Welcome to Season 2 of the How You Find Your Voice podcast. Expect more conversations on creativity, identity and voice, on and off the page. Summary

What happens when you lose your connection to music, to sound, and to yourself? And how do you learn to listen again?

In this episode of How You Find Your Voice, host Jessie Huth speaks with writer and journalist Alice Vincent about her most recent book, Hark: How Women Listen.

After more than a decade as a music journalist, Alice found herself burnt out and unable to listen to music at all. What began as an attempt to reconnect with music became something much deeper; a search for meaning, identity, and a new way of listening to the world and to herself.

Together, they explore how motherhood, trauma and major life transitions can fundamentally change the way we hear and process the world. Alice reflects on her experience of PTSD following her son’s illness, and how sound became both a trigger and a lifeline during that time.

The conversation also looks at the idea of listening as a gendered experience, namely, how women are often taught to be good listeners, while their own voices and experiences are overlooked. They discuss the difference between patriarchal and more intuitive ways of listening, and the overlooked soundscapes of women’s lives, from baby groups to hospital wards.

They also talk about matrescence, liminal states, and the cyclical nature of women’s lives, from adolescence to motherhood to menopause and how these shifts shape identity, perception and voice.

This is a conversation about sound, silence, motherhood, trauma, and the process of learning to listen to yourself again.

Topics Covered

Losing connection to music and identity
Burnout and stepping away from the music industry
Listening as a practice and a way of understanding the self
Motherhood and matrescence
The sensory and emotional impact of becoming a parent
Trauma, PTSD and auditory triggers
The role of sound in processing difficult experiences
Writing as a way of making sense of trauma
The pressure to “move on” after difficult experiences
Liminal states and identity shifts
Adolescence, motherhood and other transitional phases
Misophonia and heightened sensitivity to sound
Patriarchal listening vs intuitive or embodied listening
Why women are taught to be good listeners
The invisible soundscapes of women’s lives
Community, connection and shared listening experiences
Silence, quiet and the search for stillness
Nature, environment and listening beyond the human
Cyclical identity and women’s changing inner worlds
Finding your voice through listening

About Alice Vincent

Alice Vincent

Alice Vincent is a writer, broadcaster and multi-platform storyteller fascinated by the often-overlooked parts of life. Her books include the bestselling Why Women Grow: Stories of Soil, Sisterhood and Survival, which was shortlisted in the 2023 Books Are My Bag Readers Awards and Rootbound, Rewilding a Life. Both were longlisted for the Wainwright Prize. You can learn more about her latest book, Hark: How Women Listen here.

A career journalist, she was a writer and editor on the arts desk of The Telegraph before joining Penguin as an editor. Now a columnist for The Guardian and Gardens Illustrated, Alice has offered readers her fresh approach to nature, gardening and life in the city as a columnist for The Telegraph and The New Statesman. She writes for titles including Vogue, The Financial Times, The Sunday Times and The Observer.

Beyond the page, Alice is the host of the Why Women Grow podcast – which topped the British podcast charts during its first week and unearths stories of the land with inspiring women – and In Haste, a fresh new books podcast and platform dedicated to exploring how books really get written.

Her weekly newsletter Savour offers thousands of readers a moment to pause and appreciate the delicious things in life.

About the Podcast

How You Find Your Voice is the podcast that asks brilliant guests, mostly women, how they found or reclaimed their voices.

Through conversations with writers, artists, thinkers and entrepreneurs, we explore the work they have made, the lives they have lived and the inner transformations that made it possible.

We talk about turning points and resistance, silence and expression, creative risk and process, and the often messy journey of becoming.

Listen and Follow

If you enjoyed this conversation, please follow the podcast for future episodes.

If you’d like to stay connected to these conversations and hear about upcoming events, salons and gatherings, you can join the How You Find Your Voice mailing list here.

You can also follow along on Substack for longer reflections, or on Instagram for clips and updates.

Keywords

Alice Vincent interview, Hark How Women Listen, listening and identity, motherhood and matrescence, PTSD and trauma, sound and perception, women and listening, music journalism burnout, finding your voice podcast, writing and identity, female experience and voice, liminal states and transformation, misophonia and sound sensitivity, patriarchal listening, motherhood and creativity, writing through trauma, literary podcast, women writers, identity and change