It was a children’s story about a group who voluntarily restrict their spoken words each day in order to better hear the world around them. It was also inspired by a story whose title and author Dalcher can’t remember but with a premise that stuck with her for decades. Reading the novel, it is clear that current political tension helped shape and propel the story, but it wasn’t only politics that inspired Vox. “In 2017 I watched the women marching on Washington and I remember thinking ‘I bet there are people out there watching this who wish those women would just shut up’” Dalcher recalls. Based on the feedback Dalcher got from readers she knew there was more she could do with the idea. Wernicke 27X was born and later published by The Molotov Cocktail. Using her background as a linguist, she developed a dystopian world where suddenly humans were unable to speak anything but nonsense words. Dalcher was determined to come up with a story that her competitor could not create. Dalcher had another writer she laughingly refers to as her nemesis who always placed a little higher than her in flash fiction competitions. The idea first came to life as a submission to a flash fiction competition.
The story of how the novel developed is no less intriguing. The story of how such a world developed and how it is taken down is bold and riveting. With Vox, her debut novel, Christina Dalcher “wanted to create a story about a woman who studied language and yet didn’t speak up as the world changed around her and in the end lost her voice.” In the novel, women are limited to 100 words per day and the country must submit to a value system cruelly enforced by the government.
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