The World Needs Your Voice

Announcing the Writer Development Cohorts

I was fifteen or sixteen years old the first time I read John Milton’s Paradise Lost. It was springtime, I remember, and an unusually ambitious English teacher at Warner Robins High School assigned us Books I, II, and IV of the seventeenth-century epic. As they say in the romantic comedies, Milton had me from hello. His language soars so high, plunges so deep. Whole worlds opened up as I immersed myself in that strange music.

Readers of fantasy fiction talk about fantasy taking them to other worlds. That’s exactly what Paradise Lost did for me. I can’t say I mean that literally, exactly, but I do mean it more than metaphorically. Something about the foreignness of Milton’s language propelled me, for better or worse, beyond Middle Georgia’s gravitational pull. I felt that my path was set: I was going to be a Milton professor.

I stayed on that path for a good long while, eventually getting a PhD in seventeenth-century poetry. You might say my academic career was a journey to a far country. Being a scholar is largely a matter of learning to speak a different language; in the worst case, the scholar becomes a kind of ventriloquist, speaking in a voice that is remote from his own—a voice that the folks back home would hardly recognize. As much as I loved the literature (and still do) that alienation from my own voice didn’t feel sustainable.

By the time I finished my PhD, I wasn’t sure the academic life was for me. I still wanted to write, but the prospect of writing scholarly papers and books had lost some of its shine. Finally free to read whatever I wanted to, I gave the seventeenth century poets a rest and picked up Flannery O’Connor, Middle Georgia’s greatest writer.

If Milton took me away from Middle Georgia, Flannery O’Connor brought me home again. It was Flannery O’Connor who made me see the artistic power that inheres in my native tongue. There are turns of phrase in O’Connor’s stories (and even more in her letters) that I had heard all my life but never expected to see on a printed page. I’m not talking about local color. I’m talking about a writer giving voice to the deepest truths in speech that is beautiful and soul-stirring, but not elevated. It seemed obvious that O’Connor wasn’t trying to speak in any voice other than her own.

I don’t make any particular claims for Middle Georgia. My native tongue is no better than anybody else’s. But Flannery O’Connor demonstrated that the language, the people, the social dynamics, the landscapes that I grew up around could be the raw material of great art. That was a gift and a legacy to me as a writer.

A college friend wrote of O’Connor,

She knew who she was, and what she was, and was neither over-pleased nor disturbed by either… She “talked Suthern,” to use her own words. Well, yes, in a way—but mostly she talked Flannery.

I will admit that it was the Middle Georgia connection that first drew me to Flannery O'Connor’s voice, but what turned out to be much more important was the fact that she “talked Flannery.” In her fiction, in her essays, and in her personal letters to friends, she always sounds like Flannery O’Connor, not only in her cadences and turns of phrase, but in her unique perspective on the world—her interests, her convictions, her particular kind of humor. She was thoroughly herself. She always talked Flannery.

Thanks to O’Connor’s influence, I’ve spent the last twenty-five or thirty years learning to talk Jonathan. And in my teaching I’ve put a lot of thought into how to help other writers talk like themselves. “Finding your voice,” I’ve come to believe, isn’t so much a function of going out and searching, like a person going out West (or to a guru) to “find herself.” Rather, you find your voice by chipping away everything that has accumulated on top of it and obscured it. Every few weeks I have to find my desktop again. I sort through the snowdrifts of paper, the stacks of books, the cords and dishes and accumulated flotsam and jetsam, and there my desktop is, right where I left it. Finding your writerly voice is like that. It’s down there somewhere, obscured by doubts and unhelpful habits and presuppositions about what readers want and expect from you and perhaps, the belief that you’ve got to talk like somebody else before anybody will listen to you.

The Habit Writer Development Cohorts

With all that in mind, I’m putting together a new six-week writing intensive designed to give you the confidence, skills, and habits you need to find and/or strengthen your writerly voice and produce work that you are proud of—work that readers need.

Running from May 19 through June 27, The Habit Writer Development Cohorts will be small (two cohorts capped at eight writers), hands-on, practical, and intense. There will be structured writing exercises, recorded lectures, group discussions, one-on-one coaching, and peer-to-peer workshops, as well as daily “virtual writing rooms.” By the end of the six weeks, participants can expect to have a complete and polished essay or book chapter. For this first round of cohorts, we’ll be focusing on memoir and creative nonfiction. I expect to add fiction writers to later cohorts.

The cost of the six-week cohort experience is $1799 ($1599 for current Habit members). You can find out more and apply for a spot at TheHabit.co/Cohorts.

In a world increasingly dominated by AI-generated content, your unique, human voice has never been more valuable. The robots can do a lot, but they can’t replace the depth, vulnerability, and insight that a human being can bring to the page. The world needs your story, your perspective, and your courage to share what only you can create.

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