Voice is a Chance in the Heavens

The writer Annie Dillard wrote, “Seeing a partial eclipse bears the same relation to seeing a total eclipse as…flying in an airplane does to falling out of an airplane.”

She must have known she was imitating Mark Twain there and his famous comparison of the almost right word and the right word with a lightning bug and lightning. The total eclipse in the northwestern United States in 1979 made Dillard face the gap between our words and the astonishing universe, and once gain she proved up to the challenge.

“Totality,” or the total obstruction of our sun, happens by coincidence. The moon is 400 times smaller than the sun, but it’s also 400 times closer to the Earth than the sun, which is why both spheres appear the same size in our sky.

When the moon’s orbit brings it closest to Earth and its shadow falls directly on the Earth, we see a total eclipse of the sun.

Many objects come between the Earth and sun that we cannot see—Mercury, Venus, and the International Space Station, for example—because they are too small and distant against our greatest light source. Only the moon matches up perfectly in circumference and diameter and is impossible to miss.

Because the moon is slowly receding from the Earth, a final total eclipse will occur in six hundred million years. We are on the Earth at the precise cosmic moment for this alignment of circumstances to shock the eyes and shake the nerves—as it did this past Monday from Oregon to South Carolina.

Here in the northeast, outside the path of totality, I only saw the ho-hum partial eclipse. Yet the immersive 360° videos on Facebook, the audio of crowds to the south and west bursting with joy, and the infographics of the science made me think of writing too.

A writing voice like Dillard’s requires the same serendipity as an eclipse. A certain set of conditions comes together in an individual and on a page (or on a canvas or on a screen) at the right time, for the right people, and hearts skip a beat. When you read Dillard’s piece, her voice succeeds. I’ve never seen totality myself, but I understood the online screams of awe from the witnesses better because of her words.

This week, I start my 18th semester teaching and seeking to understand voice and words as they now exist in an interactive world. It’s my 22nd class of students and my eighth year.

This semester is different. I published a book version of my writing course The Interactive Voice on Amazon. It contains the first seven modules of my 14-week course; half the content, but plenty for a volume one. I will release modules 8-14 in the spring as The Interactive Venture, a companion book on project-planning and promotion. A third Interactive book based on my visual arts course will follow. A fourth is in the planning stage.

I’m also returning to blogging here once a week, alongside producing and teaching. This post means I successfully transferred all of my websites from one host to another—a daunting task, but a necessary part of making my work more accessible to an audience. Creating a clear online path to your writing is good interactive grammar.

Managing this course is a struggle between writing the lectures, critiquing the student work, directing the social media conversation, and sharing it all. I couldn’t teach interactively without having been a producer first. I produce these courses—drafting, researching, testing, editing, and promoting them—and for a time my students have been my only audience.

Publishing and blogging means stepping into the sun again. That’s always a strange transition, moving from a period of development to sharing, from writing alone to speaking aloud, but it becomes clear when you’ve completed an orbit.

I’m ready for the planets to align.