It’s summer and everybody knows that’s the best time for an adventure. We have to have an adventure because we are In Everyone’s Hair and There Are Too Many Damn Kids In This Damn House and It’s A Lovely…
This story started with its voice: a group of kids, speaking in first person plural, navigating some ill-defined climate-dystopian landscape. I scrawled it on a page in a notebook, and then left it for several years before I could figure out what to do with it. It was that voice that eventually drew me back to the page to develop the story further. It spoke too loudly to leave it alone.
As a geography teacher, climate and climate change are recurring themes in my writing. I cannot imagine a story set in the future where this is not an integral part of the setting. And, as much as my profession leads me to climate as a theme, I am also drawn to groups of children voicing a story. There is something bold about their collective voice, but within that group voice there also exists a lot of tension as individuals vie to also be heard.
I navigate voice in my stories with both intention and instinct. In “Everybody Knows,” there are many choices that build up how these kids sound: the deconstruction of words they don’t know as they sound them out, the use of capitalization when they parrot what the adults say to them, and the meandering way they move from thought to thought.
But intuition is also an important component to how the voice of the story is made. It is when I decide that this just feels like something they would say, or when the rhythm of long sentences finally hits right.
The voice in the story is purposefully ill-defined. It is not clear who “we” encompasses, because the sense of group identity is not fixed. For most of the story, “we” feel opposed to the other groups of kids, but in the end everyone comes together.
Ultimately, it is that ending that necessitates the voice. It is an important message within the context of climate change, but a simple one, and its simplicity makes it hard to deliver. And when we have something important that everyone needs reminding of, we listen to it better when we hear it from a child.
JACLYN PORT is a Canadian writer currently living and teaching in China. She enjoys reading, hikes and long walks, and making her own writing notebooks. She has work previously published in The Downtime Review, Corvid Queen, and January House.
