Mr. Trump, You Can't Take My Fourth of July Away From Me

John Adams  "[the Fourth should be] "celebrated, by succeeding Generations, as the great anniversary Festival

I'm struggling with the words to express my disdain for the White House plans for this year's Fourth of July celebration on the Mall (well, not completely on the Mall). To hear the Interior Secretary bleat it, it's all about honoring the nation's armed forces for keeping us free for the past two-and-a-half centuries:

"There is no more appropriate place to celebrate the anniversary of American independence than among the Nation’s monuments on the National Mall and the memorials to the service men and women who have defended the United States for the past 243 years,” Bernhardt said in a news release.

“For the first time in many years, the World War II Memorial and areas around the Reflecting Pool will be open for the public to enjoy a stunning fireworks display and an address by our Commander-in-Chief,” he added. “We are excited to open these new areas so that more visitors may experience this year’s Independence Day celebration in our nation’s capital.”

Now correct me if I'm wrong (it happens more often than you might think), but we have Memorial Day, Veterans' Day, and Armed Forces Day (which is now something else, but it's a military-centric day, trust me). It's not like we don't celebrate and thank and treasure the duties, sacrifices, and memories of today's and yesterday's warriors. I spent 14 years on Capitol Hill in the House and Senate Veterans Affairs Committees, and the Armed Services Committee, and another two years working for the Pentagon, and another 12 years at the Department of Veterans Affairs, AND, I'm a DC native--been here most of my 70 years. In all that time, as the son, grandson, and uncle of veterans, I considered those days to be set aside for national reflection on the gift of freedom given selflessly by so many millions of men and women in uniform.

July Fourth, to me, has always been about the larger ideas of independence from tyranny and the shared commitment to establish a more perfect union. It is about celebrating the closing of one miserable door of history and opening a new and hopeful one through which succeeding generations of Americans could pass into a new land of opportunities. It is about keeping that door open for every new visitor, every new refugee, anyone seeking a better life. It is about realizing that we are still imperfect, and that we must continue to slough off old hatreds and animosities and hurtful habits and embrace the idea that we are still a work in progress.

Yes, the Founders and those who could vote in 1776 were all men--mostly men of wealth and privilege--often slave holders, almost genocidal toward native Americans, and unsympathetic to women's views. They were flawed men (many in their 20s) in many ways. Yes, of course they were--don't come at me with 21st century points of view, informed by 243 years of hard lessons; if you can't understand the broad sociological, economic, religious, and political context of the late 18th century society, and you need to overlay today's "enlightened" rewriting of history on the actions of those who were dealt the only cards they had, and played them against a brutalizing King and Parliament, then you fail to understand the gravity of the Founders' actions. Had they failed in their effort, they would have been hanged. Certainly Donald Trump does not understand, nor, it seems, do any of his followers.

The Fourth of July is not about a "commander-in-chief" giving a speech on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. It is not about a flyover featuring Air Force One. Trump's version of the Fourth is not about commending the men and women of the armed services with gestures intended to elevate those who serve. No, his version is to shine a false light on a man who did not serve. 

On July 3, 1776, John Adams, in Philadelphia, wrote a letter to his wife, Abigail, in Boston, expressing his thoughts on how this new day of independence should be celebrated in the future. He wrote, 

"I am apt to believe that it will be celebrated, by succeeding Generations, as the great anniversary Festival. It ought to be commemorated, as the Day of Deliverance by solemn Acts of Devotion to God Almighty. It ought to be solemnized with Pomp and Parade, with Shews [shows], Games, Sports, Guns, Bells, Bonfires and Illuminations from one End of this Continent to the other from this Time forward forever more."

Note that "Guns" is just a small part of Adams's thinking; "Pomp and Parade," is all about throwing out our national chest with pride, and parading with a sense of accomplishment at a hard-won task. "Games,Sports, Bells, Bonfires"--those are the picnics enjoyed in backyards, parks, and town squares all across the country. And "solemn Acts of Devotion to God Almighty," is not the same as slavering and drooling over a pompous son-of-a-bitch president who demeans and undermines everything holy and sacred about our democracy. Adams was not speaking of a Golden Calf to be worshiped on the steps of the most noble of our nation's memorials. He was speaking of a quiet time within ourselves--as we choose--to be grateful for our freedom. And that's my Fourth of July.

My photo of the Fourth of July taken many years ago...still a favorite

Crying To Make Things Clearer? It Works For Me.

A Little League baseball game under the lights in Northern Virginia. I cried, here, too. 

I cry easily; my family joshes me about that, and they know all the triggers that will result in a dad-sized tearfall: music of a thousand flavors (oldies or hymns or anthems, a stirring Sousa march or Copland fanfare, classic symphonies, concertos, and sonatas, smoky, hot, liquid saxophones, distant in-the-meadows English horns, penny whistles, weep-worthy Irish Uilleann pipes and rumbling, rolling, thumping bodhrans), beautiful sunrises and sunsets, movies with happy endings, movies with sad endings, passages in novels that bring me to a halt with their power to drill deep into my heart (I just finished “The Guest Book,” by Sarah Blake, a must read), flights of birds against a fall sky (thanks, Judy Collins), and thoughts of the life I have lived among so many fascinating people on a world we are fortunate to share, spinning in a universe we know so little about.

A week ago, I attended my re-scheduled 50th high school reunion. In 1968, there were more than 800 of us who moved on from Wakefield High School in Arlington, Virginia; at the reunion there were a few dozen of us (and spouses or friends) who returned to reconnect. We spoke kindly about the more than 80 alumni of our class who are dead—two that I know of died in Vietnam—and of our teachers and parents, many of whom are also gone now. Most of the class of ‘68 spread to the winds of life as best we could, fledging awkwardly (speaking for myself) on just-acquired wings. As with so many reunions that bring us back together in our later years, it was a comfortable, light-hearted event because we all had nothing to prove, nothing to put on any scale of my-accomplishment-vs-your-accomplishment. We’d long-since proven ourselves to the world, and that’s who we were that night. After a wonderful dinner and happy conversation, I walked back to my car in the twilight and felt the tears come—tears that were called forth by the memories of things I will never, ever, reconstruct properly, but which I’m pretty sure were good things and mellow things and worthwhile things shared in a moment of time that has slipped over the horizon of my life.

Later in the week, I attended the high school graduation of my youngest niece, Grace, a beautiful young woman whose brother and sister, equally loved by their doting aunt and uncle, are capable of making me cry just because they are such nice human beings. Grace’s graduating class of more than 600, and all their parents, relatives, and friends, filled a popular event arena in Northern Virginia. As the graduates took their places in the well of the auditorium, the evening sun cast beams across their caps and gowns, and moved on across the crowd, illuminating all of us under a warm evening sky. The scene was perfect. And I cried. I cried when we all stood and said the Pledge of Allegiance; I cried as the school choir sang the National Anthem and the Color Guard presented the flag; and I cried as I watched Grace and several of her classmates sign the ceremony for the deaf and hearing impaired. 

Let me be clear about one thing that I’m sure crossed your mind when you read that I cried during the Pledge and the National Anthem: my emotional response was not founded on a some notion of America First or righteous nationhood or political positioning to the right or left of a social media ideal version of America. I was in tears because of what I wished for, what I hoped for, what I longed for for all the young people getting ready to move forward in a nation facing a very troubling future. My tears were for what they will encounter, what will lift them up and what will trip them up.

For the graduating class of 2019, the path forward will be totally unpredictable, no matter how hard they try to make it conform to their wills. Life will not be kind to some of them; life will not care about their GPAs or their skin color or their ethnicity or their lineage; life will take its good sweet time in acknowledging their passions, choices, partners, points-of-view, achievements, and failures. For some, life will be a hammer and they will feel like nails; others will have the capacity to be hammers—they will bear great responsibilities--and they will have to learn that human beings are not nails. There will be plenty of tears shed in all their lives, happy tears, sad tears, tears of frustration, tears of anger, tears at loss. I am afraid that until our society comes to terms with—and arrests—the apparent rise in anger and hate, mockery and discord, division and distrust, that are becoming our nation’s face to the rest of the world, more tears of sorrow are in the offing. And so I cried.

Friday morning, I attended a pre-school graduation ceremony for about 15 boys and girls decked out in blue caps and blue gowns with yellow trim. To one of those children, and his older brother, I am “uncle Jim” and have been so-named all their young lives. To be sure, I am just a neighbor to their family; we are not blood kin. And yet, even as I and my wife are to both of them and their parents just neighbors, we have become so much more in the many years they have lived next door. Next week, they will move away to Illinois to begin a new chapter in their lives, and Carolyn and I will watch them leave and feel that hole in our spirits that comes from wanting happiness for someone when finding that happiness means moving on. So I will cry about that. But at the graduation—where my little buddy stood with his friends as the strains of Louis Armstrong’s “A Wonderful World” filled the church sanctuary—I was a wet mess, and would not have wanted to be anything else but. It would be inhuman—robotic—to watch four- and five-year olds facing lifetimes of who-knows-what accompanied by that song of hope, kindness, and love. So, yeah, I was pretty teary.

And, finally, on Friday night, I went to see our neighbors’ oldest boy play his last little league baseball (T-ball plus pitching) game under the lights at a nearby recreation center. If you have been a parent of a seven- or eight-year-old boy or girl who is just learning the basics of baseball (or if you were one of those little boys or girls once), you know what that evening was like. Sort of like the demonstration of atomic fission using a gymnasium floor covered with mousetraps loaded with ping-pong balls. When the first trap is triggered the floor becomes a mass of flying ping-pong balls, each moving in its own trajectory until the last trap is sprung and the last ball falls to the floor. Pretty much describes the pre-game activities on a little league baseball field. But then, the magic happens. The coaches and players line up from home plate along the first- and third-base lines, the knots of parents huddled near the dugouts stand up and face the American flag beyond center field, and the announcer plays the National Anthem which echoes across the grounds covered in dusk. And I felt the tears coming and didn’t mind at all.

There is something about a tearful moment—the act of crying without shame in the face of exquisite beauty, inexpressible love, unimaginable horror, or in deep contemplation of self and one’s place in the continuum—that is, at least for me, a release, a permission of sorts to let the soul show through without fear of judgment or embarrassment. I find that my tears clear things up…wash off the accumulated dust of doubt…rinse away the motes of mistrust…sluice away the skepticism that comes so often…and, in the very act of wiping them away, reveals anew the world around me.

It is clear to me that the world in which I grew up cannot, and should not, be looked back at with blinders on; there was much to cry about that I did not understand in my youth, and I’m sure my parents did their share of weeping for what was happening then, and what they feared lay ahead for me and my sister. They believed then, as I believe today, in the power of a glad heart to heal a wounded spirit; in the power of a firmly-held hand to steady a friend in a time of moral and ethical testing; in the power of a kind word to push back the darkness of hate; and in the power of tears to help us see more clearly what lies ahead for us all. And, of course, I’m crying as I finish this.

Have We Learned Nothing In 75 Years? Thoughts On D-Day And William Faulkner

A P-38, marked with D-Day invasion stripes

Like the children of so many World War II veterans—too many who are gone, too few who are still with us—I used to look at June 6 as the anniversary of something greater than the sum of its parts, something that would endure and truly change the world. My father was flying a P-38 over Normandy that day, watching from his aerial perch the horror that was unfolding far below his safe cockpit. Like many of his colleagues who witnessed D-Day from the ground, sea, and air, he didn’t want to talk about it in the years that followed; he knew the terror of combat, the feeling of futility at not being able to save the life of a buddy shot down in a dogfight or blown apart by a mine or drowned beneath the debris of a submarine attack. He knew what it was to kill another human being—to place another man’s airplane in his sights and pull the trigger and press the attack until the other man was either ashes or a figure beneath a parachute. He blew up trains; he destroyed factories. His was the guiding hand of wing-borne savagery, carnage, and death. By all accounts, medals, and commendations, he was very good at what he was trained to do. He outlasted those who were equally determined to kill him. And he came home to a wife, a daughter, and, eventually, a son. 

To know him as I did, was to know the most peace-loving human being I’ve ever encountered. Even though he remained in the Air Force for 30 more years—doing things in the Cold War that remain classified, and losing men under his command—he was not inclined to anger or temper; he preferred quiet resolution of conflict. When he finally retired in 1972, he traded a seat in a cockpit for a seat on a John Deere tractor and tried (not always successfully) to farm a modest acreage in Virginia and build and fly model airplanes…and embrace his family. My memories of my dad probably mirror the memories—with variations in details—of many kids of those warriors who, against all common sense, left their farms, their small towns and big cities, their schools, their businesses, and their families, to wrest freedom from tyranny at the very possible cost of their lives or at least parts of their bodies or minds.

My father believed, until his death in 2003, that what he and his fellow Americans and allies, particularly his British brothers-in-arms, accomplished between the late 1930s and the war’s end in 1945 was a necessary violence to stem what otherwise would have been an unthinkable reign of terror across the face of the world. He was not a dreamer of unrealistic outcomes; he knew full well that tyrants, despots, sociopathic stealers of public trust and fortune would rise again, would try again to walk their self-serving horror across vulnerable nations. But he would not have believed such an enemy would emerge within his own country; he would not have believed such a home-grown man, a usurper of a popular vote befouled by a foreign and treacherous foreign agent, would also seek to bond himself with other global tyrants—liars and murderers all—and turn his back on the welcoming torch-bearer at the gate of Democracy. That such a madman has followers is no surprise; the history of ruthless men is replete with the stories of the ignorant and willing sheep they led. In part, they are followers because they have been told to be afraid of truth, to fear change, to fear the unfamiliar. But to a greater degree, they are followers because they have forgotten what D-Day was all about; they have unlearned (or never learned) the immutable truth that democracy is hard work accomplished by many hands working as one.

Seventy-five years ago—D-Day, June 6, 1944—my father aloft and all those boys and men below him who were engaged in unimaginable violence could not have known that all they were fighting for, dying for, would two generations later be in a state of existential peril at the hands of a new madman and his cadre of know-nothing-see-nothings. Can it possibly be true that the sacrifices of so many Americans and allies were for naught? Have we learned nothing? We are being torn apart more and more every day; unraveled from within; a ragged, ruthless ripping of the fabric of sensibility and ideals meant to endure, to evolve, to become better.

Are we today at the endgame? Have we lost our resolve to push the inhumanity out of our lives and restore the very soul of the nation? Have we lost the courage of our convictions? Have the last 75 years been wasted? I want very much to believe we are better than that. Because I do not have a voice sufficiently powerful, or eloquent, or useful with which to properly engage and fend off forever this existential threat, and because I want very much to believe that what brave men and women have died for still means something, and can still be redemptive, I turn to one of my favorite writers, William Faulkner, winner of the 1949 Nobel Prize for Literature. 

On December 10, 1950, Faulkner delivered his acceptance speech. At the time, atomic bombs were getting bigger, the world was growing fretful, if not fearful of annihilation. America, recovering from World War II, was on the verge of a new war, and barely a decade away from Vietnam. I read this speech whenever I begin to fear for the country…so I’ve been reading this a lot lately, and I will read it today, 75 years to the day after my father looked down on those bloody beaches and the treasure being offered up to the altar of freedom.

“Our tragedy today is a general and universal physical fear so long sustained by now that we can even bear it. There are no longer problems of the spirit. There is only the question: When will I be blown up? Because of this, the young man or woman writing today has forgotten the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat.

He must learn them again. He must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid; and, teaching himself that, forget it forever, leaving no room in his workshop for anything but the old verities and truths of the heart, the old universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed – love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice. Until he does so, he labors under a curse. He writes not of love but of lust, of defeats in which nobody loses anything of value, of victories without hope and, worst of all, without pity or compassion. His griefs grieve on no universal bones, leaving no scars. He writes not of the heart but of the glands.

Until he relearns these things, he will write as though he stood among and watched the end of man. I decline to accept the end of man. It is easy enough to say that man is immortal simply because he will endure: that when the last dingdong of doom has clanged and faded from the last worthless rock hanging tideless in the last red and dying evening, that even then there will still be one more sound: that of his puny inexhaustible voice, still talking.

I refuse to accept this. I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance. The poet’s, the writer’s, duty is to write about these things. It is his privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart, by reminding him of the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past. The poet’s voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail.”

APAC, NYC: An Annual Migration Where Narrators Gather in a Volume of Voices

[This is a pretty long post for BWIIW?, but stick with it, please. There is a personal story of attending a conference that frightened me in the months and weeks leading up to it; and it is a little bit of education into the home-studio world of audiobook narrators. There is so much more to be said that I can't say here without writing a book, and I apologize up front to all my narrator, producer, and APA friends who I did not mention. As always, feel free to add your name to my blog's subscribers.]

I am an audiobook narrator. I am also a photographer, photojournalist, writer, pilot, former government employee, husband, dad, and granddad. But, when I’m asked, “What do you do?” I am quick to reply, “I narrate audiobooks.” My license plate is NARR80R, just to confirm the vanity of my work to passersby in the shopping centers here in Northern Virginia, and while driving down I-95 when I am visiting my family in North Carolina.

This past week, I took a great leap from the comfort of my home here in Alexandria, Virginia where I have a modest studio we lovingly call “The Dungeon,” and ventured to New York City to attend the Audio Publishers Association Conference (APAC), a migration of talent (I think more than 600 of us, for which there should be some sort of collective noun. If there can be an exaltation of larks, a pandemonium of parrots, a convocation of eagles or a charm of finches…perhaps a gathering of narrators could be a volume of voices?). Well, if you get my tortured drift (I am a bird photographer, too), then APAC is a microcosm of those great annual avian flyways that swirl over the Americas and alight on their summer feeding grounds, the APA conference was filled with experts in the field whose many goals were to excite us, encourage us, embrace us, teach us, hear us, and bond with us.

I’ve been narrating audiobooks for about six years, and I joined APA a little more than a year ago. I felt totally inadequate, and, frankly, intimidated by the thought of meeting so many amazing, well-known professionals whose audiobook output puts mine to shame. Little did I know how many other phobics were fighting the same internal battle. But I, and they, spread our wings, flapped out of our safe nests (or took Amtrak), joined the great migration, and showed up at the Javits Convention Center.

Going up to New York to stand in this arena of narration and production icons, gods and goddesses triggered all the hide-in-the corner and flight responses I harbor. I am a victim of imposter syndrome, social anxiety, phobias, and depression. In all my years in the public arena…as a news photographer, reporter, columnist, a press secretary, a president appointee and cabinet speechwriter…I feared every day or event that would cast me into some group (usually smallish—10-30 people) where I was expected to interact. I can give a speech to an audience of 1,000; I fail miserably when contemplating talking at a cocktail party, reception, or closed venue like those meeting rooms at APAC. But, in most cases, I go somewhere inside myself and find the courage to hold my own hand and proceed with my head up into the world I fear. I suspect I manage okay; I have yet to be ejected from a party or conference for being a creepy bore, nor have I been wheeled out on a gurney and taken to a hospital in a straitjacket. So, those are plusses.

With respect to APAC, I felt, after six years of audiobook narrating and only a handful of titles that barely get listened to or reviewed, I needed a glimpse into the world of the more successful narrators, to see how newcomers are treated, to hear panels of the publishers, to meet my coaches and those narrators/friends for whom I was but a virtual presence. My expectations were low, by choice; I set a list of about ten things I wanted to accomplish and people I thought I should meet. It was my great fortune to meet Jenny Hoops, my #1 proofer and a wonder narrator in her own right. Jenny was there to welcome me with genuine warmth and comity, and she and two or three other narrators I’ve known took me around to meet other people. But the anxiety and phobia were always lurking, especially at the pre-APAC reception at the Boat Basin where “mingling” was my worst bête noire, and after a drink and a bite of catered food, I was out of there in the teeth of a vivid and wild thunderstorm. The day of the main APAC events started with my taking a slow walk from my hotel to the Javits Center, snapping pictures along the way, finding in my photography, as I always do, the muse I would need to make it through the day’s events. As I entered the Javits Center, I made a determined effort to “whistle a happy tune,” as the song goes (though quietly, in my head), and meet the challenge head on.

I made myself meet Robin Whitten, founder and editor of AudioFile magazine; I reached out to PJ Ochlan, one of my coaches who helped my dialect in “The 480.” I finally got to meet, face to face, Andi Arndt, my co-narrator for my very first duet book five years ago. Andi and I have been FB friends for a while, but meeting her was important. I sat at a roundtable discussion with my coach Sean Pratt and met several new narrators there who actually asked me questions about the narrating world. Alice Anne English, a connection of mine (through family and narration) dragged me over to meet Scott Brick, and he and I got along fine once he found out that my grandfather produced several of Scott’s favorite 1940s movies. I participated in the Networking with Publishers discussion by asking all four of the panelists a question about us older narrators—those in our 70s and above—and recounted to them and the audience my anxiety of aging, my imposter fear, and my story of being blinded for a year when I was a young boy, and how so many people read to me over the phone. To hold a microphone in a packed conference room and ask a question was a challenge—and my shaky voice probably betrayed my fear—but I knew I had invested in going to APAC, and I was going to make the most of it. One of the producers asked for my card—a nice gesture, but I won’t obsess over it. What was important, is that after that panel broke up, several of my age-related peers came up to me and thanked me for asking a question they were too anxious to ask.

I met Pam Almand, a well-known narrator (I didn’t know that) who was once, of all things, a 747 captain who was happy to meet a fellow pilot. She is now one of the big players at APA, though I was blissfully unaware of the link until after I met her.

All in all, I collected about 20 business cards—gave out about as many of my own—and achieved most of my modest goals.

At the final reception, I touched base with about everyone I’d met during the conference to thank them for their kindnesses and audiobooks, and while I’m sure I was just one common face in a crowd of 600 (despite my portliness), everyone I met, without exception, responded with warmth and congeniality. As I left Javits, another massive thunderstorm rolled across the city…a copy of the one just the night before that had spawned a tornado in New Jersey and almost trapped me at the Boat Basin. I took both storms as nature’s way of telling me there are powers greater than my simple human fears.

Will I do APAC again? I don’t know for sure. Like many new-to-mid-range narrators, I don’t have a major publisher behind me, though I am still a BeeAudio narrator, and my latest book is being represented by Blackstone. What APAC did set in motion for me was a rededication to getting more, and higher-quality, audiobooks under my belt, and to keep pushing every button I can find to promote my work and keep making a go of this thing. All the newbies at APAC, and all of us in the middle ground of our narration journeys, did find an organization that welcomed us, informed us, and treated us with respect.

About My Small Niche of the Audiobook Narration Business: The Home Studio Narrator

There are thousands of narrators across the U.S., down in Mexico, up in Canada, across the United Kingdom, across the Channel on the European Continent, and around the world in Asia, along the Pacific Rim, and down under in Australia and New Zealand. I’ve sure I’ve missed some regions. If you look hard enough (or listen often enough) you’ll find us everywhere. And we’re not all narrators…many of us are proofers, editors, and engineers whose efforts pull it all together. And there is the APA staff and organizing committee challenged with pulling it all together. It rather does take a community (mostly virtual) of many talents to make it work.

You would be hard-pressed to find a more eclectic bunch—a broad and deep demographic slice of us would reveal at least six-decades worth of ages (20-80), single and married working mothers and fathers and grandparents, soccer moms, teachers, cabbies, care-givers to aging parents or special needs children, artists, writers, carpenters, a former 747-400 pilot (one of the few women to assume the left seat of that airliner), community volunteers, stage actors, doctors, nurses, boat-builders (in Alberta, Canada, no less), engineers, scientists, historians, grad-school students, stay at home dads (one of whom I met recently wrangles seven children while still managing to squeeze in narrating time thanks to his working wife who takes on the kid-duty while dad is on the microphone), grandmothers who narrate erotica (yes, really) and grandfathers who give voice to Civil War histories. A high school classmate of mine is now a senior judge in a local county court, and he just narrated his first audiobook! Many of us are the dreams of analysts and mental health professionals: we can be painfully shy in our black tee shirts and sweats; some of us think we are socially awkward; while others are happily boisterous and fabulously feathered with nary a care. We are blind to color and religion, we are ethnically blended, sexually “who cares?”, politically all over the board, city dwellers, rural (and I mean rural) outliers, and from every other form of community in between.

Our daily voices run the gamut of ranges—from bass/baritone (yours truly), to contraltos to sopranos. Some of us have big, booming voices useful for little-league coaching, while some of us are known around the office for our soft tenor lilts that calm heated discussions. But despite our at-home-or-around-the-office voices, we are all vocal chameleons when seated (or standing) before a microphone and the “record” light comes on. An Ohioan becomes a Liverpudlian; a Londoner becomes an American southern sheriff; a burly Virginian becomes a frail 90-year-old aunt from Vermont; a soft-spoken woman from Georgia becomes a cheeky teenager from Limerick; a ginger-haired Oklahoman strides the studio boards as the Bard of non-fiction (that Sean Pratt would become my non-fiction coach has nothing to do with his entry in this blog); and a New Yorker/Los Angelino named PJ Ochlan becomes almost any character anywhere in the world (I single out PJ because he transformed my gentle Virginia drawl into the musical dialects of several Indians and one or two Pakistanis); and light-hearted, soft-spoken Jenny Hoops—a mom, a caring neighbor, a scientist surrounded by all her husband’s tools of serious wooden boat-building in Alberta, Canada—becomes a master narrator of the planetary world of Johannes Kepler. (It is safe to say that were it not for Jenny Hoops and her masterful proofing, and the masterful engineer of Bob Evoniuk, my newest audiobook, “The 480,” would not have the wings I hoped it would have).

We all work at something that promises no great profit (yes, the great narrators—and I don’t mean the major screen, stage, and television actors who also narrate, just the core cadre of experienced professionals who have established themselves in the trade—do quite well, but even for them, the work of working never ends). But it is something which also holds out the promise of steady work and a fair income commensurate with, and demanding of, our talent, commitment, life-long learning, ability to accept failure and/or frustration, the desire to strive for improvement, and the willingness to put ourselves out there (to bang our own drums, as my voice coach Sean Pratt puts it) without being obnoxious or “creepy” as publisher Suzanne Elise Freeman, on a professional panel put it recently.

How popular is this audiobook market? According to a 2018 report in IBISWorld data,

“Over the five years to 2018, the Audiobook Publishing industry has exhibited strong growth as consumer demand for audiobooks has increased. In particular, the simultaneous rise of the digital audiobook format and increased smartphone usage have made audiobooks more accessible to a wider audience than ever before. During the five-year period, digital audiobooks have continued to eclipse other audiobook formats, as they facilitate greater economies of scale and higher margins. Furthermore, shifting media consumption habits among consumers have largely been in favor of audiobooks. Stoked by the increasing popularity of podcasts and online radio shows, consumers have turned to audiobooks as a convenient form of entertainment and education.”

From Vulture, reporting on the September, 2018 statistics:

“The rise of audiobooks, a small but rapidly growing piece of book publishing, is by now well documented, but rarely is it framed as a tech story. It’s maybe a little counterintuitive to think of what we once called Books on Tape (so cumbersome they had to be abridged to remain affordable) as a format on the disruptive cutting edge. But this decade’s double-digit annual growth — with total sales doubling to $2.5 billion over the past five years…” In that same story, Michelle Cobb, Executive Director, APA, said, “We have a lot of room to grow, and a lot of members are getting into the market. We don’t see any signs of it slowing down.”

And from Statista, three years ago:

"The printed book market has struggled in recent years as a result of consumers increasingly turning to technology to provide entertainment. One medium that bridges the gap between the traditional book market and new forms of technology is the audiobook. Sales revenues have soared in this area, more than doubling between 2010 and 2016. This growing demand for audiobooks can be seen in the fact that the number of audiobook titles published in the United States has grown from approximately 6,200 to over 50,00 in the same time frame."

To the uninitiated, audiobook narration may sound like a profession that requires a major recording studio, or, at least, a major investment in equipment and space. After all, don’t those beautifully-produced Audible.com television ads make it seem as if all us narrators are ensconced in elegant Hollywood or Manhattan studios? Believe me, if I had my druthers, I’d be out in LA in Debra Deyan’s studio, or seated before a mic at Edge Studios, or in any number of great audio production houses from Tantor to Penguin to Audible.

Well, while being able to record in a major studio is certainly a goal of many narrators, the truth underpinning our product is quite a bit more down to earth. The audiobook you last enjoyed, or are now enjoying, may well have been recorded in a clothes closet in some high-rise apartment building in Atlanta, or in a tiny booth created beneath a staircase in a single-family row house in the suburbs of Detroit, or in a spare bedroom draped in moving blankets to keep out the sound of the tractor plowing the field of the farm across the dirt road in Iowa, or in a hand-made basement Dungeon studio of a 47-year-old four-bedroom house in Alexandria, Virginia. Countless narrators live and record under the flight paths of military jets, police and mercy flight helicopters; we work at filtering out road crews repaving our street or dynamiting subway tunnels. We try to seal our recording space from the adorable but noisy, children playing next door, the lawn mowing crews, the roofers repairing out roofs or the flooring crews laying down new hardwood floors just a few feet over our heads.

We pray for “just one hour, please audio-god-of-silence” so we can get at least one good chapter narrated. And don’t get me started on the insidious hums, thrums, and through-the-floor echoes of air conditioners, furnaces, and refrigerator compressors—or that moment when your spouse decides to take a shower and the rush and whoosh of the water races through the pipes next to your recording space. All these distractions are well-documented throughout the narration community. And yet…and yet…narrators find a way to transform the written word into something rich and immersive and transporting. Because that is our passion, and we will not be deterred from the goal.

Most of us are also small businessmen and women; we know we must invest in our profession, and that is rarely easy for the beginners and modestly successful narrators. It is true, thankfully, that the equipment—computers, microphones, and recording and editing programs—is within reach of most start-up narrators; gone are the days when $10,000 was not an unusual amount to spend to get the gear necessary to equip a modest home studio. 

One of the best equipment resources going is Sweetwater Electronics, where almost everything a new and experienced narrator needs can be purchased along with outstanding technical help from the Sweetwater staff. But the costs are still there, and for a home-based narrator who really wants to rise in the business, good/great microphones ain’t cheap; the investment in industry-acceptable recording programs and the attendant hardware (pre-amps, monitors, cables, speakers) can take the place of family vacation funds—those costs alone can easily exceed $2,000-$3,000 (though I’ve marveled at the results of some narrators who’ve managed to create their studios for under a grand). On top of all that, there are often technical questions about using recording software such as Audacity, Audition, Twisted Wave, PreSonus’s Studio One, or the incredible repair tool, Izotope’s RX7, as well as learning to get the most of out of the various pieces of hardware, cables, etc., that make up a home studio’s toolbox. Experts like Don Baarns, who post regularly in narrator and related-audio groups, are also available for one-on-one sessions via Skype (as an example), and a serious narrator must factor in the fees for that high-level help.

Add to those entry-level fees the costs of hiring someone to proof your narration (yes, it’s vital to have an ear that is not yours listen to your work. A proficient proofer will help with proper pronunciation of myriad words and foreign phrase, catch the misplaced word, remind us of a character’s voice we’d used in chapter one and messed up in chapter 20; we all make mistakes we miss, and a great proofer is like an insurance policy against embarrassment and poor sales). We need to hire an editor and/or audio engineer to clean up the assortment of lip noises, stomach rumbles, dog snoring (yes, that’s happened to me and other narrators whose beloved hounds nap at our feet), chair squeaks, plosives (the popping sound after “p” and “b”) and sibilants (the hissing of an “s”) and many other extraneous noises that inevitably creep into to our recording sessions.

And we need to keep on learning, availing ourselves of experienced coaches—experts in voice, dialect, genre, gender tones and textures, etc. (see note at bottom for a list of the experts we call on every day, and who were there at APAC to lead discussions and give advice).—and conferences like APAC in order to stay abreast of industry, business, and social media trends. [Thank goodness for our industry magazine, AudioFile, founded and edited by Robin Whitten who opens the doors to audiobook reviews, narrator interviews, and industry news crucial to our work.] 

And all those necessaries come with costs—a voice coach can cost $200 or more per hour, a dialect coach the same. Proofers’ and editors’ fees range from $40-$100 per finished hour of recording, and if you do the math, that means a 10-hour book (a book that takes 10 hours to listen to) may rack up anywhere from $800 to $2,000 in proofing and editing alone. Going to 2-3 days of APAC in New York for someone who lives in Los Angeles can be a thousand-dollar commitment (or more) when airfare, hotel, and conference fees are all totted up.

Taken all together, the average in-home-studio narrator who is serious about his or her work, has to know right from the start that recouping the costs of business through royalties from their first audiobooks will not happen overnight or even over the first year or two of their efforts. 

Many audiobook narrators begin their voice acting journeys by recording books that are in the public domain (PD)…that is, books published before 1923. Public domain books are free of copyright constraints and can be narrated without having to pay for the rights, which is a definite upside. The downside, and it’s not all that down, really, is that PD books don’t market themselves, and they do require the same tender loving care—and expense--in the studio as any other audiobook. 

When I recorded Owen Wister’s sweeping 19th century western, The Virginian, a fun 15-hour book filled with great characters and fast-paced scenes, I associated myself with Steven Jay Cohen’s Spoken Realms (then Listen-2-a-Book), which placed The Virginian on Audible in a royalty arrangement. It takes quite a few sales to achieve a cost-matching return on a long book like The Virginian, but over the years, I’ve been able to recoup those costs. The same was true for many other books I’ve narrated in collaboration with Spoken Realms.

Even when we find ourselves with books that pay by the per-finished-hour (PFH) (that same 10-hour book mentioned above can bring in somewhere around $2,000 and more when it’s assigned and produced by a big-name publishing house, the publisher foots the production costs), the average narrator will spend roughly six hours narrating for every finished hour of completed audiobook—and that 6:1 ratio can soar to 10:1 with complex books that need research, dialect training, etc.

My point—and I sometimes have one—is that the audiobook listener (and there are more and more of them every year, see stats above) who purchase one of our 10-hour (or more) productions for $15, $20, $30, $40 or more is getting a listening experience created over hours and hours of isolated labor, cooperative artistry, and a complex distribution network that makes possible the simple act of downloading an audiobook, or slipping a CD into an player.

My experience at APAC was uplifting, educational, exciting, happy, and rewarding. I did not know what to expect, and all my years of experience as a media and government professional public relations exec, attending hundreds of professional conferences over the past 50 or so years, did not prepare me for the collegiality, warmth, and genuine sense of belonging in the right place at the right time.

With thanks to Tanya Eby, here are some of the very supportive and accessible coaches, narrators, producers, and APA leaders who made the APAC experience so worthwhile. Thank you all.

Siiri Scott, Piper Goodeve-Vaughan, RC Bray, Ramon de Ocampo, Andrew Eiden, Joel Leslie Froomkin, Jeffrey Kafer, Katherine Littrell, Matthew Lloyd Davies, Amy McFadden, Natalie Naudus Bradner, Sean Allen Pratt, Ann Richardson, Paul Alan Ruben, Teri Schnaubelt, Adam Verner, Neil Hellegers, Melissa Moran, Andi Arndt, Laura Jennings, Troy Otte, Karen Commins, Suzanne Elise Freeman, Cary Hite, Nick Martorelli, Anne McCarty, Andrea Emmes Cenna, PJ Ochlan, Pamela Mitchell Almand, Michele Cobb