Where Writers Write: Clifford Garstang

Welcome to another installment of TNBBC's Where Writers Write!

Where Writers Write is a series in which authors showcase their writing spaces using short form essay, photos, and/or video. As a lover of books and all of the hard work that goes into creating them, I thought it would be fun to see where the authors roll up their sleeves and make the magic happen. 

This is Clifford Garstang. 


Clifford is the author of the new short fiction collection, House of the Ancients and Other Stories, as well as two previous collections, In an Uncharted Country and What the Zhang Boys Know, and a novel, The Shaman of Turtle Valley. He’s also known for his annual literary magazine rankings, which can be found on his website: cliffordgarstang.com

Where Clifford Garstang Writes

My home office is where it has been since I moved into this house in 2001—a second-floor loft with built-in bookcases, closets for storage, and a bathroom. There’s even a window overlooking my yard. In theory, it’s ideal, even if I do have to make the occasional trip down to the kitchen for snacks or a coffee refill. Over the years, though, it grew impossibly cluttered. There is no more bookshelf space anywhere in the house, so new acquisitions formed stacks in my office, teetering piles of regret mixed with possibility. I also had boxes and boxes of literary journals that needed to go somewhere, but I couldn’t bring myself to send them to recycling. And I had a hard time throwing away documents or drafts of stories or anything else I’d produced here, so file drawer space was also hard to come by.

The office had become such a mess that I began writing in coffee shops. I’d grab my laptop and head off to one of the many such spaces in my community and find that I got a decent amount of work done and also managed to interact with people, too. Factoring in travel and socializing, it might not have been the most efficient use of my time, but I managed.

When the coffee shops closed in response to the pandemic a couple of months ago, I was forced to stay home to work. The first thing I had to do if I had a prayer of getting anything done was clean the office, or at least make it livable. I threw away a lot of paper. I removed the clutter from my desk. I organized the stacks of books so they didn’t look quite so intimidating. And for the first time in a long time I haven’t been tempted to leave, even if I had somewhere to go.

I’m now loving this space. I’ve written a lot here, over the years—my MFA thesis (an unpublished novel), three story collections, two novels (one published, one forthcoming), and a draft of another book I hope to finish this year. Not to mention the three anthologies I edited, the magazine I started and worked on for years, and countless book reviews, essays, and blog posts I’ve written.

In a previous life—I practiced international law for two decades, bouncing between Asia and the United States—I had offices that were necessary, but not particularly inspiring (although I do kind of miss my view of the Singapore harbor). Now, if I can keep the clutter at bay, I think I’ll be able to keep writing for years to come.

Page 69: Walking with the Ineffable

Disclaimer: The Page 69 Test is not mine. It has been around since 2007, asking authors to compare page 69 against the meat of the actual story it is a part of. I loved the whole idea of it and so I'm stealing it specifically to showcase small press titles - novels, novellas, short story collections, the works! So until the founder of The Page 69 Test calls a cease and desist, let's do this thing....

In this installment of Page 69, 

We put Stephani Nur Colby's Walking with the Ineffable to the test!

_{Set up Page 69 for us. What are we about to read?} 

_{P. 69 details a painful childhood incident mainly in the arena of nature and culture, where I became sadly made aware of some of the violence we people were heedlessly wreaking on our ecology.}

_{What is the book about?}

_{Walking with the Ineffable is a memoir with a core relating to spiritual experiences, both as an adult and as a child, and also to relationship with our natural world. It’s about the changing weather of belief -- what, when, and why we believe at various passages in our lives, and the startling possibilities which can open up for us if we venture “into the unknown region” of both traditional and unconventional mystical paths that carry us toward deeper aspects of ourselves and of the Divine.}

_{Does this page give readers an accurate sense of what the collection is about? Does it align itself with the collection’s theme?}

_{It aligns with part of the theme which has to do with growing awareness of the natural world but does not touch on the search for relationship with God and its consequences, a more pervasive aspect of the book. The shocks of personal growth that came through contact with powerful spiritual paths and phenomena comprise much of the memoir and are thus not well-represented by the incident described on p. 69.}

_{Commentary on p.69:}

_{To me at the time this seemed just further evidence of the heartbreak and uncertainty of life. But rescue was close at hand. Uncle “D,” a close family friend, visited, took a look at the bough, and said, “Don’t worry; we can fix this.” Having me hold the branch in its normal position, he wound layer after layer of heavy, sticky black tape around the bark. It held up when I let go. “Now just don’t bump it! And watch!”    he said.}

_{Over months and a couple of years I watched the dogwood bark expand until it ultimately covered all the tape, and no sign of injury remained. To me, it was like a miracle and gave me new hope in life’s possibilities.} 

_{Furthermore, Uncle D himself was a broken branch   --      a     blameless intellectual, he had been framed by an unscrupulous boss who purloined a union’s funds.  My innocent Uncle D went to prison as a result and left it a shattered man.  Yet he retained his knowledge and love of beauty, raising two generations of my family in love and appreciation of all the arts. The broken bough yet brought forth beauty and joy, and the teaching that one should never despair too soon.}

_{This is a good sampling in the sense that much of my book deals with unexpected resiliency in hard or challenging situations and the ubiquity of hope and grace.}       

                                                                                                   

_{~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~}

_{PAGE 69}

_{WALKING WITH THE INEFFABLE}

 _{which I peered, as if through an elegantly carved screen, at the swatches of blue sky peering back at me through their screen of lordly oak leaves high overhead.}

_{One day, when I went out to play, I saw a small airplane flying low above the neighborhood, a strange dark spray raining down from it. It gave me a bad feeling somehow. I went in to tell my mother. She came out, looked up, and hustled me into the house. She forbade me to go out again that day, looking troubled, but explained nothing. The next morning, when I went out to play, I noticed odd little brown lumps scattered all over the ground and even way up the hill beneath the tall trees. When I went to examine one lump, I was shocked to see that it was a dead sparrow. And, as I wandered from lump to lump, I discovered that they were all dead sparrows, scores of them. I felt as if I were walking in a waking nightmare in an ornithological Armageddon. In shock, I stumbled over to my comforting Wishing Rock. Bright on its gray surface, the pink-blossomed dogwood branch framing them, lay three pure yellow dead goldfinches. Staggering as if with a spear in my heart, I scrambled back into the house and told my mother. She told me that all this slaughter was due to the DDT that the plane had sprayed to kill insects. Apparently, this poison had also killed almost everything else. She kept me in the house again that day. Later on my father went out with his heavy work gloves to fill a big bag with small dead birds.}

_{Aghast that grown-ups could perpetrate such a rain of death, it was quite awhile before I could bring myself to return to my dear Wishing Rock and comforting dogwood tree; the mind-photo of three rigid, cold little goldfinch bodies arrayed funereally on the sparkling mica always leapt up, causing a catch in my throat and the need to turn away. A short time after I finally did resume my companionship with the rock and tree, a particularly violent thunderstorm struck. To my distress, the next day I found the main bough of the dogwood, as thick as a man’s wrist, broken off, with only some thin threads of bark still maintaining their connection with the mother tree.}                                                                                         

                                                                                       

 _{~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~}

_{Stephani Nur Colby is a writer and editor who lives in Gloucester, MA, “the last stop before Portugal.” Walking with the Ineffable: A Spiritual Memoir (with Cats) traces her journeys through spiritual seeking in Greek Orthodox Christianity, Sufism, herbalism and energy-healing, Nature (especially with owls, hawks, and falcons), the de-anaesthetizing company of lively cats, and pilgrimages and adventures in Greece, the Holy Land, England, Bulgaria, Turkey, and Mexico, all spurred by a persistent search for the Really Real.  Walking with the Ineffable is to be issued by Green Writers Press in August 2020.}                      

Page 69: Inconvenient Daughter

Disclaimer: The Page 69 Test is not mine. It has been around since 2007, asking authors to compare page 69 against the meat of the actual story it is a part of. I loved the whole idea of it and so I'm stealing it specifically to showcase small press titles - novels, novellas, short story collections, the works! So until the founder of The Page 69 Test calls a cease and desist, let's do this thing....

In this installment of Page 69, 

We put Lauren J Sharkey's Inconvenient Daughter to the test.

Set up page 69 for us. What are we about to read?

Rowan and Valentina are students at Our Lady of Mercy Academy, an all-girls Catholic high school on Long Island, NY. At this point, their excitement for the Sadie Hawkins Dance is met with worry over the school’s new dress code after word of the cost and beauty of another student’s dress starts to make its way through the halls. In particular, Rowan is not only worried about asking her mother to buy her another dress, but also concerned that if she can’t get a dress which meets the guidelines that she won’t be able to go with her crush.

  

What is your book about?

At its core, Inconvenient Daughter is about the relationships between mothers and daughters. Rowan is a transracial adoptee from Korea being raised by two Irish Catholic parents on Long Island. Not seeing herself reflected in the faces of the people she loves most, and the lack of answers surrounding Rowan’s relinquishment, lead her to question her self-worth. Rowan – like so many of us – is searching for love, her identity, and where she belongs.

Do you think this page gives our readers an accurate sense of what the book is about? Does it align itself with the book’s overall theme?

I think this page definitely gives the reader an accurate sense of the tension between Rowan and her mother, which is one of the central themes of the book. When it comes to Rowan and her mother, there’s a lot they don’t say to each other, and therefore, a lot that’s assumed. Rowan’s fear of talking to her mother about everything – from buying a dress to questions about her biological mother – leads the their inability to be close.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

PAGE 69

INCONVENIENT DAUGHTER

Despite being an exemplary college preparatory school on the North Shore of Long Island, the Academy had sent a letter home after the hallways were taken over by speculations regarding Kristen Yacendia’s custom gown two weeks before the Sadie Hawkins Dance. Apparently, Badgley Mischka was a friend. Either way, Mercy let it be known it would not permit any “attire that contributes to social and economic division among its young women.”

            “Did you see this crap?” Valentina huffed, slamming her binder onto my lunch tray.

            “Dude – my fries! Watch it!”

            “This place sucks – it’s like we can’t do anything.”

            “What’s your deal?”

            She laughed at my ignorance, and passed me an envelope. As I removed and unfolded its contents, my eyes grew wider, my temperature hotter.

            “Are they serious?” I mumbled, my mouth full of fries.

            “I know!” she said, snatching the notice from me. “Check this out: Excessive cleavage is not allowed. Looks like you don’t have to worry about that one,” Valentina laughed, giving my chest a quick pat.

            “Shut up, lesbo,” I laughed, swatting her hand away. “No backless, no midriffs, blah, blah, blah…What?! Dresses may not be above the knee and are not to exceed tea-length. Absolutely no gowns are permitted. What the hell is tea-length?”

            “I don’t know, dude.”

            “Oh my god,” I sighed, lowering my head to the table. “My mom’s going to kill me – she already got me a dress.”

            “The red one?”

            “Yeah!” 

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

LAUREN J. SHARKEY is a writer, teacher, and transracial adoptee. After her birth in South Korea, she was adopted by Irish Catholic parents and raised on Long Island. Sharkey holds an MFA in Creative Writing & Literature, and her cre­ative nonfiction has appeared in the Asian American Feminist Collective’s digi­tal storytelling project, First Times, as well as several anthologies including I Am Strength! and Women under Scrutiny. Inconvenient Daughter is her debut novel, and loosely based on her experience as a Korean adoptee. You can follow her at ljsharks.com.

A Sinister Quartet's Guide to Books & Booze

Time to grab a book and get tipsy!

Books & Booze challenges participating authors to make up their own drinks, name and all, or create a drink list for their characters and/or readers using drinks that already exist. 

Today we welcome the multiple authors behind the collobrative A Sinister Quartet  which gathers original long-form wonders and horrors composed in unusual keys, with a short novel by World Fantasy Award winner C. S. E. Cooney and a new novella from two-time World Fantasy Award finalist Mike Allen joined by debut novellas from rising talents Amanda J. McGee and Jessica P. Wick. All four offer immersions into strange, beautiful and frightening milieus.

Behind the walls of an invulnerable city ruled by angels, old movies provide balm for the soul and a plan to escape risks grisly retribution. A princess discovers a passage to a nightmarish world of deception and blood-sealed enchantment. A woman who has lost everything meets a man of great wealth and ominous secrets. In a town haunted by tragedy, malevolent supernatural entities converge, and the conflict that ensues unleashes chaos.

C. S. E. Cooney (author of the short novel “The Twice-Drowned Saint”)

Alizar’s Benison Wine

In Fabulous Gelethel, which is always under angelic quarantine, the only thing citizens may drink is what is provided by the angels themselves. In this case, the Seventh Angel—Alizar the Eleven-Eyed—has provided, in his great munificence, a shrub called “Benison Wine.”

INGREDIENTS: 1 shot glass of ineffable beauty, bought on the cheap from your favorite thrift store; 1 “dollop” of Ginger Beer (brand: Reed’s “Strongest”); 1 “dash” of Jalapeño/Tequila/Lime Hot Sauce (brand: Queen Majesty, of course); 2 “glugs” of Prickly Pear Sour (brand: Iconic Cocktail Co.); and just a “soupçon” of D’Anjou Pear White Balsamic Vinegar (brand: We Olive). For garnish: a tiny, tasty red pepper! This drink is refreshing, complex, sweet, sour, and bold. Above all, it’s good for the gut!

Remember: Alizar the Eleven-Eyed provides for his people. Unlike some angels we could mention.

Jessica P. Wick (author of the novella “An Unkindness”)

Ravenna’s Notes on Heart in a Green Glass Cup
(cocktail created by Elissa Sweet)

I don’t know who thought it would be funny ha ha to name this cocktail. Certainly Aliver thinks it funny, and naturally I suspect him. I think it more funny aaaagh you caught me on my funny bone and now my whole body is unhappy. I will uncover the culprit. But even I must admit it is a very good drink for sipping broodingly at a window, preferably while light catches the ruddy ardor of the drink’s fabulous color, and then whoever you’re brooding at looks up and spies you with your heart in a green glass cup, and you give them a slight nod which means Yes, mine enemy, I do look fabulous and I will soon be defeating you in that argument we keep having and I hope you are not enjoying your impending doom as much as I am because this drink is very delicious and as soon as I have had three more I will be right down. I confess, for education purposes, I have been trying a few glasses of Heart—just to see if anybody is experimenting with variations of course. It tastes green and refreshing and I think it will give you courage if you are unable to sally forth and do deeds of derring.

Here is the recipe, complete with notes, as I have wrangled it from the notes of a very wary bartender:

2 oz gin

2 oz red berry juice (we used pomegranate cherry)

Mint leaves

3 oz seltzer

Muddle 6-8 mint leaves in the bottom of a cocktail shaker. Add ice, juice and gin to the shaker and shake until cold. Strain into a green glass and top with seltzer. Garnish with a sprig of mint, preferably fresh from the garden. Tastes woodsy and fruity and fresh, like a springtime walk in the pines when you happen across fresh berries. Looks like blood.

Amanda J. McGee (author of the novella “Viridian”)

Snowfall at Evergreen (Rosemary Gin Fizz):

1.5 oz of rosemary simple syrup, made with as much rosemary as you can stand (I used about 12 inches of rosemary—remove from the stem and finely dice before adding to your sugar water and cooking down)

2 oz your favorite gin (try Smuggler’s Notch, which Lori drove by on her first drive to Caspian Lake!)

4 ice cubes

1 egg white

Club soda

Rosemary is for memory and happens to be an evergreen. Combine this with a Vermont gin’s piney scent and you have the perfect odor to evoke chilling walks in the forest amidst the fresh, sound-muffling snow.

To mix, use a cocktail shaker (a regular-sized Mason jar will also work wonders here). Add the gin, simple syrup, ice cubes, and egg white. Shake until most of the ice has melted and the mixture is frothy. Pour into your favorite glass (or keep it in your jar). Add about 2-4 ounces of club soda (to taste, it’s really just a filler). Sip. I think it tastes like rosemary marshmallows. If you like your drinks less sweet, cut back on the rosemary simple syrup. You could likely add a touch of lemon or lime here to brighten (as in a traditional gin fizz), but I haven't tried that out yet!

Mike Allen (author of the novella “The Comforter”)

Southern Ember

Peaches are for devouring. So are souls. Flesh, on the other hand, is malleable as clay and vulnerable as paper, easily opened at seams you never knew were there, ready to be removed and repurposed.

For this recipe, we’ll focus on peaches. It’s so simple anyone could make it, including the culinarily untalented author, who came up with it while sheltering at home as he looked for a way to enliven his pre-existing liqueur possibilities.

In a transparent glass supplied with ice cubes, fill the bottom half to two thirds full with peach schnapps (the brand in the photo is de Kuyper Peachtree). Then, ideally pouring gently on the ice, carefully fill the glass the rest of the way with Old Camp Peach Pecan Whiskey. (We are uncertain if any other brand of this particular concoction exists.) This produces the smoky upper layer, and smoke of course signifies fire, which is a thing that terrifies even devourers of souls—but confronting our fears makes us hardier, after all.

If you don’t have a taste for the extremes of Southern sweet tea, you might be daunted by this drink. You might even call it an abomination that shouldn’t exist, just like the monsters in this story.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ 

World Fantasy Award-winning writer C. S. E. Cooney is the author of Desdemona and the Deep, and Bone Swans: Stories. She has narrated over a hundred audiobooks—including her own—and has produced three albums as the singer/songwriter Brimstone Rhine. Her short stories and poems can be found in numerous anthologies and magazines. Learn more online at csecooney.com.

Jessica P. Wick is a writer and freelance editor living in Rhode Island. She enjoys rambling through graveyards and writing by candlelight. She will take her shoes off to walk through some truly freezing surf. You can follow her at instagram: foamlyre, twitter: lunelyre, or jessicapwick.com.

Amanda J. McGee is a mapmaker by day and a writer by night. She is the author of the epic fantasy series The Creation Saga, one half of the podcast Pop Fizz!, and blogs weekly on books, movies, anime, and writing advice. You can find out more on her website at amandajmcgee.com.

Nebula, Shirley Jackson and two-time World Fantasy award finalist Mike Allen wears many hats. An author, editor and publisher, his books include the novel The Black Fire Concerto, the short story collection Unseaming and the Clockwork Phoenix anthology series. You can follow Mike’s exploits as a writer at descentintolight.com, as an editor at mythicdelirium.com, and all at once on Twitter at @mythicdelirium.

Where Writers Write: Juditha Dowd

Welcome to another installment of TNBBC's Where Writers Write!

Where Writers Write is a series in which authors showcase their writing spaces using short form essay, photos, and/or video. As a lover of books and all of the hard work that goes into creating them, I thought it would be fun to see where the authors roll up their sleeves and make the magic happen. 

This is Juditha Dowd. 

In addition to Audubon's Sparrow: A Biograpy-in-Poems, Juditha Dowd is the author of a full-length poetry collection, Mango in Winter (Grayson Books, 2013), as well as short fiction, lyric essays, and three poetry chapbooks—The Weathermancer (Finishing Line, 2006), What Remains (Finishing Line, 2009), and Back Where We Belong (Casa de Cinco Hermanas, 2012). Her work appears in many journals and anthologies, including Poet Lore, Poetry Daily, The Florida Review, Spillway, Rock & Sling, Kestrel, and About Place. With the ensemble Cool Women she regularly performs poetry in the New York-Philadelphia metro area and occasionally on the west coast. Juditha currently lives in Easton, Pennsylvania with her husband and two cats, not far from where Lucy Bakewell began her long-ago adventure with John James Audubon. Visit her website at www.judithadowd.org.  

Where Juditha Dowd Writers

In a 1978 interview one of my favorite writers, Tillie Olsen (then sixty-five years old), talked about her final book, Silences, a meditation on the essential relationship between circumstance and creativity. By circumstance Olsen meant money, class, responsibilities, and time, but also space—creativity needs a place to flourish without interruption. In my twenties and thirties I didn’t have one. Like many women of my generation, I married young—in my case to a writer who was also a painter. The New York City railroad flat where we lived from 1964 through the late 1970s with our two young girls was barely big enough for our everyday needs. And though we were cash-strapped, I accepted my husband’s decision to rent himself a studio in another building, where he spent much of his free time. Meanwhile, I’d occasionally close the apartment’s bathroom door and sit on the edge of the tub with a notebook—desperately trying to capture a poem that was already escaping. Or I’d write into the night at our kitchen table, too tired by then to find the muse. It still surprises me that I once considered this disparity normal.

Fast forward several decades to the present, and the late-Victorian brick house where my second husband and I live in Easton, Pennsylvania. Here I work in a sunny alcove adjacent to my bedroom. It has everything I need and more: a door, a writing table, music, and books. I’m deeply grateful for it. Though I’ve had the good fortune to spend productive time at writers retreats, this room means the world to me. New surroundings can spark a wave of creativity, as can being in community with other artists. But I’ve found for me it’s familiar space, reliably mine, where the most work gets done.

By design, this little room doesn’t contain a guest bed or have any additional function, unlike the writing spaces I’ve carved out previously. The only visitors here are our two Maine Coon cats, who often sleep in a basket beside my writing table.

It’s a luxury to have a big bookcase so close at hand. There I keep whatever books I might be currently using for research, as well as the books I want to read soon and books I return to frequently for inspiration, information, and pleasure.

At one end of my writing room is a window with a view of our quiet street—something to stare at when my eyes need a break. I can tell the weather at a glance. Occasionally people walk by—our neighbor with his dog or children returning from school. My thoughts are free to ramble. In winter I share this window with a Meyer lemon tree that has wonderfully fragrant blossoms.

My mother was a woman of Olsen’s generation, whose life spanned almost the same years. Apparently she drew in her youth, but I only saw one picture—an illustration in her high school yearbook—a dark pine tree. When she took up painting in middle age, I had already left home and my brothers were teenagers. Talented, she studied with a local teacher for some time and finished a dozen or so paintings. But despite our praise, my mother didn’t hang those paintings in our house, or if she did it was only for a short while. I’m a perfectionist she’d say, as though that explained everything. She eventually put away her paints but her art remained a tender subject, something she was uncomfortable discussing. After my father died and she seemed at loose ends, I suggested she might want to take up painting again, but she firmly said no. That refusal and what may have been hiding behind it still makes me sad, and I wonder if I could have done more to encourage her. These days I keep my favorite of her pictures in front of me when I write. It reminds me how fragile the creative impulse can be. It reminds me to believe in myself, to persevere.

Audio Series: Dare to Matter

Our audio series "The Authors Read. We Listen."  was iriginally hatched in a NYC club during BEA back in 2012. It's a fun little series, where authors record themselves reading an excerpt from their own novels, in their own voices, the way their stories were meant to be heard.


In light of all the social distancing and recommended reduction to group events, we're happy to help support those who have recently published, or will soon be publishing, a book. It's hard enough to get your books out there, and now with the cancelation of book events and readings making it even harder, I want to do my part to help you spread the word!


Today, Shifra Malka joins us to write about her experience recording the audiobook and she shares the preface excerpt from her memoir Dare to Matter. 

Shifra is fascinated with the inner spaces humans inhabit. As the producer and host of a weekly radio program on social and educational issues that aired live in the Mid-Atlantic region, Shifra was known for eliciting hard, honest responses from her interviewees when posing the questions that others were too hesitant to ask. Underlying these conversations was one pressing question Shifra always wanted to answer: what makes our lives matter? Daring to step right into the heart of life’s complexities, her search for answers to this question is refreshingly approachable and impactful. Shifra resides in Maryland, where she occasionally puts her pen down so that she can roam around in pursuit of her next writing desk. She can be reached at Shifra@ShifraMalka.com 

Recording the Preface, Reading my Life

It took three hours to record the preface and the first two chapters of DARE TO MATTER.

"Ben," I told my editor/publicist after that first session, "There is something powerful about recording one's own story. I didn't expect that."

It was also intense, because the story itself was. I wondered more than a few times if I'd just resort to a pesky little habit of mine, to curtsy out of the remaining project, claiming that it didn't matter much anyway. And that it was too strenuous to sit there for hours at a time, drawing myself into the appropriate emotional space needed to tell the story. I did have an advantage, though. I wasn't merely doing a voice-over, as I had been professionally trained to do. I could hear the voices inside my head. Yes, they were the voices that traveled through my pen onto my hungry page. I knew how they sounded. Some were so hurt and cried deeply. Others laughed right out of my belly. 

And one other thing: This was a story about mattering. I knew that I would need to finish the effort because judging whether or not this work mattered was not an indulgence that I was willing to take.  Not now, not with this. It took me four years to get here. 

Not all Studios are Created Equal

This was not my first time in a recording studio. But it had been a long time since I last took a seat behind the mike – as the producer and host of a Sunday night live radio program that aired in the Mid-Atlantic States. I did that work at the radio broadcast station in Towson, MD, sitting comfortably on a high stool behind a semi-circular counter, with the sound engineer nearby in the same room. I kept my handwritten notes directly in front of me to prompt me as I moved along the program. Because radio is live, there is no editing or even pausing. The clock’s second hand is your master, and dead air space your demise.

Now I was in the Bel Air, MD custom-built studio of audio producer and sound engineer, Jamie Cerniglia. I read the audio book from my PDF manuscript on his iPad.  I could and would have to stop many times to re-record a line that did not cooperate with me. Often, I would catch it, while Jamie chased it other times. When all was spoken and done, he had 30,000 edits to do. The rough calculation is that six hours of editing is needed for every one hour of recording. Who says the spoken word is simple?

In both studios, the mike felt natural to me. Almost as natural as the pen in my hand …. both instruments for communicating our voice. And to be clear, our voice is who we are at our core.

Click the link below to hear Shifra read the preface to Dare to Matter: 

TNBBC · Dare to Matter audio excerpt