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 Read More