A Little Summer Project
When I wrote Look Both Ways, my intent was to share my life with as many people as wanted to know about it. My intent, then, was also to have Look Both Ways available in as many accessible formats as possible – in fact, my desire to share my life with people couldn’t ever be actualized without also ensuring that it was available to them in a variety of ways. I am a lover of audiobooks, and have been for as long as I have lived with paralysis. I can remember, when I was in junior high school, high school, and college, listening to assigned novels in my English classes: The Lord of the Flies, The Great Gatsby, Their Eyes Were Watching God, East of Eden, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, The Road to Wigan Pier as “recorded books” from the Library of Congress, and in the early 1990s, this was the only way I could immerse myself in works that have since become frames from which I view the world.
For people with disabilities, audiobooks open doors to worlds – an even greater number of worlds than simply our own – that are accessible to most but not to all. It’s for this reason that, when learning that actually recording an audiobook is far less straightforward than one might expect, I felt not only frustrated but a bit betrayed. But, it takes a lot more than that to waylay me – try harder next time, audiobooks!
So, I devised a new plan. For the next 11 weeks, I’ll be posting videos of myself reading individual chapters – sometimes broken into halves or thirds, depending on length – of Look Both Ways. I’ve never done voiceover work before – and, admittedly, a voiceover demo from me would never be the first one grabbed by any marketing team – but it’s my voice and, for a book as personal as Look Both Ways is, no other voice would be appropriate. So, I’ll put on my microphone, flip on the camera, and put as much heart into my narration as I put into my dictation. It will be imperfect. It will be somewhat amateur. It will have glitches that I can’t now anticipate. But, it will be true, honest, vulnerable, and personal. In other words, it will be the only way I know how to share Look Both Ways with everyone.
Stay tuned!