Lucy Mathews Heegaard, Author at Studio-Lu Stories

All About Your Voice

by Lucy Mathews Heegaard | Aug 14, 2024

How do our voices work and what happens when they don’t?

A Conversation with Dr. Deirdre Michael, Speech Language Pathologist (SLP) and Co-Founder of the Lions Voice Clinic at The University of Minnesota

In September 2023, I sat down with Dr. Deirdre Michael to talk about how our voices work and what happens when they don’t.

We discuss the relationship between voice and identity, voice and self-worth, and voice disorders and depression. We also talk about a book called This Is Your Voice by John Colapinto. And Dr. Michael tells me her story of becoming an SLP because of struggles she had with her own voice as an opera singer, which relates to the thumbnail image for the video⏤ a scene from the opera Carmen, a role Dr. Michael dreamed of performing.

The Lions Voice Clinic provides specialty care for people with voice disorders through teams of MDs and SLPs working in close collaboration for patients’ benefit.

I had been working with Dr. Michael for seven months by the time we spoke. Through voice therapy, she had taught me how to make the best sound I could with my speaking voice, despite the fact that my right vocal fold (a.k.a. vocal cord) was paralyzed. Evidence of the effectiveness of my work with her can be heard in this conversation. My speaking voice sounds normal, not hoarse, whispery, and barely intelligible as it had since the end of 2022 when Covid-19 damaged the nerve to my vocal fold.

Ironically, at the time of this interview, my right vocal fold was still fully paralyzed. But, as Dr. Michael often assured me when we were working together, the body has an amazing ability to adapt. And mine did. My right vocal fold, though unable to move, had found a tone and firmness that allowed my left vocal fold to make contact with it so that I could make more normal sound. Coupled with the tools I had learned from her in voice therapy, I could once again function in the world, speaking and being heard. It felt like a miracle.

I made a documentary film about my year of vocal fold paralysis called Diplophonia: A Diary of Voice Loss, which premiered at the Minneapolis St. Paul International Film Festival in April 2024. The film will be screened again in Minneapolis on August 24th at 4:00 p.m. an event sponsored by the Eye of the Heart Center. To register, visit: Voice and Belonging: An Immersive Film and Conversation.

The purpose of this conversation is to provide facts about the voice mixed with what it feels like to experience voice loss for an extended period of time. My hope is that others experiencing voice disorders will find it comforting, supportive, and informative. At a minimum, I want people going through voice loss to know they are not alone.

Diplophonia Film Premieres

by Lucy Mathews Heegaard | Jul 24, 2024

Diplophonia: A Diary of Voice Loss, a documentary film by Lucy Mathews Heegaard, was named an official selection of the 43rd annual Minneapolis St. Paul International Film Festival. Premiering at The Main Cinema in Minneapolis in April, Lucy called the experience of watching it in theater with a sold-out audience in her hometown a surreal moment.

“Seeing audience reactions, from their concerned sighs to their gasps to their laughter, I felt like I was right back in that year of voicelessness and that every single person in the theater was with me, rooting for the return of my health and my voice.”

Recently, Lucy sat down with interdisciplinary artist and filmmaker Kary Hess to discuss the film. This interview was printed originally on the blog of the MFA program at California Institute of Integral Studies where Lucy and Kary graduated together.

Diplophonia Poster Documentary Film about Voice Loss

Many Lucys Faces of Lucy Mathews Heegaard as she experiences long term voice loss

Images. left: the film poster for Diplophonia. Top: a frame from the film. bottom: Kary Hess on left, Lucy on the right.

HESS: First of all, congratulations on Diplophonia being an Official Selection of the Minneapolis St. Paul International Film Festival! How did it feel to premiere in your own hometown?

HEEGAARD: I was stunned to receive the acceptance! Not that I didn’t believe my film was worthy, but rather I know the rate of acceptance is low and the quality of submissions is high. And this was my first time submitting to festivals with a feature-length project. So, I felt a little disbelief when I opened my acceptance email. Seeing it for the first time in theater with a sold-out, hometown audience was extraordinarily meaningful. I held my breath for the first audible reactions, and then relaxed as I witnessed audience laughs, gasps, and sighs at pivotal points in the story. I felt like the audience was with me at every turn.

HESS: Let’s talk about the origins of the film. Diplophonia is the diary of your journey through voice loss after Covid-19 froze one of your vocal cords. No one was sure how long it would be paralyzed or if it would even heal at all, potentially leaving you with permanent voice loss. What made you realize you had to make a film about it?

HEEGAARD: I never intended to make this film! The process began first and foremost as my own effort to heal emotionally from what I was experiencing. When my normal speaking voice returned, but my paralysis remained, this turning point was as destabilizing to me, if not more so, as when I first lost my voice. I felt very adrift. To try to make sense of what had happened, I started listening to the voice messages I had sent others over the previous months. The film began to shape itself as I experimented with using these voice messages to create a narrative soundtrack of my experience that captured what it felt like in real-time. Listening to my own messages, I realized that even a few weeks after some events, I was already creating a different story in my head from what I had felt in the moment. I really was just trying to understand and document my true experience by creating short vignettes on key moments. The film grew organically from that process.

HESS: You’ve said that the human voice and spoken narratives are at the heart of your stories. Did losing your own voice impact the way you understand your work?

Yes! It was the experience of losing my own voice that helped me recognize the human speaking voice as the foundation of my work. Before voice loss, I would have told you that sound, in general, was the anchoring element of my stories. And that was true. But as I was finishing up the MFA, the idea of using my voice loss story for a film project arose in workshop conversation. I vividly remember the sudden, jaw-dropping moment when I realized what should have been obvious to me all along. It’s not just any sound at the heart of my work, but the specific sound of the human speaking voice because of all the contextual information it conveys about the speaker and the story far beyond the meaning of the words being spoken.

HESS: Can you talk about the imagery you chose for the film? Your style of grainy, pixelated, layered imagery evokes a feeling of dissolution — of disintegration. Is the medium the message here?

HEEGAARD: I love the look of 8mm film footage and shot some on an old Kodak Brownie movie camera handed down to me by my parents. The mistakes I made with the first reel I filmed, some very overexposed footage, became a grainy layer over or under almost every frame. To me, that gives the film a surreal sense of duality, like watching an old movie even as you also feel you are witnessing events in real time. The scratchy texture is important to me, too, because it evokes dissolution and decay, as you noticed. Yes, medium and message are connected!

HESS: You are primarily a sound artist who uses the medium of film, and losing your voice changed how you approached that. Can you tell us about the ways this film is partly an exploration of identity and the impact that something completely out of one’s control can have on one’s identity?

HEEGAARD: The most deeply jarring impact of my voice loss was how invisible I felt. And disconnected from other people. I’d never understood that all the small, seemingly insignificant interactions I have during a typical day are integral to my feeling part of the larger world, to my sense of well-being, to my sense of mattering in this world. I had already been on a several year quest to investigating philosophical ideas about original self, meaning who we are before any life experiences shape us. The relationship of being heard and understood by others to my own sense of identity and worth became powerfully apparent to me during my voice loss.

HESS: Beyond your festival premiere, what do you hope Diplophonia will accomplish when it reaches the wider world?

HEEGAARD: My biggest hope is that the film will offer support and comfort not just to those who are experiencing voice loss or communication disorders, but to anyone experiencing an unexpected loss that challenges feelings of safety, connection, and self-worth. I am working now with several organizations here in Minneapolis-St. Paul to develop a series of small, private screenings that will use the film as a vehicle for facilitated conversation. My idea is that these screenings will be an immersive, participatory art experience themselves, a deeper way to interact with the ideas in the film and in community with others.

Chiyono’s Bucket

by Lucy Mathews Heegaard | Feb 20, 2023

Watch the unboxing of the book and read the story.

Chiyono’s Bucket: Awakening Reimagined couples the story of a thirteenth century Japanese servant named Chiyono with observations about a twenty-first century photograph. Pairing these reflections, I found my way unexpectedly to an understanding of awakening that felt far more approachable than the lofty, unattainable notion of it I had always held.

This letterpress book was a heartfelt collaboration with Jim Wilder, founder of The Wild Apple Press, based in Bethesda, Maryland. Established in the 1960s, The Wild Apple Press focuses on printing original stories about Irish history and culture by Irish writers. All type is handset and printed on a Vandercook No. 3 proof press by Jim, who honors his Irish heritage through his publishing. Luckily for me, Jim made an exception for my story, which veers from his Irish catalog of work.

Originally, the essay was an assignment for a class with Dr. Ayo Yetunde on Buddhist spiritual and pastoral care at United Theological Seminary of the Twin Cities. This was during my stint in seminary before I found my way to the Master of Fine Arts program I am soon to complete. Our assignment was to write and deliver a dharma talk. The photograph that is central to the reflection is one I took while on a trip to New Mexico with a small group from the Seminary. On that same trip, I heard the story of Chiyono for the first time. I suppose this is how the two became unlikely partners in contemplation.

My friendship with Jim dates to the late 1960s. Seen in this photo, I am the shortest one in the group. Jim is on the far right. An old and dear family friend, Jim and I share a passion for the written word, for beautiful typography, artfully designed pages, and meaningful stories. We’re the kind of people who use instructions like “just a titch to the left” and we understand exactly what the other means by this. We also appreciate how even small adjustments can be enormously impactful.

Though it has been about a year and a half since the book was published, I still have the same excitement when I hold the slim volume in my hands as I did when I first unboxed my copies in the summer of 2021. I relish Jim’s attention to details: the weight and texture of the handmade paper he selected; the particular shade of blue he mixed for the title; the careful placement of the photograph after printing was complete; the hand sewn binding; and the tidy knot in the crease of the center page spread. The story was printed as an edition of sixty copies.

A testament to Jim’s artistry, works from The Wild Apple Press are held by the Royal Irish Academy Library; National Library of Ireland; Russell Library, Maynooth University; Early Printed Books, Trinity College Dublin; Burns Library, Boston College; Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University; Catholic University of America; and Special Collections, University of Delaware. In 2017, the National Print Museum of Ireland hosted an exhibition featuring The Wild Apple Press.

While my stories often take a completely digital form, I have deep and abiding love for the feel of a book in my hands and the crisp sound of a page turning. Telling stories the old-fashioned way will always have a place in my heart.

Contemplative Pause

by Lucy Mathews Heegaard | Dec 11, 2022

How can art be used in service of a mission, toward a meaningful purpose? That’s the question I was set to address in a summer internship as part of my Master of Fine Arts program at California Institute of Integral Studies. I strongly believe that stories can be healing and lead us toward wholeness. My internship for Upaya Zen Center in Santa Fe, New Mexico was a chance to put my beliefs into practice. Could I make something both beautiful and useful that wove teachings from their programs into a semblance of a story narrative that would be meditative and immersive?

At the end of the summer, I did a Q & A about my experience for my program’s blog on medium.com. I share it here for anyone who may have missed it there.

How did this project come about?

This project, which I call Contemplative Pause, arose initially because I wanted to dive more deeply into teachings from a year-long program I participated in at Upaya Zen Center. A group of 300 of us from around the world—representing a variety of religious and spiritual perspectives, not just Buddhism—met twice a month to consider how Buddhist wisdom can be used as fuel for action to make a positive difference in the world. As a service-offering culminating my year in the program, I produced a short, experimental documentary film telling the stories of nurses who provided frontline care for Covid-19 patients in the beginning of the pandemic. My first year of the MFA program coincided with this project. Our interdisciplinary arts workshops that year became an invaluable space for me to receive creative ideas and feedback from classmates and professors.

I wanted to build on the techniques I crafted in that project of creating multi-layered, abstracted visuals designed to focus the viewer deeply on the emotional tenor of the audio narrative. I did not want viewers to simply hear the nurses’ stories; I wanted viewers to have a visceral and bodily experience of their narratives. My question for this project was how might I use those same techniques to create an artful and meaningful contemplative experience from the raw material of over 30 talks given by a wide variety of teachers in Upaya’s program. Further, I wanted to explore how I might use the internship in our MFA curriculum to make art in service to an organization whose mission I admire. I was fortunate that Upaya Zen Center was open to the idea of having me use my internship to create such a project for them.

How did the internship and mentorship classes play a part in your process?

My intention with my summer mentorship with filmmaker and CIIS adjunct professor George Reyes was to expand my visual vocabulary and film techniques. George and I came up with a plan for me to produce short film experiments for our weekly meetings in which I would play with the interaction between sound, silence, voice, music, and visual imagery. I focused in these experiments on how I could use each element in concert with the others to encourage the viewer into deep reflection on the content. At the same time, I was sifting through approximately 50 hours of audio of the Upaya talks looking for short clips that could stand alone as powerful teachings without need for lengthy context. At first it was simply a matter of expedience to use the raw material from my internship project as the basis as the basis for my weekly film experiments in my mentorship. But very quickly I saw that the film results had even more potential for creating an immersive, reflective experience for viewers than the audio-only format I had originally envisioned for my internship project. The internship and mentorship ended up working together very synergistically, which had great benefits for my growth as an artist and the quality of the final project I produced for my internship.

How does this project fit in the context of your larger goals for your art?

The contemplative film series gave me extensive opportunities to test, experiment, and refine my visual techniques for illustrating narratives without relying on the standard “talking head” shots that are more typical of documentary film. I ended up with many experimental clips that never made it into the final project, which now gives me a library of visual ideas to draw from for future projects. At the encouragement of my mentor, I also began to research findings in psychology and neurology about how the brain receives and interprets visual and auditory information. I was fortunate to have access within the CIIS community to immediate resources to acquaint me with such research. Dr. Christine Brooks, a faculty member in the Expressive Arts Therapy Program within the School of Professional Psychology and Heath, graciously gave me an overview of the field and helped me situate my research in the most helpful context for my work. I am excited about the possibilities for insights from such research to help augment the intuitive approaches I am already using.

What’s your next project?

Next for me is a short documentary film in the same immersive, experiential style of my previous two projects. In this film, I will focus on a small group of American Zen Buddhist teachers who hold the master designation known as Roshi. Specifically, I want to highlight the experiences of women who were among the first of their gender to serve in this role. This film is part of an inquiry of mine that began with the nurses project to examine how individual stories can be combined to create a collective narrative in a way that respects the uniqueness of each individual’s story and also highlights the collective threads throughout them all.

Manifesto reimagined

by Lucy Mathews Heegaard | Feb 7, 2022

What if the word manifesto was not a dictum imposed on others but an invitation into your evolving purpose and practice in the world?

A recent assignment in my M.F.A. program called on us to write a manifesto for ourselves. My first thought was, “I have no idea how to write a manifesto!” Yet, the moment that thought evaporated, another was close on its heels: “Be particular.” It is a phrase my grandfather used often. Honestly, I am not 100% certain what he meant when he used it, but it became a catch phrase in our family over the years—a response that could suit more occasions than you would imagine. “Be particular” became the beginning of my manifesto.

More words followed easily. I pulled phrases from my website through the years and thoughts I realized had long been guiding principles behind my work. Voila. A Manifesto. Homework completed.

Sharing it with my writer’s circle after submitting it for class, my fellow writers liked the sentiments I expressed but bristled at the word “manifesto.” For most, it conjured notions of “manifest destiny,” of conquering and taking by force. These meanings are the antithesis of what we foster in our circle, where we cultivate deep listening and seek to nurture each of us as writers to find and live into our own voice.

I admitted to the same initial reaction. My feelings shifted, though, when I thought about manifesto as more akin to manifestation than dictum. With that lens, the word became more of an evolving process to me, a sense of creation and offering, rather than an imposed mandate. We talked about reimagining the word as coming from birthing rather than conquering and what that transformation might look like.

After the Manifesto by Craig Buckley Columbia University

Searching to see how others are thinking about manifesto in this day and age, I found a book called After the Manifesto, edited by Craig Buckley and published by Columbia University Press. While Buckley investigates manifesto in terms of architecture, he captures the spectrum of viewpoints on it in a way that is applicable to uses of manifesto in any genre. Of the various reactions he mentions, I find myself in the “protean camp” at the moment, willing to re-vision what this word means, repurpose it to be more fitting now and into the future.

In the spirit of manifesto as an invitation to growth, evolution, purpose and practice in the world, I offer you my mine. What’s yours? Or, what’s a better word than manifesto that can accompany us with ongoing relevance?