JoshSundquist

Pulitzer Prize winning writer Susan Sheehan sat in the studio for several days while I recorded the audio version of Just Don’t Fall. This is an article she wrote about the experience. (You can listen to a sample of my audiobook on Audible.)

“In the Moment”

Recorded books have become the modern equivalent of the antique art of storytelling round the fire.  On a Monday in November, Josh Sundquist, a handsome, Obama-slim, Roman-nosed young man with sky blue eyes and a punk haircut, starts to read in a soundproof cubicle at Recorded Books, Inc., the world’s largest independent producer of unabridged audio books.  The book he will read aloud for between four to six hours a day through Thursday is  “Just Don’t Fall,” his account of being told at nine he has cancer, losing his left leg at the hip socket at ten, and skiing in the Turin Paralympics at twenty-one — four years ago.  Most of the six hundred books put out annually by Recorded Books are narrated by professional stage actors in its seven studios on the tenth floor of an office building at 12^th and Broadway above the Strand, the city’s iconic used book store, but occasionally an author who passes an audition, as Sundquist has, is permitted to read his own memoir.   He begins:

“The physical therapist glues two stickers to my back, to the lower part of my back right above my underwear.  There are wires coming out of these stickers, wires that will give me an electric shock – not the kind that electrocutes and kills people, no, don’t worry, she says, this is a tiny shock I will barely feel.”

Greg Steinbruner, a professional actor and playwright, who now works as a producer at Recorded Books, is seated in a separate room with a window facing Josh’s windowed cubicle.  In front of him are a Furman console, a computer keyboard and screen, and a microphone.  Every time Sundquist makes a mistake – which is frequent, about two or three times a page for the first couple of hours — Steinbruner interrupts him by pushing the computer’s space bar, which serves as a stop button, unless Josh has already stopped himself by saying  “Sorry,” or “Nope,” or  “Let’s do that one again.”  Greg then has Josh read the last correct words before the glitch, Greg repeats them, Josh repeats them and continues reading, a process known in the audio world as cueing.

Josh: “the kind that tastes terrible”

Greg: “the kind that tastes terrible.”

Josh: “the kind that tastes terrible.  We always ask her to make pizza with white crust and pepperonis because we don’t mind about eating lots of fat and cholesterol and having heart attacks when we go up.”

Josh: “when we grow up.”

Greg: “when we grow up.”

Josh: “when we grow up, but she still makes her whole wheat crust and spinach-on-top pizza every week.”

Josh: “But soon I won’t have hair because the chemotherapy will make it all fall out…So I ask Mom to shave my hair…Eighteen homeschool boys come over and get the Chemo Clut.”

Josh: “come over and get the Chemo Cut.”

Greg: “come over and get the Chemo Cut.”

Steinbruner has a foot pedal and when he presses it, Sundquist can hear him. The producer sometimes stops the author-reader because a word is “slushy” or because “that was a bad pause,” or to suggest, “Instead of going softer on the italics, go louder,” or to offer advice: “Just take your time when you’re reading alliterative words.  If something is hard to say the intention is not for it to be read quickly.  There’s a one-to-one correlation between reading faster and making mistakes.  The art of audio books is to slow down and get yourself in the moment.”

To cut down on pauses for page turning, two pages of the manuscript of “Just Don’t Fall” are on a cloth-covered table in front of Josh.  (Cloth muffles sound.)   When Josh is reading his voice makes EKG-like squiggles on Greg’s screen.  When Greg interrupts Josh, the squiggles stop.  Solid pink appears on Greg’s screen when the recording resumes, and the squiggles start anew.

Sundquist reads with a mixture of discipline and humor (“I read ‘durses and noctors’, what?”). During an occasional fifteen-minute break he speeds down corridors on titanium forearm crutches.   He no longer wears a prosthesis. “If I wear it I limp and when people see me, they don’t know why so that’s awkward for them socially,” he says.

The need to concentrate on the performance makes the daily four to six hours fly while seeming to stand still.  The work is intense for both Greg and Josh, but again and again they both wind up in the moment.  The hardcover edition of the book, blurbed by Elizabeth Strout and John le Carre (“Inspiring.  Courageous.  Sometimes heartbreaking”), will be published in January.   Public libraries, the prime customer of Recorded Books, will circulate the unabridged audio version.  Others can download it from the Internet or purchase it directly by mail from Recorded Books.   Library purchases and downloading are two financially bright spots in today’s economically challenged book publishing industry.

On Thursday at 3:30 p.m. after Sundquist has finished reading his 316-page book, Josh and Greg make a video of Josh reading its brief preface for his website.  “The physical therapist glues two stickers to my back, to the lower part of my back, right above my underwear…”