You’re at a karaoke bar, and it’s your turn at the microphone. Your friends pushed you up on stage, and just before the song begins, you curse the gods for not giving you a voice like Sting, Bruce Springsteen, or Lady Gaga. You give your friends at the bar the middle finger, because you specifically avoid karaoke night. But here you are. 

You can only sing and sound like who you are. Instead of trying to sound like someone else, you might as well just play the hand you’re dealt and just be you. As Oscar Wilde said (and he sure did say a lot of things): “Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.”

This workshop is intended to strengthen your natural writing voice and/or discover your voice if you haven’t readily come across it already. You have a natural writing voice—let’s figure out what its range is and what it might be best suited for.

This workshop will be a series of short, prompted writing exercises, small group feedback, large group sharing and reflection. The intent of each prompt is to identify genre and modes to which your voice is suited and how you might broaden your voice’s range and how all the small and large decisions you make as a writer determine what your voice is. From word choice to sentence structure to narrative perspectives, all these choices make up that elusive thing called voice.

Workshop attendees must bring a laptop and be comfortable using Google docs and email, with an email address that they can easily access.
Pre-registration is required

Phuc Tran has been a high school Latin teacher for more than twenty years while also simultaneously establishing himself as a highly sought-after tattooer in the Northeast. His 2012 TEDx talk “Grammar, Identity, and the Dark Side of the Subjunctive” was featured on NPR’s Ted Radio Hour. His acclaimed memoir, SIGH, GONE: A Misfit's Memoir of Great Books, Punk Rock, and The Fight To Fit In, received the 2020 New England Book Award for Nonfiction and the 2021 Maine Literary Award for Memoir. SIGH, GONE was named a best book of 2020 by Amazon, Audible, Kirkus Reviews, and many other publications.