Hi friends,
A couple of weeks ago, I sent you some sound, looked back at one of the most famous examples of shared authorship, and wondered about a new kind of oral tradition for assembling stories and preserving memories. Here’s the follow-up, wherein Jessi adds some thoughts to our patchwork composition.
This is a special sort of transmission, and one particularly apt to the topic, because it’s a mix of her words and someone else’s that she’s conveying to us. Jessi sent her voice memo right after getting out of a writing workshop with Garth Greenwell, when his voice was still fresh in her mind. Alongside some really nice ideas around language, style, and rhetoric—“language is giving us data that our senses can process”— and Jessi’s own thoughtful synthesis and word choice for carrying them forward, I also love that you can hear her flipping the pages of her notebook. You’ll also find out what moon dust is like.
Speak soon,
Meg
p.s. Did you guys see this piece on Edoardo Ballerini, who’s found (relative) fame as an audiobook narrator of a bunch of well-known books, like My Struggle and the Bible? I like the audio players embedded in the story, and also the detail about how the house he lives in was once inhabited by a silent movie star. “…the house of a silent actor is now occupied by one who uses only voice on projects,” Ballerini told me by email. “What a century will do.”
