Thursday
Apr142011
An Interview With The Lovely Jen Lee And A Giveaway Of Finding Your Voice
Thursday, April 14, 2011
I met Jen Lee during my most favourite ever blogging conference session ever, Blogging As Storytelling, at BlogHer '09 in Chicago. I spoke to her briefly after the session, immediately decided that she should become a citizen of my semi-nomadic yurt-dwelling community, and have followed her online ever since.
If you know Jen, you know the thoughtful and creative force, the awesome, that is she. If you do not know Jen, let me introduce you to her, because to know her is to love her. She is a writer, photographer, and storyteller raising a family in New York and bravely helping to forge a new genre "...that marries story, myth and poetry to the wisdom mined from [the individual]..."
She is also the author of a course that helps you guide yourself to your own storytelling voice, Finding Your Voice: A Multimedia Course, a course that she and I are giving away to one of you lucky readers for free at the end of this entry, because you are so keen. The course we're giving away includes an audio learning program, an interactive workbook, a handwritten blessing, and private access to a course-specific discussion board.
Jen let me interview her about the course, how she came to create it, and why finding your voice important.
First, tell us a little bit about who you are as an artist and storyteller.
I feel like a bag of paradoxes. Superhero brave and totally chicken shit. I'm this crazy old-school, Little House On the Prairie girl with an aversion to technology and a high need for privacy who somehow found her way into being an internet artist and a live performer. I'm someone with something to say who is always looking for a way to get out of doing it. I want to be heard, and I want to be hidden. The tension of it all feels like it will tear me apart sometimes, trying to learn to live with some kind of peace in the middle spaces, but it grounds me in my humanity. We are complicated beings — there's no way around it — and the parts that appear to be contradictory are perhaps the most interesting (and true) of all.
What led you to want to create Finding Your Voice: A Multimedia Course?
I wanted this work to be available to a wider community. It's hard knowing so many people are longing to be a part of this conversation, but are prevented from attending live events like workshops and retreats by situational or financial constraints.
Tell us about experiences you had while you developed this course at Squam?
I'm laughing, remembering the first workshop I taught there. I was SO tired, and one of my students said afterward, "You're doing more content in half a day than other instructors are
doing in a whole day. What you just told us is a BOOK — do you know that?" I didn't. I had no concept of pacing, and how much people could absorb in a 3-hour period. I wanted people to feel like they were "getting their money's worth", so I was just spilling all the goods like a jackpot win pouring out of a slot machine. If it were just a question of intellectually entertaining some ideas, that would be one thing. But people stumble into realizations that really shift something on a very foundational level. The kind of things that you need time to rearrange your cells and your soul around, that make you want to lie down or not hear another word until you can process it. And I was just blazing through this stuff like a racehorse, trying to jam it all in before our time ended.
Ever since, I've been working to slow the content and the process down. It took me years of living to move through these spaces, and it's crazy talk to try and move others through it as fast as I was. I had this work — really good, foundation-shifting stuff — but I was up against the constraints of what people could absorb and integrate into their living.
I started experimenting. What could we do in three days together? I hosted three retreats last year that were three-day affairs, and I was still lopping off content left and right. Then I thought, what could we do in three months together? I wrote a 12-week voice and story curriculum last year, presenting the various parts and pieces in my Squam workshops along the way.
I often say that we don't know what we've got until we give it away, and this was completely true of my workshops and retreats. People responded to the material in a really powerful way, so I knew that I was onto something. That this work was making a difference and mattered. So I began the process of producing that 12-week curriculum, slowing it down even more and breaking it into multiple courses. Finding Your Voice is the first in that series.
What did you learn from the process of creating this course, and what do you want others to take away from it?
I've been trying to check this work off my list and move on, but one thing I'm learning is that some assignments from the universe are not fulfilled so quickly or easily. This conversation is going to have my presence and attention for some time to come.
Creating it has also been an exercise in really rooting my work in myself--my values, my story, every aspect of my expression. It's so easy to become distracted by how "everyone else" is doing it and second-guess oneself, but I have such an aversion to anything that doesn't line up with my values that I knew I couldn't present this work any other way, at least right now.
I want others to know that it's never too late to visit old injuries and process them in a new way that gives you more freedom, more awareness, more access to all of yourself. We all want to be brave, but making our way across our personal minefields is daunting, no matter how you frame it. These are my best avoid-the-blast moves, and if they get even one other person through a precarious place, I will be so deeply happy.
What is the basic first step in finding your voice, and why is finding your voice important?
The first step is to bring your awareness to an aspect of your voice that eludes you or is hard to access. Identifying that alone shifts something. Once your awareness is on it, it's pretty hard to believe those things we've been telling ourselves about how *we're fine* and *it doesn't really matter anyway*.
Our voice is like those old phones we used to make out of cans and a string--it's the communication line to our true, whole selves. It's how we reach back to the parts of ourselves we condemned to the attic long ago, it's how they come out of the dark and get to be heard along with the rest. Whatever we're creating, it will be more rich and full if we are creating with our whole voice, in all its contradictions and complexities, instead of some thinner, two-dimensional version that is simply easier to live with or more palatable for others to take.
----------------------------
Jen and I want to give Finding Your Voice: A Multimedia Course away for free to one of you, because we are, all of us, storytellers, whether we're writing the next great American novel or documenting a spectacularly disgusting diaper incident.
There is nothing quite like finding your voice. It's like coming home.
If you would like ONE chance to get your hands on Finding Your Voice: A Multimedia Course, do one of the following. If you would like TWO chances to win, do both of the following:
I will pick one lucky person at random on April 21st at midnight using random.org, and then I will announce the winner both here and on Twitter.
So, have at it and comment and tweet this baby! Your voice is waiting.
----------------------------
UPDATE: And the giveaway winner has been chosen. It is The Other Laura!
If you know Jen, you know the thoughtful and creative force, the awesome, that is she. If you do not know Jen, let me introduce you to her, because to know her is to love her. She is a writer, photographer, and storyteller raising a family in New York and bravely helping to forge a new genre "...that marries story, myth and poetry to the wisdom mined from [the individual]..."
She is also the author of a course that helps you guide yourself to your own storytelling voice, Finding Your Voice: A Multimedia Course, a course that she and I are giving away to one of you lucky readers for free at the end of this entry, because you are so keen. The course we're giving away includes an audio learning program, an interactive workbook, a handwritten blessing, and private access to a course-specific discussion board.
Jen let me interview her about the course, how she came to create it, and why finding your voice important.
First, tell us a little bit about who you are as an artist and storyteller.
I feel like a bag of paradoxes. Superhero brave and totally chicken shit. I'm this crazy old-school, Little House On the Prairie girl with an aversion to technology and a high need for privacy who somehow found her way into being an internet artist and a live performer. I'm someone with something to say who is always looking for a way to get out of doing it. I want to be heard, and I want to be hidden. The tension of it all feels like it will tear me apart sometimes, trying to learn to live with some kind of peace in the middle spaces, but it grounds me in my humanity. We are complicated beings — there's no way around it — and the parts that appear to be contradictory are perhaps the most interesting (and true) of all.
What led you to want to create Finding Your Voice: A Multimedia Course?
I wanted this work to be available to a wider community. It's hard knowing so many people are longing to be a part of this conversation, but are prevented from attending live events like workshops and retreats by situational or financial constraints.
Tell us about experiences you had while you developed this course at Squam?
I'm laughing, remembering the first workshop I taught there. I was SO tired, and one of my students said afterward, "You're doing more content in half a day than other instructors are
doing in a whole day. What you just told us is a BOOK — do you know that?" I didn't. I had no concept of pacing, and how much people could absorb in a 3-hour period. I wanted people to feel like they were "getting their money's worth", so I was just spilling all the goods like a jackpot win pouring out of a slot machine. If it were just a question of intellectually entertaining some ideas, that would be one thing. But people stumble into realizations that really shift something on a very foundational level. The kind of things that you need time to rearrange your cells and your soul around, that make you want to lie down or not hear another word until you can process it. And I was just blazing through this stuff like a racehorse, trying to jam it all in before our time ended.
Ever since, I've been working to slow the content and the process down. It took me years of living to move through these spaces, and it's crazy talk to try and move others through it as fast as I was. I had this work — really good, foundation-shifting stuff — but I was up against the constraints of what people could absorb and integrate into their living.
I started experimenting. What could we do in three days together? I hosted three retreats last year that were three-day affairs, and I was still lopping off content left and right. Then I thought, what could we do in three months together? I wrote a 12-week voice and story curriculum last year, presenting the various parts and pieces in my Squam workshops along the way.
I often say that we don't know what we've got until we give it away, and this was completely true of my workshops and retreats. People responded to the material in a really powerful way, so I knew that I was onto something. That this work was making a difference and mattered. So I began the process of producing that 12-week curriculum, slowing it down even more and breaking it into multiple courses. Finding Your Voice is the first in that series.
What did you learn from the process of creating this course, and what do you want others to take away from it?
I've been trying to check this work off my list and move on, but one thing I'm learning is that some assignments from the universe are not fulfilled so quickly or easily. This conversation is going to have my presence and attention for some time to come.
Creating it has also been an exercise in really rooting my work in myself--my values, my story, every aspect of my expression. It's so easy to become distracted by how "everyone else" is doing it and second-guess oneself, but I have such an aversion to anything that doesn't line up with my values that I knew I couldn't present this work any other way, at least right now.
I want others to know that it's never too late to visit old injuries and process them in a new way that gives you more freedom, more awareness, more access to all of yourself. We all want to be brave, but making our way across our personal minefields is daunting, no matter how you frame it. These are my best avoid-the-blast moves, and if they get even one other person through a precarious place, I will be so deeply happy.
What is the basic first step in finding your voice, and why is finding your voice important?
The first step is to bring your awareness to an aspect of your voice that eludes you or is hard to access. Identifying that alone shifts something. Once your awareness is on it, it's pretty hard to believe those things we've been telling ourselves about how *we're fine* and *it doesn't really matter anyway*.
Our voice is like those old phones we used to make out of cans and a string--it's the communication line to our true, whole selves. It's how we reach back to the parts of ourselves we condemned to the attic long ago, it's how they come out of the dark and get to be heard along with the rest. Whatever we're creating, it will be more rich and full if we are creating with our whole voice, in all its contradictions and complexities, instead of some thinner, two-dimensional version that is simply easier to live with or more palatable for others to take.
----------------------------
Jen and I want to give Finding Your Voice: A Multimedia Course away for free to one of you, because we are, all of us, storytellers, whether we're writing the next great American novel or documenting a spectacularly disgusting diaper incident.
There is nothing quite like finding your voice. It's like coming home.
If you would like ONE chance to get your hands on Finding Your Voice: A Multimedia Course, do one of the following. If you would like TWO chances to win, do both of the following:
- Leave a comment on this post. You can tell me why you need this course or about your latest cooking snafu. We're not picky.
- Post the following tweet on Twitter, complete with hashtag:
I want to win @jenleedotnet's course, Finding Your Voice - http://tinyurl.com/findingmyvoice #findingmyvoice
I will pick one lucky person at random on April 21st at midnight using random.org, and then I will announce the winner both here and on Twitter.
So, have at it and comment and tweet this baby! Your voice is waiting.
----------------------------
UPDATE: And the giveaway winner has been chosen. It is The Other Laura!
Reader Comments (36)
i need this course because i feel like i've been writing and writing and somehow only circling around my voice. it's like sitting on the periphery of a bonfire--i can feel snippets of the heat and smell the sweet, dense smoke but i can't get my damn hands warm. plus, i'm about to graduate and i'm generally having an endless freak-out about this and it would be awfully nice to have something to look forward to. so, random.org, align your stars accordingly, please.
I'd like to win the course because I am at the point where I need a kick in the pants. I need something to motivate me to go further.
I'd like to win because I just recently realized I'm going to have to tell the story I've been running away from all my life and I'm going to need all the help I can get.
Oohhhh, this sounds intriguing. I believe I've found my voice, but am often scared of it. When I do access it- it's fulfilling beyond what I ever could have hoped. Just need some help holding onto it and embracing it a little more... or perhaps finding another voice I didn't know was there?
Dear random.org, give it to me!
I want to win this course because even though I've been blogging in one form or another for more than 10 years, somewhere along the way I let fear, doubt, uncertainty, and a belief that nobody cared what I had to say stifle my voice. I'm trying to work my way back to the person I was ten years ago when I started, but I'm finding it to be more difficult than I expected. This course would help open doors for me.
I feel like I've lost my voice since my audience has grown to include too many IRL friends. I need help finding it again and being comfortable with using it equally in my on-line and real lives.
Great interview and you are so right, to know Jen is to Love her. I feel like she really gives her all when she is with you..sees you and tries to help you see yourself.
hugs
Karen
i have been told on many occasions that i have the capacity for being a prolific writer but have never pursued that avenue of self expression . if i were to win it would be a good prompt for initiation
My voice has been buried by academic writing. Please help me uncover it!
At 35 I feel like I'm finally beginning to recognize the first tingling of my *true* voice. Not for want of trying either! I've been working with a great healer to quiet the noise and busy-ness to make space for my voice and my honest self to shine through.
Lovely interview, thanks for sharing.
I *need* this course as I am searching for help with truly embracing, owning, and inhabiting my voice. I am such a fan of Jen's and have been hoping for the opportunity to learn from her more directly. This multimedia course would be like having a pocket-Jen to guide me on my journey. How lovely would that be?
I have heard of Jen Lee but not keyed in to her voice yet. Thank you so much for putting her right in the center of my path so I could not miss her any longer. I can't wait to read and hear and see more.
I need something like this. I hardly post anymore...and I know there is a lot to say in my head. I just can't seem to get it going. I'm frustrated in all aspects of my life right now, and maybe this could help clear it up :)
I also met Jen in Chicago, and then when I moved to New York, she invited me to go to the Moth storytelling reading, where she was an active participant. I know this is going to sound New Age-y and weird, but she is a woman who has a creative aura about her. When she talks to you, she really listens to every word, taking it all in. She told me some of her creative ideas -- and she has lots of them -- and it is exciting to see them becoming real and touching the lives of others.
i feel like i need this course because i am finding my voice hard to hear after decades of listening to the voice of others, because i am the Queen of dichotomies and i know the sound of the inside of me tearing in half far too well, because i think Jen Lee can secretly read all that is written inside my heart and i want to know what's there
I would like to take this course because I find the idea of authorial voice intriguing. People tell me I have a strong writers voice on my blog, and while I know what they mean, the process for me is still mostly subconscious.
Even in my recent experimental forays into fiction, the characters have had incredibly strong voices that are clearly other than mine - but I did not invent them consciously, either. They really just started talking in my head and I was merely taking dictation. So, I think making this process more conscious might be interesting.
I tweeted about this giveaway here:
http://twitter.com/#!/frelle/status/58742512759742464
I would like to win this giveaway because I am just starting out writing, and I would love to start out well informed by such a dynamic woman!
Well, I don't twit so this is my one shot!
I work with individuals with serious mental illness. One of the things I do is encourage them to tell their stories. I believe that being able to do this helps unlock things they've kept buried and are maybe holding them back from having real lives and not just treatment.
Listening to someone's story is such a gift, as much as telling one's story to someone else.
And yes, Jen Lee is lovely.
I would love to win this course because (this feels a little like a Grade 4 writing assignment) ... I've just started writing again and I'm pretty sure I'm serious about it this time. I feel compelled to write but I'm not entirely certain that I have anything of value to say. I would love to take this journey of finding my voice.
And, thanks again to Schmutize for all your awesomeness! And, now I have another great blog to read - Thanks Jen Lee!
I would love the opportunity to explore this course because I seem to have lost my voice...and my ambition to write has disappeared. I miss it.
I'm in the process, after years, of finding my voice through pictures but the words still escape me. I have enjoyed her journals and would love to explore this "course".
I've experienced 41 (yes, 41 - that's not a typo!) deaths of loved ones in the last nine years, plus a "terminal" diagnosis of lung cancer (my second "terminal" diagnosis - the first being 34 years ago) that I fought back from and have now been cancer free for over five years. Yay me!!
Words are medicine. I would love to treat myself through Jen's course and lifting my voice.
How healing that would be! Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhh.....
I would love to win "Finding Your Voice" I have been writing and thinking and living for years without a guide and the past few years have been incredibly difficult in terms of mourning and this would be a wonderful way to move me through the path of my own voice and find clarity.
thank you for this exquisite and generous offering. it would be an honor to journey through finding your voice, as these days/months silence beckons me, and i truly want to listen with fierce open-heartedness.
I want to win because part of my vocation is exploring how our stories shape our lives, and helping people connect to a story that has meaning for them.
This sounds awesome, how have I never heard of her? Man I am so out of it.
I wanna win!!! Sounds great, I need the motivation and the tools. I wanna win!!!!!!!!!!
I'd love the voice-finding help.
Sometimes the people I've birthed are so loud and I say the same things so much that I don't even know what I'm thinking.
Gah.
I've been seeking a way to find my voice for very long. i would cherish this.
Yes, please.
OMG I have been looking for my voice all of my life. I've been told by so many that I have a load of books in my psyche, that I'm funny and people learn from me. Yet when I sit down and try to "write" it comes out like someone threw a plate of spaghetti at the screen. Yikes! So I'm at a pivotal point in my life. I've been waiting to write. And I can't quite get the words out. This morning I was reading Pioneer Woman blog, which I love, and saw on her faves, "Ordinary Courage". This after praying for whatever is next in my life to appear. The very first thing I saw was "Finding Your Voice" by Jen Lee. And I almost spewed my coffee. Then I found "Schmutzie" which is one of my all time favorite words. I felt like I was following the bread crumbs! If someone else wins this wonderful prize, I will be happy for them. REALLY happy for them! And I will find a way to purchase this somehow. I'm on disability and my funds are so limited. However, thank you for offering this. Even if someone else wins, you still have yet another reader for life.
I love Jen! I love Schmutzie! Can I win please?
I need this course because somewhere along the line I lost my voice to depression. When all you see is gray, and all you feel is gray (with a tinge of desperation) , what do you say? "Today is gray." As for my last cooking fiasco - tater tot casserole. It was... unique.
In high school, I was that girl who was crazy good at math and science. All I wanted to be was the one who could draw, paint, sing, dance etc... I felt like I had so much inside of me I wanted to share, and no way to convey it to the rest of the world. I thought I was a terrible writer, a thought that still hangs over me now.
I have grown as I gotten older, I have moved away from math and science. I try to write, I try to create. I would love to take this course to help me learn what my strengths and weaknesses are to find my voice.
The giveaway winner has been chosen and the giveaway is now over. Any comments after this one will not be entered to win.
Congratulations, The Other Laura! I am so happy for you! I truly pray this wonderful tool gives you the courage and fuel to tell your story. I was at a meeting Tuesday night and the facilitator was talking about how our past history, and how we run from it, or hide it, or try to fix it, is actually a huge part of our destiny. This one moment in time that we just do not want to deal with sometimes becomes our crowning glory. I can see from the 15 minutes I spent on your blog (I bookmarked it, btw!) that you have a huge voice. An important voice. Go for it Sistagirl! Tell it like it is!