There really are no cast-in-stone answers for literary problems. I wish there were, it would make life so much easier and calmer. My students ask: What should be the structure of this memoir? How do I end this essay? What’s the right voice for it? Each is a mystery to solve – whether it’s my own or a student’s. Which is one of the reasons I love to teach. I don’t have the answers but it’s always exciting to try to figure them out. How to solve the problem of structure, voice? What’s this story really about?

I started teaching my advanced non-fiction course yesterday – limited to twelve students, and this is what we were talking about in class, voice and structure, endings and beginnings. Sometimes I think that the more I write the less I know. Or maybe it’s just that each time you sit down to write it’s always the first time. Kind of a literary version of Groundhog Day.

What blew me away yesterday was the quality of my student’s writing, their generosity and smarts in critiquing each other’s work and their courage with plunging into five minute writing exercises. And their questions.

I’m going to talk about voice next week in class and have found some interesting thoughts on the subject by Mary Karr and Vivian Gornick. And then this morning, like a little gift from the muse, a piece of paper rose up from my desk on which I’d written this quote from Terry Tempest Williams:

“Finding one’s voice is a process of finding ones passion.”