From: Connie Rockman <connie.rock>
Date: Mon, 13 Apr 2009 11:35:15 -0400

I was on that first Odyssey committee with Teri and Sylvia and I can echo Teri's thoughts about fitting in time for listening. My commute is from my bedroom down the hall to my home office, but I always have a book loaded in the car stereo because even a quick trip to the grocery store allows for half a chapter to be devoured. I do a lot of my listening on morning walks or while gardening, exercising, or doing housework, and it does become a habit to always have the walkman, discman, or ipod handy.

For those of you who like a little historical background on narration . . . I recently interviewed Mort Schindel (the founder of Weston Woods and a pioneer in audio-visual adaptations of children's books) for an article for the Connecticut Storytelling Center's newsletter. I was most interested, for this article, in the storytelling aspects of those early Weston Woods films and read-alongs that Mort started to create in the early 1950s, and while I knew he had consulted librarians, especially the New York Public Library's central children's room staff, about choices of books for those early adaptations, I didn't know (before writing this article) how much Augusta Baker had influenced his choice of narrators for the films.

Mort was auditioning actors in those early days by inviting them to his studio, placing a variety of picture books on a coffee table, and asking them to pick the ones they would like to read onto a tape. Then he would take the tapes to NYPL for the librarians to hear and approve. He soon realized that these librarian storytellers, and Augusta Baker in particular, were not impressed with the trained actors' voices unless they could internalize the story and express it with true feeling, rather than reading as if they were doing a voice- over. Finally he auditioned a character actor who also read aloud to his own children at home, creating voices for the characters and loving the stories. When he took that tape to Mrs. Baker, she told him, "Now, Morton, you can go back and make your films." And then he understood the difference between storytelling and simply reading aloud.

The full story of those early days of children's AV will be available later this year in John Cech's book, "Imagination and Innovation: The Story of Weston Woods" (Scholastic, Sept. 2009) . . . and it's interesting to note that Weston Woods' productions, now in the capable hands of producers Paul Gagne and Melissa Reilly, has had Odyssey honor titles in both years of the award - the read-along packagles of
"Dooby Dooby Moo" in 2008 and "I'm Dirty" in 2009.

Finding the right narrator is key because that's what we are looking for in the best audio editions - that storytelling commitment. It's a sense that the narrator not only pronounces all the words right, but captures nuances of character and expresses the tone of the story through every phrase - whether it's a picture book like "I'm Dirty," or Stephan Briggs masterful narration of "Nation," or Sherman Alexie's pitch-perfect interpretation of his own work in "Absolutely True Diary . . ."

Connie Rockman
Received on Mon 13 Apr 2009 10:35:15 AM CDT