How You Find Your Voice is a platform for women (or indeed anyone in their liminal era) to explore creativity, identity and transformation, through bold conversation, storytelling and live events.

This project is an evolution of 5x15 Bristol, the acclaimed literary event series that I co-founded with my friend Helen Nixon and curated for a decade. For each event, we invited five exceptional speakers to come tell us a story or about their life’s work in fifteen minutes. The stories were true tales of passion, obsession and adventure. We also hosted longer-form conversations between leading writers and thinkers, exploring some of the big questions of our times. You can see the list of speakers and listen to their stories in the archive here.

How You Find Your Voice continues the same spirit of curiosity and love of stories, drawing inspiration from amazing people who have found their voices and aren’t afraid to use them.

It can’t be overstated that this is not a how-to guide. I repeat: I do not have all the answers. I am right in the middle of it all; midlife, motherhood and messy times. I am not a guru. But I am obsessed with stories, in all their forms, and endlessly curious about people, what makes them tick and how they came to find their voices. And that is why I’ve started this.

My name is Jessie. I live in Bristol with my <insert appropriate term for a non-husband life partner> my two young, delightfully feral sons, an old lady cat and a hamster. I am 42 years old, which still shocks and surprises me. I am a writer by trade - mostly copywriting and creative strategy -and a novelist and screenwriter by aspiration.

I’ve started HYFYV partly as a personal quest for understanding, for connection and for answers, as I try to (re)discover my voice, through using it and by talking to others. It’s a topic I’ve become obsessed with and I hope it might resonate with you, too.

If it does, please do join the community by signing up to the newsletter. Who knows - maybe, just maybe we’ll find our voices along the way.