Congratulations to SR Contributor Marcia Aldrich on her forthcoming essay collection Studio of the Voice, coming out in February 2024.
In her essay collection, Aldrich invites readers on a journey of personal exploration of women’s lives, discussing themes such as the complicated love of mothers for daughters and daughters for mothers, slinky blue dresses and sultry red lipstick, Hollywood beauties and the stories we tell about them, the losses and treasures of getting older, her lifelong swim, and much more. The essays speak in a voice that is uniquely hers: revealing, comic, elegiac, perceptive, and wise. Each essay takes on dazzling form; some as shape-shifters, some fragmented and experimental, others in the classic mode–each of them to be discovered, savored, and shared.
Award-winning Aldrich has received significant praise for her newest essay collection.
“Essaying is the best way to freeze and examine and better understand the shifting phantasmagoria of our experiences in families and societies, and Marcia Aldrich’s Studio of the Voice is a whole collection of essays par excellence. With an eager, associative mind, Aldrich gathers and explores intergenerational conflicts and conundrums, generating meditative momentum toward a new vision of how we should, and can, relate to one another.” —Patrick Madden, author of Disparates: Essays
“In Studio of the Voice, Marcia Aldrich creates a studio of the voice-driven essay. Endlessly curious, digressive, formally inventive, these essays shine a light on an essential quality of the essay: it’s not about the epiphany, but process, the questions one asks. Long one of our very best essayists, Aldrich is undaunted at the dark door of the multifaceted truths self-investigation can yield, though sometimes, surprisingly, it is only the door that is dark. One essay by Marcia Aldrich is a cause for celebration. This rangy new book should provoke a parade. A signal achievement, Studio of the Voice is an essential book of essays.” —David Lazar, author of Celeste Holm Syndrome and founding editor of Hotel Amerika
“No writer evokes the way Marcia Aldrich evokes. For every scene she writes, story she tells, detail she describes, she palpates the imagination. This book is physicality incarnate. I can feel her hands as they clutch a bedpost, soothe a cheek slap, twist the chain of a pair of smudged reading glasses hanging around the neck, warm with a flash of menopause, rub the arch of Marilyn Monroe’s foot, burnish beauty, weigh the heaviness of rejection, thrill at the joy of a backflip, and press through dark water with the joy of swimming. Studio of the Voice maintains that we are most human when we are most embodied. Aldrich makes us feel fully human as she gives voice to her own body and the bodies of others in this vibrantly corporeal book.” —Nicole Walker, author of Processed Meat: Essays on Food, Flesh, and Navigating Disaster
In addition to Studio of the Voice, Aldrich also recently wrote “My First Old Person” on Oldster. Additionally, “In My Head: Tinnitus” was nominated for Best of the Net 2023.
Marcia Aldrich is the author of Girl Rearing, Companion to an Untold Story, Haze Underway, Waveform, and Edge. Her writing has received awards such as the AWP Award in Creative Nonfiction. View more of Marcia’s work on her website, where you can also view how to order Studio of the Voice.
View Marcia Aldrich’s “The Year in Review” in issue 23 of Superstition Review.
