Studio of the Voice: Essays by Marcia Aldrich
Marcia Aldrich's essay collection, Studio of the Voice is winner of the Wandering Aengus Book Award in Nonfiction
In this collection of some of her most engaging writing, award-winning essayist Marcia Aldrich invites us along for a personal look at women’s lives, the love of mothers for daughters and of daughters for mothers, slinky blue dresses and sultry red lipstick, Hollywood beauties and the stories we tell about them, the losses and treasures of getting older, her lifelong swim, and much more, talking to us always in a voice that is hers alone, revealing, comic, elegiac, mythic. The essays take on dazzling forms, some as shape-shifters, some fragmented and experimental, others in the classic mode—all of them to be discovered in Studio of the Voice.
Aldrich (Edge), a creative writing professor at Michigan State University, serves up intense personal essays in this rewarding collection. Several pieces probe the dynamics of mother/daughter relationships, as in “She and I (A Field of Force)” where Aldrich recounts getting into bitter fights with her 19-year-old daughter in the months before she moved out of their home, after which Aldrich felt devastated (“She is going to make another home for herself, on her own terms. I have not allowed myself to see that she is making the end of childhood”). “The Structure of Trouble” reflects on Aldrich’s strained relationship with her own mother—who spent most afternoons in bed, apparently overwhelmed by facing the responsibilities of parenthood with minimal assistance from her husband—while playing with form, recreating the uneasiness Aldrich felt as a child by gradually pushing the text into a tighter space on the right-hand side of the page. Elsewhere, Aldrich reflects on finding her authorial voice and the independence she felt swimming competitively in middle school. Still, the beating heart of the compendium is Aldrich’s candid reflections on her relationships with her mother and daughter (“I sometimes think of my life as one long attempt, and failure, to right the wrong-footed relationship I’ve had with my mother”) elevated by creative formal experimentation. This is worth checking out.
--Publishers Weekly
Essaying is the best way to freeze and examine and better understand the shifting phantasmagoria of our experiences in families and societies, and Marcia Aldrich’s Studio of the Voice is a whole collection of essays par excellence. With eager, associative mind, Aldrich gathers and explores intergenerational conflicts and conundrums, generating meditative momentum toward a new vision of how we should, and can, relate to one another.
--Patrick Madden, author of Disparates: Essays
In Studio of the Voice, Marcia Aldrich creates a studio of the voice-driven essay. Endlessly curious, digressive, formally inventive, these essays shine a light on an essential quality of the essay: it's not about the epiphany, but process, the questions one asks. Long one of our very best essayists, Aldrich is undaunted at the dark door of the multifaceted truths self-investigation can yield, though sometimes, surprisingly, it is only the door that is dark. One essay by Marcia Aldrich is a cause for celebration. This rangy new book should provoke a parade. A signal achievement, Studio of the Voice is an essential book of essays.
--David Lazar, author of Celeste Holm Syndrome and founding editor of Hotel Amerika
No writer evokes the way Marcia Aldrich evokes. For every scene she writes, story she tells, detail she describes, she palpates the imagination. This book is physicality incarnate. I can feel her hands as they clutch a bedpost, soothe a cheek slap, twist the chain of a pair of smudged reading glasses hanging around the neck, warm with a flash of menopause, rub the arch of Marilyn Monroe’s foot, burnish beauty, weigh the heaviness of rejection, thrill at the joy of a backflip, and press through dark water with the joy of swimming. Studio of the Voice maintains that we are most human when we are most embodied. Aldrich makes us feel fully human as she gives voice to her own body and the bodies of others in this vibrantly corporeal book.
--Nicole Walker, author of Processed Meat: Essays on Food, Flesh, and Navigating Disaster
Studio of the Voice is a polyphonic study in the nature of voice. Like the best essayists, Marcia Aldrich asks tough questions and explores a multitude of possible answers. Some questions lead to new ways of seeing, whether a fresh perspective on a famed portrait of Marilyn Monroe and her fascinating feet, or Jane Fonda’s character in the film Klute, or her own mother’s thick curling toenails. Other questions lead to self-reckoning, taking the measure of the self’s many roles: daughter, mother, young woman, middle-aged woman, lover, wife, swimmer, professor, writer. Under Aldrich’s piercing gaze, the voice can be the spoken word, sometimes quiet and stifled, sometimes surprising and provocative--as when she tells male academic colleagues her career has been unlike theirs because of sex. Or the voice can be the written word, carefully crafted in experimental form (abecedarian, diagram, second person) or in classic questioning essay mode. Often, the body becomes a kind of voice, powerful in a fitted blue dress when a broken-down New York City apartment and isolating job at a law firm stifle almost every other aspect of voice. Or when swimming in competition, or refusing to strike a pose that will produce a photograph that says “writer.” Sometimes the body slips into a sidestroke, and the writer in a sense becomes her mother, who favored that paradoxical stroke, weak and disqualified from competition, yet lifesaving in preserving energy and allowing a drowning person to be carried ashore. The book probes the spaces of intimacy—the marital bed, the separate beds of the parents, labor pains and birth, a post-menopausal gynecological exam, sex and seduction—marrying and divorcing her college professor, then marrying for life. The book probes the big questions—why she has no birth story, the challenges of balancing writing, academia, and motherhood, grief and longing. In every section, every individual essay, you will find a voice that dazzles, soars, flies, swims, sings.
--Jocelyn Bartkevicius, author of “How to Survive in Lithuania” and former editor of Florida Review
In this collection of some of her most engaging writing, award-winning essayist Marcia Aldrich invites us along for a personal look at women’s lives, the love of mothers for daughters and of daughters for mothers, slinky blue dresses and sultry red lipstick, Hollywood beauties and the stories we tell about them, the losses and treasures of getting older, her lifelong swim, and much more, talking to us always in a voice that is hers alone, revealing, comic, elegiac, mythic. The essays take on dazzling forms, some as shape-shifters, some fragmented and experimental, others in the classic mode—all of them to be discovered in Studio of the Voice.
Aldrich (Edge), a creative writing professor at Michigan State University, serves up intense personal essays in this rewarding collection. Several pieces probe the dynamics of mother/daughter relationships, as in “She and I (A Field of Force)” where Aldrich recounts getting into bitter fights with her 19-year-old daughter in the months before she moved out of their home, after which Aldrich felt devastated (“She is going to make another home for herself, on her own terms. I have not allowed myself to see that she is making the end of childhood”). “The Structure of Trouble” reflects on Aldrich’s strained relationship with her own mother—who spent most afternoons in bed, apparently overwhelmed by facing the responsibilities of parenthood with minimal assistance from her husband—while playing with form, recreating the uneasiness Aldrich felt as a child by gradually pushing the text into a tighter space on the right-hand side of the page. Elsewhere, Aldrich reflects on finding her authorial voice and the independence she felt swimming competitively in middle school. Still, the beating heart of the compendium is Aldrich’s candid reflections on her relationships with her mother and daughter (“I sometimes think of my life as one long attempt, and failure, to right the wrong-footed relationship I’ve had with my mother”) elevated by creative formal experimentation. This is worth checking out.
--Publishers Weekly
Essaying is the best way to freeze and examine and better understand the shifting phantasmagoria of our experiences in families and societies, and Marcia Aldrich’s Studio of the Voice is a whole collection of essays par excellence. With eager, associative mind, Aldrich gathers and explores intergenerational conflicts and conundrums, generating meditative momentum toward a new vision of how we should, and can, relate to one another.
--Patrick Madden, author of Disparates: Essays
In Studio of the Voice, Marcia Aldrich creates a studio of the voice-driven essay. Endlessly curious, digressive, formally inventive, these essays shine a light on an essential quality of the essay: it's not about the epiphany, but process, the questions one asks. Long one of our very best essayists, Aldrich is undaunted at the dark door of the multifaceted truths self-investigation can yield, though sometimes, surprisingly, it is only the door that is dark. One essay by Marcia Aldrich is a cause for celebration. This rangy new book should provoke a parade. A signal achievement, Studio of the Voice is an essential book of essays.
--David Lazar, author of Celeste Holm Syndrome and founding editor of Hotel Amerika
No writer evokes the way Marcia Aldrich evokes. For every scene she writes, story she tells, detail she describes, she palpates the imagination. This book is physicality incarnate. I can feel her hands as they clutch a bedpost, soothe a cheek slap, twist the chain of a pair of smudged reading glasses hanging around the neck, warm with a flash of menopause, rub the arch of Marilyn Monroe’s foot, burnish beauty, weigh the heaviness of rejection, thrill at the joy of a backflip, and press through dark water with the joy of swimming. Studio of the Voice maintains that we are most human when we are most embodied. Aldrich makes us feel fully human as she gives voice to her own body and the bodies of others in this vibrantly corporeal book.
--Nicole Walker, author of Processed Meat: Essays on Food, Flesh, and Navigating Disaster
Studio of the Voice is a polyphonic study in the nature of voice. Like the best essayists, Marcia Aldrich asks tough questions and explores a multitude of possible answers. Some questions lead to new ways of seeing, whether a fresh perspective on a famed portrait of Marilyn Monroe and her fascinating feet, or Jane Fonda’s character in the film Klute, or her own mother’s thick curling toenails. Other questions lead to self-reckoning, taking the measure of the self’s many roles: daughter, mother, young woman, middle-aged woman, lover, wife, swimmer, professor, writer. Under Aldrich’s piercing gaze, the voice can be the spoken word, sometimes quiet and stifled, sometimes surprising and provocative--as when she tells male academic colleagues her career has been unlike theirs because of sex. Or the voice can be the written word, carefully crafted in experimental form (abecedarian, diagram, second person) or in classic questioning essay mode. Often, the body becomes a kind of voice, powerful in a fitted blue dress when a broken-down New York City apartment and isolating job at a law firm stifle almost every other aspect of voice. Or when swimming in competition, or refusing to strike a pose that will produce a photograph that says “writer.” Sometimes the body slips into a sidestroke, and the writer in a sense becomes her mother, who favored that paradoxical stroke, weak and disqualified from competition, yet lifesaving in preserving energy and allowing a drowning person to be carried ashore. The book probes the spaces of intimacy—the marital bed, the separate beds of the parents, labor pains and birth, a post-menopausal gynecological exam, sex and seduction—marrying and divorcing her college professor, then marrying for life. The book probes the big questions—why she has no birth story, the challenges of balancing writing, academia, and motherhood, grief and longing. In every section, every individual essay, you will find a voice that dazzles, soars, flies, swims, sings.
--Jocelyn Bartkevicius, author of “How to Survive in Lithuania” and former editor of Florida Review
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Marcia Aldrich is the author of the free memoir Girl Rearing, published by W.W. Norton, and of Companion to an Untold Story, which won the AWP Award in Creative Nonfiction. She is the editor of Waveform: Twenty-First-Century Essays by Women, published by the University of Georgia Press. Her chapbook EDGE was published by New Michigan Press.
marciaaldrich.com
marciaaldrich.com