Authorial Stance
Authorial Stance
Every writer stands somewhere before they write a single word. Stance is the specific position a writer takes toward their subject and their reader: what they choose to include, what they leave out, what tone they take, and what form they reach for to hold the whole thing together. Stance is not the same as opinion. A writer's opinion is what they think. Their stance is how their particular life, their particular history, and their particular way of seeing the world shape the actual choices on the page.
Stance shows up most clearly in form, the shape a piece takes before you even read a word of it. A writer with a different life would not necessarily make the same formal choice, because the form itself often comes out of something specific to them.
Katherena Vermette, Métis and raised in Winnipeg's North End, makes exactly this kind of choice in her poem "mixed tape," from her 2012 collection North End Love Songs. The poem tells the story of a family searching for a missing brother, and Vermette builds it as an actual mixtape: two sides, twelve tracks, each one titled after a real song from the 1990s, from "18 and Life" to "November Rain." She could have told this story as a straightforward narrative poem. Instead she reached for the exact object that would have been sitting in a car stereo or a bedroom in that decade, in that neighborhood, in a family living through exactly this kind of waiting. The mixtape is not decoration. It is the container her specific standpoint reached for, and no other container would carry quite the same weight of time and place.
That is what stance does. It is not a writer announcing who they are. It is a writer's background surfacing in the actual decisions they make about structure, detail, and voice, whether or not they ever say so directly.
Stance matters just as much when you read as when you write. A reader's own background shapes what they notice in a text, what confuses them, and what lands hard. Two students can read the exact same poem and walk away with two different poems in their heads, because each of them is reading from their own particular stance. Recognizing that is simply how reading actually works.
As you move into your own reading and writing for this final lesson, hold two questions in mind. First, when you read "mixed tape," notice which details land differently for you than they might for someone else, and ask yourself why. Second, start thinking about your own life: is there an object, a ritual, or a structure from your own background that could hold a story of yours the way a mixtape holds Vermette's?
A writer's stance is not what they say about themselves. It is what their specific background makes visible in their formal and structural choices.
Form can carry a writer's stance as much as subject matter does.
A reader's stance shapes what they notice and how they respond to a text, and that shift from reader to reader is expected, not a sign of one reading being wrong.
Stance: the specific position a writer takes toward their subject and audience, shaped by their own background, that shows up in the actual choices they make on the page.
Form: the shape or structure a piece of writing takes, chosen deliberately to carry its content.
Standpoint: the particular vantage point, built from lived experience and cultural background, that a person reads and writes from.
Vermette's full biography and other work are available at katherenavermette.com. Her novel The Break and her later poetry collection river woman both continue to explore family, place, and voice from her own specific standpoint in Winnipeg's North End.