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.