"A voice is a human gift... powerlessness and silence go together." ~Margaret Atwood

The Letter Reimagined Starts Tomorrow! Join us to (re)discover your fierce original voice.

Some people think voice can’t be taught (more on that in tomorrow’s post).

But I think there is little point in teaching writing at all without acknowledging the urgent necessity of identifying, exercising, and tuning the voice.

And, there is perhaps no container more apt for exercising the voice than the letter. Yes, the letter.

As the poet Paul Matthews puts it:

The letter is a most powerful form… language becomes real when real people (even if imagined) are addressed. That is why love poems and poems to God are so powerful, whereas wise literary statements addressed generally to humanity so often lack vigor.

I would go farther and say it is the reason so much writing lacks vigor—the language is not, as Matthews puts it, “real” in the way it more often becomes real when used intentionally between speaker and recipient.

Another way to put this: letters, at their best, are concrete and specific, existing within the defined world of a living relationship, and delivered in a recognizable vo…