Who Is Speaking? Voice, Authenticity and the Writer-Soul with Victoria HetheringtonWednesday, October 28, 6:30 p.m. – 8:00 p.m.

Central Library, 350 West Georgia St.

What makes writing sound like someone? A distinctive voice that reaches you? It can emerge from surprisingly small-seeming choices, which we'll explore: rhythm, syntax, vocabulary, perspective; you can also find it in the things a writer habitually or intentionally leaves unsaid. In this workshop, we’ll look at how writers construct voices and personas, and experiment with imitation, disguise, exaggeration and literary ventriloquism to see how much a voice can change before it stops feeling like the same person. We’ll also consider what happens to our ideas about voice and authenticity when machines can convincingly reproduce some of these signals. What, if anything, makes a voice feel genuinely one’s own?