Finding My Voice

Thanks to Fannie Lou Hamer and Jessye Norman

A woman walks on stage, opens her mouth, and a mountain roars. That mountain’s name is Jessye Norman.

The Prepublication Stage—Picking a Subtitle

I was struggling with my publisher over the subtitle to Prozac Monologues. Well, not a struggle for her. It was all in a day’s work for a publisher who invites input from her authors and values collaboration. The struggle was mine.

The prepublication process had already set my anxiety disorders screaming and thrown my precarious balance out the window. Every single suggested edit in the manuscript bypassed my prefrontal cortex and went to straight to my amygdala, setting it into hyperdrive. The fact that the work itself contains a chapter that describes this process in detail did not prevent my feeling the pain—though some self-awareness did give me a few chuckles.

That was my battered brain’s condition when we got to the topic of subtitle. As a previous post related, it was partly a push/pull over genre. Would the title signal memoir (her choice) or brilliantly written treatise on the pathophysiology, diagnosis, and treatment of bipolar disorder, albeit in the form of a comedy club performance (my vision)?

Now that I put it that way, I recognize her wisdom.

It was September, 2019. My wife had gone to Ireland with her sister, while I stayed home to work on prepublication. So I did not have her help with that balance thing. This could have gotten entirely out of hand.

Credit for Edge goes to the publisher: I like “the edge” because it speaks to the energy of the book, which is at times edgy.

Edge also spoke to something deep within me. So that edged us toward a solution.

The Power of a Voice

And then came September 30, 2019. Jessye Norman died.

I played the cd of her performance with Kathleen Battle at Carnegie Hall. I played it again. And I played it again.

And that also spoke to something deep within me.

My Struggle for Voice

I am never going to write one of those memoirs that tells all the dirty little secrets. That’s for me and my therapist. My struggle with the memoir genre relates to the concept of trauma-porn. Do you get off on reading about other people’s misery? Do I get off on telling you my own?

Nah, I was raised not to complain. Complaining triggers a boatload of shame for me. Which, by the way, makes the therapeutic process difficult.

And then there was the trauma inflicted in therapy itself, when my complaint was about something that my therapist did, and expressing my complaint was shamed.

I lost my voice entirely.

Yup. In the first session with each of the next three therapists and next three pyschiatrists, I had laryngitis. I whispered my story. Weird, huh.

That was the background, my struggle with voice. Then on September 30, 2019, I pulled out that cd. I went to Youtube and watched the performance.

A woman walks on stage, opens her mouth, and a mountain roars. A mountain walks on stage, opens her mouth, and Jessye Norman’s is the voice that roars.

It was time to claim my own voice.

Once I had Voice, the subtitle discussion came down to prepositions. I am not going to write a post about the prepositions.

The Voices of Black Women

They have been my teachers, black women.

It was 1964. I was eleven years old, nearly twelve, teetering on the edge of one of those developmental milestones. My mother raised her children to pay attention to politics. So I was watching the Democratic Convention.

Back in those days, political conventions were not infomercials. There was conflict. There was drama. There were decisions made at the convention itself about who would be winners and who would be losers.

It’s hard to imagine such a thing these days, but a hearing in the Credentials Committee was being broadcast on national television. And there I was, on the edge of a child’s morality based on rules, when I heard this:

There are rules about who is seated at a convention, who gets to represent their state. The delegation had been chosen. But the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party challenged the seating of the Mississippi delegation. It would break the rules to seat the Freedom Party.

But.

But there is another kind of morality. It is based on justice. Fanny Lou Hamer told me it was time to grow up.

The Power of Story

Fanny Lou Hamer called me to find my own voice in the name of justice. Eventually I came to understand the power of story to catch people at their own edge of growth.

So now I have come full circle on the issue of memoir. Story is a powerful tool. I still cringe at trauma-porn. If a story has the power of a buzz-saw, it takes incredible skill to create something with it that is more than sawdust.

But that is another post.

Has anybody’s story changed you?