For Narrators, Non-Fiction Can Be The New Fiction

The headset is a land-line link to the Metropolitan Washington Ear's recording system. Not my usual studio mic.

I had an enjoyable conversation yesterday with Sean Allen Pratt, a master of the non-fiction genre, and a teacher extraordinaire of the art and business of audiobook production. In the course of our conversation, I mentioned to Sean that I’ve been a non-fiction narrator for more than ten years, not with audiobooks (though I o have four non-fictions on Audible), but through a twice-weekly volunteer job as a reader for the Metropolitan Washington Ear, a non-profit organization here in the Washington D.C., area. The Ear provides on-radio and by-phone narration for visually-impaired or blind listeners. Ear readers narrate all the stories in the Washington Post and several other news dailies and weekly news publications. Many audiobook narrators I know here in D.C. either got their start with the Ear, or are still Ear volunteers.

My particular narration niche (starting at 6 a.m) is the Thursday front page stories—read from beginning to end, with all the photos described, and charts and graphs explained—and either Saturday or Sunday editorials or the Sunday Outlook section, which includes book reviews and long opinions or feature articles. I’d estimate my time-on-task is about two hours per morning, or four hours per week, for an approximate 200 hours per year of recording time. Sean seemed a bit surprised that this was just volunteer time, but there is value in that, and I am one of a few hundred Ear readers who wouldn’t have it any other way.

My conversation with Sean about the importance of non-fiction narration as opposed to the fun and freedom we can have with fiction, can be summed up in what I did this morning when I was reading the Post’s Outlook section, specifically four stories about Martin Luther and the 500th anniversary of his 95 Theses (I also read a fun and, for me, very informative piece about the history of home runs in baseball, “How baseball came to accept—and love—the home run,” by Rich Cohen, and a chart-heavy article, “Can we talk about the gender pay gap,” by Xaquin G.V.).

If you are a hard-over fiction narrator and/or producer who shies away from non-fiction, I’d like to share with you passages from the four Martin Luther stories I recorded this morning (Sunday, Outlook, October 29) in order to elevate the perception of non-fiction dullness to the higher level of enjoyable reading it deserves.

From today’s Outlook article “When Catholics and evangelicals cooperate in politics, Christianity loses,” by Elizabeth Bruenig, a narrator gets a bit of a tongue-twisting challenge in this passage:

“In July, the Rev. Antonio Spadaro, a close confidant of Pope Francis and a top Vatican official, indicted such evangelical-Catholic collaboration in an article published with a Protestant co-author in La Civilta Cattolica, a Jesuit journal reviewed by the Vatican before publication. 

The essay, “Evangelical Fundamentalism and Catholic Integralism: A Surprising Ecumenism,” offered this thesis: “Some who profess themselves to be Catholic express themselves in ways that until recently were unknown in their tradition and using tones much closer to Evangelicals,” Spadaro wrote."

In her Post Outlook article, “For Christian voters, rejecting elites means ignoring the clergy,” Lydia Bea writes,

“Most evangelicals look to partisan sources and their social networks to tell them how to vote as a Christian. They don’t look to religious authorities to help them deliberate about politics through the eyes of faith.

Before 2008, partisanship was not so tightly fused with religious identity for white Catholics. That year, they split down the middle between Barack Obama and John McCain, and only 41 percent identified or leaned Republican. But between 2008 and 2012, Republican identification of white Catholics jumped eight points. By 2016, 58 percent of white Catholics identified or leaned Republican.”

Jonathan Kay writes about the oddly logical advantage of the mass media/slow delivery technology of Martin Luther’s time, 500 years ago this month, in his Post Outlook article, ‘It took years for Luther’s ideas to spread. That’s why he succeeded.” 

In a stark comparison between the mass media technology of Johannes Guttenberg’s printing press, and today’s high-speed, on-your-phone-now ability to move a message globally at the speed of light (nearly), Kay adds some illumination with this:

“There’s a lesson here that transcends religious doctrine. Modern professional culture encourages collaboration through instant communication and globalized networks. But Luther’s legacy as one of history’s most influential thinkers shows us that there are certain epic projects — such as the systematic rethinking of foundational dogmas — that require time to mature and space to germinate before they are safe for universal exposure. Without that window, they die.

Luther’s struggle against the Vatican began as a struggle against himself. He started his career as a tortured German academic whose spiritual neuroses were tangled up with biblical exegesis — a state of constant agitation that members of the religious classes then referred to as the “bath of hell” — according to Craig Harline’s outstanding new history, “A World Ablaze: The Rise of Martin Luther and the Birth of the Reformation.”

And, finally, in the Post Outlook article, “The talented, heedless man who changed the direction of history,” a review of two new books about Martin Luther, Andrew Pettegree writes about Eric Metaxas’ book, “Martin Luther: The Man Who Rediscovered God and Changed the World,”

“Luther was now a man with a movement, which brought new responsibilities and challenges, not least the growing body of acolytes in Wittenberg. He had to cope with ominous signs of disorder as newly empowered citizens sought the authority of the Gospel in their hope for a better life — and, more parochially, the arrival in Wittenberg of a cartload of runaway nuns. One of these stowaways would become Luther’s wife.

“This ultimately happy union came in an impossibly challenging year, as Luther fended off criticism from Erasmus, dealt with the death of his protector Frederick the Wise and faced down a revolt that threatened to destroy his young movement. As peasant armies roamed the German countryside, claiming Luther’s Gospel message as their inspiration, portraits of the reformer in this year show Luther as a man on the verge of collapse. Yet he weathered the storm, decisively throwing in his lot with the state authorities. The course of the Reformation was set.”

In all these related stories—a non-fiction collection related in theme—there is intrigue, sweeping historical arc, statistics, plot-twists, socially-relevant discussion, in-depth profile/biography, opinion, and fascinating detail explaining the importance of this 500th anniversary of Martin Luther’s world-changing social media posting on Wittenberg’s Castle Church door.

Narrating fiction is often fun, and we get to play with characters and chew the scenery, and raise and lower the stories’ temperatures often with wild abandon. But, that doesn’t mean that a good non-fiction narrator cannot have the same experience. We can, and do; we just have to find ways to take down the volume while enhancing the learning and enjoyment value of the articles or books. The material is all there—in the best of non-fiction books, certainly—and we can bring it to life even without chewing the scenery.

Young, Vulnerable, and Slapped Down

Today, while sitting around a dining room table in the happy, sugar-soaked wake of a 6-year-old neighbor’s birthday here in Virginia, the boy’s grandmother, visiting from Chicago, mentioned the recent story about another young boy, one who was removed from a Cub Scout den in Broomfield, Colorado, earlier this month, because he had the temerity to ask a most probative question of a state lawmaker.

According to the Associated Press story,

“Eleven-year-old Ames Mayfield posed the questions at an Oct. 9 event in Broomfield, between Denver and Boulder. Cub Scouts had been told to come prepared to talk to Republican state Sen. Vicki Marble about issues important to them.”

On the face of it, that sounds like a good assignment for a scout—Cub or otherwise—one that might cause a young boy or girl to think about the issues facing his or her community, state, or country, and work up a question or two for a politician. 

Well, you know what they say about the road of good intentions; for young Ames Mayfield, his well-intended question about gun control was, as far as the Scout leader was concerned, sending Ames straight to the hell normally reserved for older members of the media. 

Again, quoting the AP story:

 “In the video showing Ames asking about gun control, he read from a printed sheet, telling the lawmaker that he was shocked that she sponsored a bill that allowed domestic violence offenders to own guns. He also rattled off a list of survey statistics about Americans' views on the issue and spoke about the trouble Las Vegas shooting victims would have paying their bills.

‘There is something wrong in our country where Republicans believe it's a right to own a gun but a privilege to have health care. None of that makes sense to me,’ he said.”

The story also makes clear that Ames’s mother, Lori, was involved in helping Ames frame the question “in his own words,” and she typed up the sheet he read from. While I could write a much longer column on inappropriate parental help, that’s not the crux of this story.

The heart of this story is the Cub Scout den leader’s decision to cast Ames out of the den and seek another den in which to participate, solely because Ames made the political guest uncomfortable.  Apparently questions asked by other scouts also added to Marble’s discomfiture, including a follow-up by Ames in which, according to AP, “… Ames told Marble that he was ‘astonished that you blamed black people’ for their health problems.

She replied, ‘I didn't. That was made up by the media. So you want to believe it, you believe it, but that's not how it went down.’" 

Senator Marble, if ever Sarah Sanders steps down from the White House Press Room briefing platform, I do believe there is a job there for you.

Ultimately, young Ames was asked to pack his duffel and find another den in which to learn the Scouting ways. No, he wasn’t dismissed from scouting, only pushed out of a den of friends and fellow scouts because he and his mother held the foolish notion that politicians should be held accountable for their words and actions. Funny, huh? How quaint. How insidious. How (and not because Halloween is fast-approaching) ghoulish and ugly.

I’m sure Ames will do well wherever he lands, and I do hope he continues his inquiries into the reasons why politicians say and do what they say and do. But, in an era of indictments, this is a glaring indictment of a Colorado Cub Scout leader who didn’t have the leadership abilities to stand up for his young charge. Shame on that leader, and shame on the Scouts. But, it doesn’t end there.

This morning, before the birthday party for our young neighbor, I read an NPR story about a 10-year-old Mexican girl who was recently detained by U.S. Border Patrol officers shortly after her operation at an American hospital. The girl, who has cerebral palsy, was intercepted by U.S. Immigration authorities, “…as she and a cousin, who is a U.S. citizen, were in an ambulance being transferred between two hospitals so that she could receive emergency gall bladder surgery.”

According to the NPR story,

“Rosamaria Hernandez was brought to the United States illegally from Mexico when she was 3 months old, according to her family and immigrant advocates involved in her case. She was traveling in an ambulance to Driscoll Children's Hospital in Corpus Christi when federal immigration officers stopped the vehicle at a checkpoint.

The Border Patrol agents followed the ambulance to the hospital. When the hospital discharged the child, Border Patrol agents took the 10-year-old into custody instead of allowing her cousin to take her back to her parents, who are also in the country illegally, in Laredo.”

Let’s put aside the issue of illegal immigrants—which Rosamarie’s parents are—and focus on just what happened here: a 10-year-old girl, with cerebral palsy, needs an operation that can best be carried out in an American hospital (where, “First, do no harm,” is the operating principle). A desperate family, fearful of exposure, reaches out to the hospital, and the girl is admitted and treated. With barely a moment for the incision to heal, the girl is detained by U.S. authorities, and removed from the recovery care her family can offer, and sent to a detention center. At age 10. With cerebral palsy. After major surgery.

As quoted in the NPR story,

 “Alex Galvez, a lawyer representing Rosamaria, tells Newsweek that "this wouldn't have happened during the Obama administration."

"This current administration wants to send a clear message to all undocumented immigrants — that if you want to go to [a] hospital, you better think twice about it because you might be deported," he told the magazine.”

This is the same administration that suggests that if you are an inquisitive member of the media, or maybe even just an appropriately curious Cub Scout, you should always be looking over your shoulder for the "authorities" who are just itching to send you away. 

Shameful all the way around. Shameful, but, sadly, not unexpected. 

Bullies Come in All Shapes and Sizes, and From All Walks of Life

As a member of Quora, I try to respond to as many questions as I can, as briefly as possible, but as one who has been bullied, I have long been a vocal opponent of bullying, and I will use every platform I have to keep the pressure up on those who think it is fun or useful to berate, belittle, and demean someone else. This particular Quora question brought out my long-form reply: If you are bullied at work, were you also bullied during your childhood and teen years? Does it feel the same at its essence? How does it feel?

I am reminded of two different Huffington columns I wrote on the subject of bullying. The first appeared earlier this year in a piece I wrote about Donald Trump, the other appeared in 2013 directly addressing the issue of workplace bullying in the federal government.

Having now made sure I am taking credit for plagiarizing myself, let me place excerpts from both columns here, expanded and/or edited, as a combined response to the question.

When I was in junior high school in Lincoln, Nebraska, in the early 1960s, I was one of a number of students bused into town from a nearby Air Force base. The usual “townie” versus “base” relationships I’d experienced in previous postings in other parts of the country played out much as expected. The base kids were generally accepted — the girls more than the boys — and the town kids were tolerant, if just a bit standoffish.

Friendships did form, but as the military kids knew, such friendships were always compressed — starting quickly and ending quickly — simply due to the transient nature of our fathers’ assignments. Additionally, the intra-military-kid relationships were often just as fleeting; when you attend 12 schools in 12 years as I did, it’s hard to form lasting attachments even among your peer group. The bottom line is, as a military brat attending a school in a town you don’t know well, with other military kids who really don’t know you well, you frequently fend for yourself in some social situations.

In 1962, I found myself in just such a situation.

I was a scrawny 13-year-old, in no way wise to, or prepared for, the world of a band of street-smart town kids whose leader, a swaggering 14-year-old boy, singled me out as an object to be bullied. The group of toughs would wait for me to come down the front steps of the school at the end of the day, on my way to the air base bus that shuttled the military kids back home. The band’s leader would grab me and pull me to the side of the steps, hit me once or twice and demand whatever money I had left from my lunch allowance. Of course, I gave it to him. My bus-waiting base companions stood by, possibly sympathetic, but certainly not sympathetic enough to step in on my behalf. Sometimes, the bully would just hit me because he could. Surrounded by his circle of thugs, I rarely made a move to fight back — I simply didn’t know how, and I doubted anyone would help me even if I tried.

After a few weeks of being a punching bag for a school-yard criminal, I began to show some bruising that long-sleeved shirts or pajamas couldn’t hide. A swollen and purplish mark on my face finally caught my father’s attention, and after a few minutes of beating around the bush, I came clean and confessed my weakness. My father did something I had not expected. He did not call the school; he did not try to find out who the bully was. He taught me to fight back.

In a few short lessons, he showed me the simplest, most effective way to deliver a punch to the face, and he reinforced the lesson with one mantra: “Hit first, hit fast, hit hard.” He said he’d learned the same thing while a cadet at West Point, and because he didn’t like boxing, he’d figured out how to end a match quickly so that he wouldn’t have to pound or be pounded for any unnecessary rounds. He also told me that I shouldn’t expect any of my friends to come to my aid — not because they didn’t like me, but because they were too afraid, at that age, to do anything. I would be on my own.

A few days later, as I left the school to catch the bus, I saw the mean gang waiting for me at the bottom of the steps. I was still their scrawny target, and my base pals began to distance themselves from me. The bully stepped forward, putting himself between me and the bus stop. I cannot remember a single thought that prefaced my action, but I suppose weeks of being terrorized came to a boil. In one flashing moment I punched cleanly into the bully’s face and he went down like a 100-pound bag of sand.

Nothing more was done or said. I got on the bus. None of my base friends commented or displayed any kind of support or relief. My dad took it as fact and I went on with being a 13-year-old. The bully never approached me again.

As almost anyone who made it through junior high school (as it was called in my day), or middle school can tell you, bullying is not just a stain on our society; it is, in fact, deeply woven into the very fabric of our national being.

Thanks to my father who peeled back the layers of my embarrassment and my reluctance to reveal my insufficiency, I was able to confront the lead bully and put a period to the sentence of my adolescent torture. But, as I was to discover several decades later, that did not put an end to the bullying, or my reluctance as an adult to call it by its real name.

Federal employees are also subject to bullying. Whether they are on the staffs of senators or congressmen, or work in the myriad halls of cabinet departments and federal agencies, a large number — and I’m only guessing here, but after 35 years in the system I had some standing — find themselves on the short end of the stick with little recourse.

I’m not talking about employees who are unsuited for the work and find themselves in disciplinary encounters; I’m not talking about employees who purposefully abuse the privilege of their station, get caught, and are summarily dismissed. The employees I’m writing about are just your everyday Joes and Janes who put a lot of effort into their work, often exceeding their position descriptions, working overtime without necessarily logging it, and doing their best to contribute to the mission of the federal government. And all the while, they are being dogged, stymied, abused — bullied — by one or more ego-inflated superiors who fly under the radar in a system so big they know they can act with imperious impunity.

I could offer several examples in my own career, a work history ranging from Capitol Hill — both House and Senate — to three cabinet departments and one federal agency. I suggest that these exemplars are common across the board of federal service, more common than one might imagine. In my opinion, the bullying that flows from the White House—the president’s angry drumbeat to publicly humiliate those individuals or organizations he does not like, trust, or believe—is the most visible form of bullying we have seen in my lifetime.

In my career, one act of bullying directed at me when I was the Department of Veterans Affairs included a blatant violation of the Hatch Act; in another, a Congressman for whom I worked assumed that I would be willing to miss the birth of my second child in order to continue participating in a Congressional campaign 800 miles from home; and the third example was a Senator who literally graded my speeches in red pen as though I were still in elementary school.

There are numerous other examples just from my personal experience, but I’ve observed many others, including deliberately crass and demeaning behavior and language used in front of female employees by a supervisor. And, of course, the government shut-down by the Tea Party several years ago is the dramatic example of how bullying held an entire, powerful nation hostage. The effects of the shutdown — emotional upset, fear of reprisal, loss of confidence — were no different than those effects felt by vulnerable teens or beaten wives, or low-wage employees in the private sector.

My story is not unique; bullying of the sort I experienced during my career occurs across the federal government; though it is not rampant, it does exist in many departments. It manifests itself in ageism, sexism, and racial preference. It can be seen in the old-boy networks some leaders bring with them to their cabinet positions.

The federal bullies are empowered by their positions and supported by a culture of leadership that is blindly results-driven — even if the goals are so poorly drafted, amorphous, or ambiguous as to be practically unattainable. Only this past week, President Trump subjected his chief of staff to a subtle bullying that put General Kelly in the White House press room, telling a lie to the media, a lie that was easily fact checked.

In all fairness to most of my bosses for whom I worked gladly over my three-and-a-half decades serving the citizens of the United States, there were and are many fine leaders in the legislative and executive branches. I had the privilege of working for quite a few of them, and I’m grateful for those experiences. But there were at least three in my career who bullied hard and meanly, and if there were three in my span, I can only imagine how many more are out there, spoiling the meaning of federal service for thousands like me who are just trying hard to be good public servants. My thoughts are with them. I got lucky. I got out.

Trumping Backward Toward The Pit Of Oblivion

The Hell  by Hieronymus Bosch

America is regressing. A sweeping statement, certainly, but one that I think is shared by more people than I ever thought possible when I was forty years younger. This isn’t going to be a rant crying for the good old days. That argument is just a wistful, wishful, wasteful, unsupported speed bump, created in our misty, imperfect, memories to divert attention from what needs to be done in the here and now, not what wasn’t done in the then and there. I don’t want to go back…I want desperately to move forward. But that may no longer be possible.

When I say we are regressing, I don’t mean we are going back to anyplace we’d even recognize—for better or worse. I mean we are stumbling backward, blindly, toward a dark, unknown place, a place so unfamiliar and unimaginable as to inspire sleepless nights, fearful days, and dread for the days to come before we get to the crumbling rim of that pit.

Forty years ago I expected we would by now be an integrated society, less bigoted, less judgmental, less fearful. There is no way we would have forecast a resurgence of the Klan, of Nazis, the rise of skinheads, the descent of decency and comity. How could we have predicted the mass shootings, the (fill in the blank) Lives Matter movements, the loss of innocence. A wall of denial along our Southern border was not on our radar in 1977; yes, immigration was an issue, and there was a barrier, but targeting children and taxpaying, job-holding immigrants for deportation at the point of a gun? No, that was not in our 1977 vision.

It was my belief in 1977 that we would be benefiting more from the fruits of our education systems than we are in 2017. We believed the same ingenuity and sense of pride in exploration and discovery that took us beyond our Earthly boundaries in the 1960s and ‘70s would manifest themselves in a general, publicly-embraced desire to continue pushing the boundaries of the world around us to the benefit of all. Today, the cost of higher education eclipses any number we might have imagined in 1977, and the debt shouldered by students and parents is punishing them for their aspirations. To the deniers, science education—even higher-education itself—is worthless now, and their voices are getting louder.

There was no reason, 40 years ago, to think that healthcare in America would be maliciously circumscribed by a mean-spirited, vindictive president and Congress. There was no way to know then that the Supreme Court would favor unlimited funding to political campaigns, a decision that would change forever the electoral process and disenfranchise the idea of one citizen, one vote.

I had no reason forty years ago to believe the nuclear family as we knew it would dissolve, disperse, and then reconstitute itself in a form where children return home as semi-functioning adults, grandparents become parents, and parents become children cared for by children.

There was every reason to believe that the institution of federal government would have lifted itself above the morass of the Cold War, Vietnam, Watergate, and civil unrest and would be working to improve the state of the nation, and not oversee without comment America’s slumping, backward stumbling toward the pit. I guess you had to be there to understand why I would say that, but there were men and women in the Congress—of both parties—who actually stood for serious values, and voiced, without apology or dissembling, their concerns and their ideas for solutions. Really, such people did exist. Reaching across the aisle was a good thing, not a thing to be scorned and dismissed.

While the threat of incoming missiles remained in 1977, I don’t think any of my peers anticipated that threat coming from North Korea in 2017, nor would we have imagined in our wildest dreams we would have a president who recklessly welcomes such an attack via Twitter and cryptic, smirking asides.

Forty years ago, we couldn’t imagine that a soldier could be rotated more than half-a-dozen times into and out of war zones, purposefully over-exposed by the Defense Department, the Congress, and the commander-in-chief to the mangling horrors of IEDs, and lives forever changed by amputations and traumatic brain injuries. It was bad enough that Vietnam-era warfighters had to endure a year or two—perhaps three—of service in combat, but today, our putative leaders are cranking the grinder of war ever faster, pushing more fine young men and women into the feeder, with results that are truly unholy and immoral.

Forty years ago there was no 9/11 on our horizon, no prediction of terrorism—foreign or domestic. We were respected by our allies, respected, grudgingly, by our adversaries. There was no way our 1977 selves would have forecast the doubt, the mistrust, the sideways glances of our friends across both oceans, and it pains many of us to see those looks and hear those whispers. Forty years ago, we would not have dreamed that a Secretary of State would stand for such embarrassment.

Forty years ago, we could not have conceived of a presidential candidate so filled with wack-a-doodle ideas, insufferable hubris, and disdain for anyone not male, white, and wealthy. Not since George Wallace’s—"segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever"—Jim Crow redux had we experienced a candidate embraced by a vocal minority of Americans who stomped and cheered at the idea of making the nation great again—but only in their mold.

That failed businessman entered the Oval Office not on the popular vote, but on the rusting flatbed pickup of an arcane set of Electoral rules. Those Electors dismissed the public will in favor of a B-grade television buffoon whose misogynistic, bigoted, xenophobic, self-aggrandizing, self-inflating, self-delusional and moronic lunacy relishes the idea of shoving us toward, not away from, the pit of oblivion.

Forty years ago, we could not have imagined the fall we are now on the verge of taking. 

What Should We...What Could We...Ask For In Life?

I recently responded to this Quora question: "What should people ask for in life knowing that very little is given?"

I think it's fair to ask for a little peace and quiet when we need time to recharge from emotional stresses--as individuals, as a nation, and as a global community.

Intrusive government, intrusive corporations, intrusive individuals seeking our time 24/7 and keeping the noise level up do raise our anxiety levels to almost intolerable heights.

We reach emotional and intellectual (and sometimes physical) breaking points as human beings, and when we do, we begin to embrace irrational actions, speak angrily, play out our frustrations internally and externally. We begin to turn on ourselves and each other.

When that happens, we--as human beings, as groups of humans--put up defensive walls and shields, while preparing tools of aggression (verbal and printed) with which to push back against attacks real and perceived in frustrating efforts to try to hold our own high ground.

All of this is such a waste of our time and fragile sanity, as individuals and as nations. If we could only focus on those positive goals of personal and social importance without the cacophonous cataracts of contrived fury and manufactured messages of misinformation designed to disunify and shift our centers of gravity.

The question rightfully notes that little is given, but that should not act as a lid on human aspirations and common comity.

We may not be given more than the lives we wear and the lives we share, but we can give each other a chance to explore the richness and interconnectedness of those lives.

Turn down the volume, turn up the respect. Listen to the peace that is all around us.