ALA Day 4: One Last Listen

With Monday being a travel-home day for many attendees, the early morning panels offered a final chance for those leaving early to hear from #alaac25 presenters one last time. One such panel, “Audiobook Spotlight: Bringing Anthologies to Audio with Terry J. Benton Walker” offered a look into the translation of physical books to the audiobook format. Walker, the author and editor of YA horror anthology The White Guy Dies First, spoke with his producer Elishia Merricks on the many layers going into that work.

They discussed how for the collected stories, they brought in different readers to perform each one with a specialized voice. They were not just looking for pretty voices, they said, but ones that really connect with the text and its atmosphere. Having authentic voices was also an important consideration, particularly for an anthology based on giving agency to BIPOC main characters in a genre known for killing them off early on.

Walker and Merricks also discussed the creative solutions required when what’s on the page is not so easily translated to the ear. One example was a story with a mysterious inner voice, separated visually by italics, that only the main character can hear. They chose to translate this by having the performer bring down their voice while also adding a reverb for an ethereal effect. Another story had the name of a character visually redacted, and this was changed to the audio becoming static whenever the name would be spoken. A third instance involved writing that was written in coded language, and this was adapted into backwards audio instead. 

One more consideration was music. Merricks explained that while she usually puts music only at the beginning and end of an audiobook, she wanted to start each story with its own music for their diversity of atmospheres. Walker, in putting together the anthology, gave authors different subgenres to write in, so the collection ended up including the categories like slasher, haunted house, found media, and more. Walker also said that while nervous at first, he enjoyed performing the audio of his own author’s note and hopes to voice the epigraph audio for his next project.

William Stieglitz (he/him/his) is a children’s book author with Paw Prints Publishing who also writes local journalism. This will be his first year attending ALA Annual, where he will be an EMIERT AuthorFest panelist. His upcoming early-readers, the Rachel and Abby books, center on two Jewish-American sisters as they solve the mysteries of the adult world, and take inspiration from how his own family, while celebrating Judaism in many different ways, would find the most meaning in the time they spent together. He is looking forward to meeting with and hearing the stories of others at the conference, and especially values how librarians work both to educate and to create an environment that really is for everyone.

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The post ALA Day 4: One Last Listen appeared first on ALSC Blog.

 With Monday being a travel-home day for many attendees, the early morning panels offered a final chance for those leaving early to hear from #alaac25 presenters one last time. One such panel, “Audiobook Spotlight: Bringing Anthologies to Audio with Terry J. Benton Walker” offered a look into the translation of physical books to the audiobook format. Walker, the author and editor of YA horror anthology The White Guy Dies First, spoke with his producer Elishia Merricks on the many layers going into that work. They discussed how for the collected stories, they brought in different readers to perform each one with a specialized voice. They were not just looking for pretty voices, they said, but ones that really connect with the text and its atmosphere. Having authentic voices was also an important consideration, particularly for an anthology based on giving agency to BIPOC main characters in a genre known for killing…
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