It’s Never Too Late (or Too Early) to Find Your Voice

The Stack of the Week: Jess Pan’s *It’ll Be Fun, They Said*

Dear reader: it’s Christmas Eve, and I have a wonderful present for you: The Stack of the Week.

Photo by Jason Rosewell on Unsplash

I found my voice as a writer at the age of 53, despite having been a working writer, despite having published things, despite having taught writing for decades. Let me explain: I have always been adept with academic prose, as jargon-filled as you like, and I can whip up a book review for an academic journal, easy peasy. I can write a fluent tenure evaluation or book proposal. Committee report? Letter of recommendation? You got it. I’m a pro. I can even write an academic article and send it to a journal and maybe even have it accepted (with painful revisions), though I hate the process. I had to do all of that for tenure.

Since my twenties, I have made several aborted attempts to write the thing that I really wanted to write, that thing that would fill me with creative energy, that no one else could write, that would be in my voice. The problem was, I didn’t really know what such a thing would look like. My first attempt was a novel, over two hundred pages of it, that I drafted while I should have been working on my dissertation. It’s in a drawer somewhere. (Actually, it’s a digital “drawer,” because I wrote it in WordPerfect in the 1990s, and I’m quite sure that the files are not readable by any modern machine—if I even knew where the files were.)

I have written poems that I have liked and have even published a couple, but always sporadically, in fits and starts. I tried blogging a few times but found it unsatisfying. (This may partly be because I despise the verb “to blog.” It sounds like I’m initiating a medical procedure involving a rectum and a complicated tool. None of its conjugated forms sound good in any tense or case. I blog; she blogs; they blog; I blogged; I have blogged; I will blog; I would have blogged, etc. It sort of works as an adjective, but not in a good way. Bloggy bloggy—blech. You see the problem.)

The real problem was that, despite my facility as a writer, despite my professionalism, I had not found my voice, which is the thing that makes us go back to our favorite writers. Yes, Jane Austen is a master of plot and character, but it’s that voice that makes me reread her. John le Carré, George Eliot, Seamus Heaney, Virginia Woolf, Wordsworth, Toni Morrison, Chaucer, Hilary Mantel, Patrick O’Brian, Tolkien. Each of my favorite writers has their own unmistakable voice.

But here is the thing: I actually had found my voice, but I had not shared it with anyone. I have kept journals for decades, but they are not typical journals. They are records of my reading, my listening, my teaching, not details about my private life (which is, I promise, usually pretty uninteresting to anyone but me; it mostly involves walking dogs.)

When I started on Substack back in July, I wasn’t sure what I was doing, but for years, I had developed the concept of personal canon formation from the subfield of literary studies known as “canon formation,” which is the study of why we read and teach what we read and teach. My theory was that since the canon was in such a state of disarray (for good reason, since for centuries it was almost exclusively male and white and European, and the overdue reckoning had finally arrived but without ensuing consensus), I would have to cultivate my own personal canon, and I would do this by keeping meticulous notes on the books that I read and the music that I listened to. My voice was in these notes, these journals, unread by anyone but me.

I gradually came to realize as I worked on this newsletter that it would become the product of all of these years of note-taking, reading, listening, thinking, and teaching. Oscar Wilde said that criticism is the only civilized form of autobiography. This is my autobiography, dear reader. I have found my voice, for better or worse. This is me.

---

The author of the Stack of the Week found her voice much earlier in life than I found mine, and that is a good thing, because I hope that it means that we get to read her for many, many years to come. She is

Jess Pan

, and her Substack is It’ll Be Fun, They Said. Jess is the author of Sorry I’m Late, I Didn’t Want To Come: An Introvert’s Year of Saying Yes, which I have not yet read but is high on my TBR list.

Her superpower is her ability to make the ordinary, mundane aspects of living a life into witty, poignant, fluent prose that I can’t stop reading. Seriously, as soon as new post from Jess lands in my inbox, I open it, and I don’t stop until I have finished. She has been documenting her life as a bookseller in an independent London bookshop, and she has so beautifully invoked herself and her coworkers as characters that the posts read like chapters from a finely crafted comic novel, though these are real people. For example, Rebecca is the best at the shop for making book recommendations:

A man came in asking for advice on what book to buy for his 18-year-old niece. He hadn’t seen her in ten years, but they were reuniting at a big family reunion that evening.  

Rebecca walked over to our fiction shelf and handed him a book called How to Kill Your Family.

The man read the title and laughed, in shock.

“It’s a dark, funny thriller,” I explained. “Not a guide.” He then bought it, which delighted us. 

Start with her pinned post, but go on and read whatever is available. The paywall goes up for posts over a month old, and you will likely be tempted to take out a paid subscription in order to savor more. Give yourself a Christmas present: read

Jess Pan

.

Thanks for reading, from my fancy internet typewriter to yours.

Photo by RetroSupply on Unsplash