“I have been a tourist in the landscape that made me,” Sonya Huber writes in “The Magpies of Industry,” the final essay in her collection Love and Industry. What she means is that her job is a white collar one rather than a blue collar one, and that she has more autonomy and independence than the workers of the land where she was born and bred, which is neither agrarian with its implied country beauty, nor urban with its implied sophistication and resources, but instead a worn out, rusted, patched together, semi-suburban industrial sprawl known as “Chicagoland.” Huber is no tourist to either love or industry, carrying a lifelong, hard-won ache from both. Here, she is, as in so many of her essays, too hard on herself. She does, however, allow later in this same essay, “In some ways, my impulse to love the worn and broken is the best part of me.”
Agreed. Except … there are so many other best parts.
Huber is also the author of the recent craft book Voice First, a thorough and generous book which explores the many types of roles an author may choose to assume when relaying a story. She argues that a young writer at the beginning of her artist’s journey may overburden herself with the search for her “voice,” when in fact there are many voices inside her and the kindest thing to do is to write in them, observe them, and name them. Huber did this herself when diagnosed with an autoimmune disease that rendered her frequently angry and frustrated but, because she kept writing, never silenced. She dubbed that voice “Pain Woman,” and the result was an earlier essay collection, Pain Woman Takes Your Keys and Other Essays from a Nervous System.
But before that, as she notes in the new collection, she already had many voices, many I could easily relate to. First, there was the smart girl in a just-okay midwestern public high school, taunted for the way she spoke and for using “big words.” Then there was the fish-out-of-water at an expensive school in the East. “Away from the Midwest, I stumbled almost immediately upon the thing people kept drawing my attention to: the midwestern accent (Are you from Chicago?) and the flannel (Wow, how did you end up here?)” But “I … laughed and said ‘Oh, the Midwest isn’t that bad,’ when what I wanted to tell them about was the ecstasy of starlings against lilac sky, waving corn tassels, warehouses and truck stops that held a particular kind of silence … Birth does not equal destiny, but landscape helps produce the soul over time.”
There is the punk rocker, the “mathlete who loved the Dead Kennedys,” the devoted daughter whose first job was stapling leak test kits for the family business, housed in the family home, when she is eight years old, the fast-food worker who locks up after the late shift, nostril-numbed from the smell of cooking grease and Windex but still able to find nourishment in the promise of a quiet dark highway cutting through fields that used to hold nothing but crops. The family business, in which everyone participated, was the safe handling of radiation and disposal of nuclear waste, which speaks to Huber’s reverence for the land, the dismay at its contamination, and the duty, always, to respect the constant tide of work. “Work surrounded us, and we knew intimately its pitches and yaws.”
There is, then, the working-class midwestern daughter with her working-class midwestern palette, except when expanded by poetry, or punk rock or bad boyfriends or good boyfriends or motherhood or the slow uncertain crawl through academia, with its precarious financial compensation that often left her shopping at the thrift store for her son’s clothes, and at the Dollar Store to feed her household.
But Huber is never unaware of the privilege inherent in loving the work that she does – this is the joy of reading her. She notes in several essays that her father dreamed of attending medical school, but the money wasn’t there, so he wound up working for his father for years as a butcher. This contrast between the aspiration and the actual is so blunt that no editor of fiction would let it stand. Then, her father launched his own business; the work was a family affair and ever-present. Huber describes her mother as “made of work; she would be up working before we got up and she would start again after we went to bed.” Huber feels in her bones the stock she comes from and is quick to observe to her comparative privilege: “I don’t have to face the same loading dock every day. Or rather, I do, but when I enter the loading dock of my academic building, I go into the academic office where my mind gets to wander, perched atop the narrow bones of my vertebrae. I don’t have to haul metal, shift gears, move steel, or smell the same rusty, grease-tinged stink of the same place.”
In “Born to Run,” Bruce Springsteen sang, “Wendy, let me in / I wanna be your friend / I wanna guard your dreams and visions.” If you want to – or wanna – know what Wendy’s dreams and visions are, maybe don’t ask Bruce. Those women waiting for rescue in rock and roll songs were all this time mathletes in flannel shirts festooned with “No Nukes” buttons who loved the Dead Kennedys, applying to art college with a fond farewell at that ribbon of highway in their rearview mirrors. Wendy? Here she is. Here are her dreams and visions, not guarded, but given voice. They are sharp, sure, savvy, smart, full of affection but not sentimental, full of appreciation but not sappy, fun, fond, knowing. Bruce would want to be her friend. Anyone would. And after all these years, it is so gratifying to hear from Wendy. All this time she has been honing her voice.
Late in Voice First, Huber describes her struggle to find the right voice for an unnamed (and apparently not yet published) memoir: “On the page my voice sounded strangled and mournful.” She rewrites the book “several times in several different voices to shake myself out of the doom and the shame … Then I realized that I’d left out the inherent joy of my approach to life, so I rewrote it again from one of my joyful voices, a hayseed-punk rock young woman from a good day in my twenties. I’m not sure if any of these voices worked, but this was great conscious practice to learn about my wild voices … The solution to a frozen relationship to writing is to practice with more voices.” Like her mother, Huber is made of work. She is so accustomed to work – industry – that she seems to forget it is work (“I rewrote it again from one of my joyful voices”) and regards all this toil as an experiment, an attempt, a kind of play (even a dream or vision).
Proof of this are the exercises in Voice First – and there are a lot of them – listed under the heading “Try This” – not an assignment, not a command, but an invitation. Try This is scattered throughout the chapters, not merely tacked on at the end, as an enthusiastic teacher will encourage a student to try out an idea as soon as it is introduced. “What is the voice you use when you are responding to mockery?” “What is the voice that speaks about awe and wonder?” Maybe this is not a craft book for a novice — it can verge on daunting. But if it’s not your first craft book, and you’ve put the hours in at your own desk, it’s a master class, and written from a joyful voice.
[Voice First: A Writer’s Manifesto. Published by University of Nebraska Press on September 1, 2022, 233 pages, $23.95 paperback.
Love and Industry: A Midwestern Workbook. Published by Belt Publishing on September 12, 2023, 189 pages, $19.95 paperback]