and voice, we came away with a stronger sense of whatwas meant when we spoke of the writer’s voice.

The writing practices highlighted the nature of our writing voices; we had thesense that it was ‘me but not me’. As soon as experience is shaped in language, wefeel one step removed, and even if what we are writing is identified as autobio-graphical, we create a persona, a speaking voice to tell the story – one conscious ofthe audience listening. But it is dangerous to map a direct correspondence betweenthe writer’s voice and the person choosing the words. As Zunshine (2008) pointsout:

Attributing states of mind is the default way by which we construct and navigate oursocial environment. This does not mean that our actual interpretation of other people’smental states is always correct – far from it! . . . In fact, it might be difficult for us toappreciate at this point just how much mind reading takes place on a level inaccessibleto our consciousness. For it seems that while our perceptual systems ‘eagerly’ registerthe information about people’s bodies and their facial expressions, they do not neces-sarily make all of that information available to use for our conscious interpretation.(60)

While here Zunshine is speaking of face-to-face encounters, her warning about inac-curate interpretations holds for writing. The game of ‘who is speaking’ and ‘whothinks what about whom’ – what Zunshine calls ‘source tags’ – is the irresistibledraw to reading stories and the belief that we are ‘reading minds’ no matter howaccurate we may or may not be.

The extent to which writing voices are constructed through literary practicesinterested us. We knew that our writing was influenced by the voices we heard andread, but the exercises revealed how much one is dependent on those structures ofnarrative, literature and language to shape those voices. Different contexts couldchange the timbre even while recognizable notes remained. We were responding tothe texture of the experience of writing as well as the story we wanted to tell.Zwicky’s essay (2006) reminded us that the project of understanding ourselves inthe world is continually undone. ‘To try to make sense of one’s life is to gatherone’s own and the community’s memories in an attempt to produce some kind offit, some kind of mutual accommodation. But this project is continually undone bythe world, by deep, open attention to the world’ (94).

What our small study taught us was the importance of writing practices thatfocus attention on voice. Even though we were all experienced writers, we weresurprised by the insights possible with simply ‘trying on’ other voices, playing withrhythms and diction, and attending to the literary techniques that signal qualities ofvoice. Copying an author’s text word-for-word is a good place to begin to feel whatit is like to write from another’s voice. Then writing from a character’s perspective,

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trying to use different sentence lengths, and choosing language that is not one’s firstchoice can reveal how we signal ‘mind’ through text. Trying the same story in dif-ferent genres can also show the subtle changes in voice that are needed. These prac-tices take writers outside what they ‘think’ and help them notice the ‘features’ oftheir writing voice. With this type of attention over time a writer can recognize anduse literary techniques that represent consciousness, creating a voice with resonanceand sincerity.

We write in the midst of a stream of experience, never able to hang on to thedefinitive, to say that this is our voice, this is how we write and think, this is whowe are once and for all. Nevertheless, by bringing our consciousness to bear on theinterpretation of experience through writing – either through our own persona oranother’s; whether through narrative or poem – we do begin to develop a sense ofcontinuity, a character to the consciousness that we might well call our writingvoice.

Notes1. The writing group described in this paper was part of this larger study funded by the

Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.2. Luce-Kapler, Catlin and Kocher.

Notes on contributorsRebecca Luce-Kapler is Associate Dean, Graduate Studies and Research in the Faculty ofEducation, Queen’s University, Kingston, Ontario, Canada.

Susan Catlin is a PhD candidate in the Faculty of Education, Queen’s University, Kingston,Ontario, Canada.

Dennis Sumara is Dean of Education, University of Calgary, Alberta, Canada.

Philomene Kocher is a research associate at Queen’s University, Kingston, Ontario, Canada.

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