Introducing Martha

Welcome, brave writers and readers.

Why brave? Because revealing the “I” behind your words is harder than it seems. It’s also a journey of self-exploration that will spark and sustain you, as it has me.

My name is Martha Nichols, and I’m a longtime magazine editor, writer, and author of these lessons. For decades, I’ve been on a journey to write more personally. Since 2008, I’ve also taught journalism courses at the Harvard University Extension School, emphasizing the value of subjectivity. My guide First-Person Journalism (Routledge, 2022) details the many ways a first-person voice engages readers.^[1]

But that’s only one description of me. It makes sense that this introduction to Finding Your First-Person Voice emphasizes my professional expertise. With other kinds of personal stories, however, I’d focus on different aspects of my life.

The Puzzle of “I”

My image above, with its grid of pieces, hints at the way a first-person writer constructs their “I.” Here are more pieces of my puzzle:

• I co-founded a nonprofit digital magazine site called Talking Writing.
• I’m a white American woman.
• I grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area.
• I’ve lived in the Boston area since the early 1990s.
• I’ve taught myself to make an excellent pie crust.

Other pieces emerge in personal anecdotes like this:

I met my son in a Saigon orphanage in the summer of 2002. He was born four months after 9/11, a September day I can’t help remembering. But it started with me imagining a baby. That morning in the Boston area, before the planes crashed into the World Trade Center, I idly thought about Vietnam. I noted the blue sky of early fall, pictured friends boarding their flights at Logan Airport – the same airport one of the planes originated from.

Then I was terrified, stuck in traffic, the usual honking horns abnormally quiet. My son knows none of this except through my stories.

The more you write from your own perspective, the more you’ll realize the entity we call “self” is not a fixed thing. You don’t have to complete the puzzle. In fact, the puzzle of being alive is never complete. Instead, go one step at a time, discovering how much your voice can grow and change as you proceed.