By Susan Schirl Smith
Decades ago, I returned home from an evening out dancing at a student union pub. The door to my college dorm room was slightly ajar, unusual noises coming from inside. I expected to see my roommate there as I entered.
But it was empty.
Standing in the middle of the room, between the metal beds on either side, I saw nothing out of the ordinary.
But the oddest sounds were surrounding me. Chirping. Cawing.
Birds. I heard birds.
I’d only had a single beer that night. I didn’t think it was that making me hear things.
This was a cold spring night in Northern New England, in a dormitory built of concrete and brick. We sometimes left the windows open even on the coldest of days since there were no individual thermostats in the rooms, the administration setting the ambient temperature.
Was there a tear in the screen?
I looked around to see if somehow something had come in through the window, and realized there was a record on the turntable. The bird sounds were coming from that record player.
As part of my roommate’s classes for her Wildlife Management major, she was studying ornithology. Learning the voices of the birds, essential in a field managing the conservation of those birds, and other animals.
Nature, and the voices of the wild had led me to that same major for a brief time. Those bird songs intrigued me. The natural world never stopped fascinating me.
Walking through my rural neighborhood now, I will often stop just to listen to the counterpoint of the wind rustling through the trees, as the symphony of bird songs fill the air. I’d like to say that I can recognize the unique cadence and music of each. I don’t, but the magic of technology allows the bird app on my phone to delineate the difference between a dark-eyed junco and a tufted titmouse.
Why did knowing the call of each matter so much to me? The individual beauty of each of their songs needed no definition, yet I needed to know who they were to understand this world I was living in.
My neighborhood is unusually quiet at night, at least with human noises. It is uniquely noisy with the sounds of nature with conservation land right behind my house. I have been awakened by the deep throaty call of a barred owl. Utterly magical. Other nights there are the sounds of foxes screaming, coyotes howling, bobcats crying… sounding oddly like babies. (Awakening to the sound of screaming foxes is a bit disconcerting, however.)
Like all the natural world, the voices unique, and beautiful in their distinct cadence and tone, important for their community and survival. Birds are among the world’s most social animals: their calls in particular have evolved as systems for mediating social interactions. More than just lovely songs, they maintain bird societies and the relationships within.
All of nature has its own sound, its syntax, its balance. Humans, much the same, with our own voices.
Why, then, do we often try to silence those voices, make them characterless and banal, particularly in our voice on the written page?
In my literary life, the first seminar I took at a writing conference was on voice. I’d attended numerous classes and workshops previously on a variety of topics in writing, but this was the first dealing with a less concrete concept. The expression of “you” on a page.
The instructor was a Latina from Brooklyn, vibrant and energetic. Big smile, loud voice speaking with authority. As she read her own words, a life in New York filled the room. I could almost see and smell the traffic in the city, the wave of odor rising from the garbage cans on trash day in the summer. She described her experience as a young woman attending a writing program at college and how the expressions of her culture, the truth of her own lived experience was discouraged. The lyricality of her words had transported me to another world. Had she changed them, my experience of her work would have been drastically altered. Her voice was so different from my own perspectives as a photographer who looks at the world’s balance of light and dark, an inner-city girl who lives in the country, and a holistic nurse who writes of the connections to the natural world.
Ten minutes later, I sat at a table during coffee hour, exchanging business cards and networking with other writers. I grew up in a small, gritty, inner city not far from Boston where the conference was held. Bostonians, and much of Massachusetts often looked down on people from my city, even as the sprawl of Boston expanded into its city limits. I mentioned where I was from, followed by some comment about being at a New York City art museum. Another writer expressed surprise that someone who grew up where I did knew about the cultural world of New York City. I’d had a similar message from a writing instructor who once asked if someone from where I was born would actually use a word so “fancy”.
I was caught in a liminal space. The words of the seminar on voice were disjointed from the subliminal—and not-so-subliminal—labels created by other people, other writers.
How often do we internalize this feedback? After having a couple of editors review a manuscript and each give feedback that was completely opposite from the other, the lessons of that seminar on voice became clear to me.
Voice in writing is language, syntax, style, tone. Our voices in writing are defined by who we are, where we are born, our lived experiences, our education. Our words, like the birds’ songs, maintain our societies and explore the relationships within them. The evolution of our writing style is like the song of a bird that is like no other, creating our community, and yes, perhaps like the birds, our own survival.
We are more than the sum of our individual parts or experiences. What makes us the person that we are, the writer that we are is what creates the beautiful tapestry of humanity.
This suppression of the individual, the negation of the unique perspective and sound we each bring to the world has contributed to certain voices and the written word being banned. Unique words, individual perspectives, not having the right “sound” to someone else, denying us the experience of the exploration of other worlds. Like the birds and other wildlife silenced, too, as species become extinct.
How can we understand something for which there are no words?
Our voices are no different from the birds, or the animals. The lyricality, the syntax, the cadence of our words on the page are a reflection of the brilliance of our individuality, and the connection to community.
In these chaotic times, we need that more than ever.
Susan Schirl Smith is a writer, photographer and holistic nurse living on the Seacoast of New Hampshire. Her essays have been published in WBUR’s Cognoscenti, Pangyrus, Silver Birch Press, Kind Over Matter, and the Porter House Review, among others. Her photography has been featured in Barren Magazine and L’Ephemere Review, along with local newspapers.
She has always been fascinated by the infinite possibilities of the world, and has owned a holistic wellness center, worked as a creative coach, designed websites, taught meditation and self-development classes, along with working in nursing in hospital and community settings. Her memoir in revisions is Desperado, a story of grief and hope, and the connection with loved ones that lasts forever.