Finding Your Voice, by Phillip Hoyle

I started out a soprano. Then on Sunday nights at church I decided to harmonize as an alto and learned to read the line and sing the part. When my voice cracked too many times in Glee Club, I became a tenor. I stayed with that for many years. Since I was a choir director, I learned to sing all the parts, SAT and B. In the choirs we worked hard to increase everyone’s tone and range using techniques I learned from one of my voice teachers. If a section was weak on a Sunday morning, I could bolster them with my own screaming. It may have horrified some people. Who knows? 

Finding my voice as a writer was another story, one that didn’t depend on timbre or range. In fact the discussion of that concept goes on. I developed a terse style for use in academic writing. I had to warm it up it for the church newsletter and did so with a little bit of success. When I accepted contracts for writing curriculum resources I got more at home with addressing volunteer teachers. The reading level for them was eighth or ninth grade. Writing for students of different ages was more fun and challenging. That work served as my introduction to creative writing. I experimented but still don’t know that I actually developed a voice. 

When I started writing for myself, I tried for something consistent and my efforts seemed to help. But I believe I didn’t really find my voice until I had written a couple of years of weekly stories for this Telling Your Story group. Meeting that weekly goal and encouraging others to do the same, telling stories to almost the same people each week, and having an appreciative audience and being a part of this group did something for my sense of voice. I like the entertainment part of that work that reminds me so much of talking with a group of children on Sundays during many years of church work. Sometimes I made up the stories on the spot and encouraged the children to help me tell them. That got me started. Many years later I feel like I have a rather consistent voice and am happy to share my many stories with you. Mostly they are accurate to the extent of my ability to recall, but you know how that goes with the years stacking up, hearing reducing, and eyesight dimming. I appreciate that the story telling group allows me to speak whatever my voice is, found or not.

Thanks for listening, or on the blog, thanks for reading. 

© 23 October 2017

About the Author

Phillip Hoyle lives in Denver and spends his time writing, painting, and socializing. In general he keeps busy with groups of writers and artists. Following thirty-two years in church work and fifteen in a therapeutic massage practice, he now focuses on creating beauty. He volunteers at The Center leading the SAGE program “Telling Your Story.”

He also blogs at artandmorebyphilhoyle.blogspot.com

Assumptions, by Phillip Hoyle

The professor said to her students, “I don’t so much care about what you conclude as I do about what you assume.” She went on to explain that two people cannot actually discuss any issue until they discover what assumptions they share. If they do not have enough assumptions in common, they actually have nothing to talk about. For her, assumptions were at the heart of any matter.

Early in my church-related career I learned a process called Strategic Planning. It began with defining your goal. That would be the picture of what you hope to accomplish. The second step was to write out your assumptions about the project. Such assumptions might have to do with your own ideas that lay behind the goal and objectives, those of others who might be involved in the project, the available resources, and so forth. In group planning this look into assumptions might be brainstormed. That part would give the group a look at whether there was any hope for the goal to be pursued to its end. Sometimes the assumptions are not in accord enough to keep the group together. I used that process regularly in my work, and as a result amassed quite a number of files describing the assumptions that I held or assumed participants might hold. Those files went to the trash bin outside the church building when after thirty years I left that work.

My most recent use of this process me occurred a number of years ago when I was recruited to lead “Telling Your Story” at the GLBT Center of Colorado. I had been in the group for a few months and thought I had better clarify my own assumptions about my participation, what I had observed about other participants, what I had picked up from the originating leader, about how the setting would affect the group, about the meeting time, about the Center’s interest in the project, about the elder aspects. I wanted the program that I had found to be significant to keep working well for me and for others, and I wanted to clarify for the SAGE program director what to expect from me. I asked the director to review my assumptions about Participants, the relationship of the group to the Center, and the process of storytelling.

One past SAGE director suggested one important assumption, saying it was better to come to a group on Monday afternoon than to stay alone in one’s apartment drinking. I suppose that would come under the category Assumptions about Participants.

Not long after that assumption was shared, another one surfaced from a “Telling Your Story” participant. He assumed that we would want to publish our stories. I’m still chewing on that idea and doing a lot of work.

There was another assumption, one I thought better and truer. When I told my artist friend Sue that we weren’t an activist group, she said, “Phillip, anytime you get a group of Senior Citizens to tell the stories of their lives; that’s activism.” Her perspective came from working several years in a Senior’s living and care center. I suspect we haven’t yet covered all the assumptions possible. Perhaps these last few assumptions are more points of view related to what we have accomplished together as a group.

© 27 March 2017

About the Author

Phillip Hoyle lives in Denver and spends his time writing, painting, and socializing. In general he keeps busy with groups of writers and artists. Following thirty-two years in church work and fifteen in a therapeutic massage practice, he now focuses on creating beauty. He volunteers at The Center leading the SAGE program “Telling Your Story.”

He also blogs at artandmorebyphilhoyle.blogspot.com

One Monday Afternoon by Phillip Hoyle

One Monday afternoon with a folder of stories in hand, I made my way to The LGBT Center in the 1100 block on Broadway, the place with the purple awning that I had visited often to borrow books from the Terry Mangan Memorial Library. My friend Dianne had looked at The Center’s website and called me to say they were offering art programs and a weekly storytellers gathering. She thought I might be interested, and she was right. For quite a few years I had been attending a writers group, a monthly gathering of men and women in which I was the only gay, but now I thought I’d like to read my gay-themed pieces to an LGBT audience to see what response I would receive. Excited by the prospects I entered the building, climbed the stairs, registered my presence, and made my way to the library where the group was to meet.

I knew the storytelling was part of SAGE, a seniors program, and wondered how I’d compare with other participants. I was younger except for Jackie who was the group leader. She was quite a bit younger than I, a graduate social work student at Denver University who had started the group as part of her internship with SAGE. Jackie’s warm and friendly personality attracted me, and she was just funky enough and humorous enough for me to relate to her. Two or three other men attended my first Monday afternoon with the group. We introduced ourselves to one another and the storytelling began. Since I’d never attended before, I had no story about the topic, but I did have a couple of stories about my experiences as an older man who came to Denver some years earlier to live his life as an openly gay man. Two participants told stories extemporaneously, sharing interesting events in their lives. Jackie read her story, something about one of her boyfriends back in New Jersey. The other participant read his story in a thick Alabama accent. I knew I had come to the right place. Thus began my tenure with The Center’s SAGE of the Rockies “Telling Your Story” group, a storytelling relationship that has endured over three years.

The next Monday afternoon one of the extemporaneous storytellers surprised us and himself by reading a story. Somehow the experience of putting his feelings on paper moved him deeply, reading them aloud nearly devastated him, and hearing them read nearly devastated the rest of us. What was this group? I suspected our times together might become more than any of us anticipated.

Over the ensuing weeks—April through June—we told our stories to one another; sometimes asking questions for clarification, sometimes responding with our own similar experiences and feelings, and always appreciating the candor and depth of the sharing. But Jackie broke into our satisfaction by announcing the end of her internship; she had received an assignment at another setting for the final months of her academic program. Michael piped up to say we already had our next leader. We looked around the room and then a realization hit me. I felt like I was again in church; I was being volunteered. When the truth of it was clarified, I agreed only to consider convening the group. The Center would be closed for a month while the programs moved into the new facility on East Colfax Avenue. I suggested that on the first Monday afternoon of opening week we come together with stories on the topic “Beginnings.” In the meantime I would confer with Ken, the acting SAGE director, about the possibility of leading the group.

I did volunteer to lead the group, an experience of great importance and meaning for me. Prior to accepting the responsibility I had gone nearly twelve years without leading any kind of group. In fact, I had rarely attended any meetings for over a decade. I reasoned perhaps it was time I re-entered group life and asked the participants to brainstorm several topics we could use for the next meetings. We did so and since then have generated so many topics we’ll have to meet weekly for several years to use them all. The LGBT makeup of the group has presented no particular challenges because of the personalities of group members and their dedication to building community that features a broad spectrum of human experience. But the most important thing I discovered in assuming this leadership was that the group barely required any leadership, barely needed it. It’s the easiest group I ever led, and I had led many, many of them in a church career that lasted thirty years. Also, I never before led a group with such a high average IQ or so much creativity and talent, both raw and trained. And still after many months I never can imagine what to expect each week. Such fun, such humanity, such diversity, such community. It all began for me one Monday afternoon.

© Denver, 2013

About the Author

  

 Phillip Hoyle lives in Denver and spends his time writing, painting, and socializing. In general he keeps busy with groups of writers and artists. Following thirty-two years in church work and fifteen in a therapeutic massage practice, he now focuses on creating beauty. He volunteers at The Center leading the SAGE program “Telling Your Story.”

He also blogs at artandmorebyphilhoyle.blogspot.com