I enjoy behind-the-scenes stories. Here's one from Amy Friedman, who emailed me a while back about a new audiobook. She sent me the CD, which showcases Friedman's folktale adaptations and features lively performances by a roster of actors. The 70-minute disk would make a nice accompaniment to the drive to Grandma's this holiday season. I'll let Amy take it from here:
"Tell
Me A Story: Timeless Folktales from Around the World," the audiobook I
produced this year with my husband, Dennis Danziger, and my colleague
and friend, Lori Ada Jaroslow, feels like one stop in a long journey,
the sort people in folktales are forever taking.
Sometimes I
think it all started when I was a kid and my dad endlessly listened to
radio and read newspapers—and taught me to love both. Back in the
1980s I was a a newspaper columnist, working with Neil Reynolds, a
groundbreaking editor at the Kingston, Ontario, Whig-Standard
newspaper, and I asked him why we didn't publish any material for kids;
he sent me off to figure out something we could add. Not long after
that I wrote for that little Canadian newspaper the first adaptations
of folktales, fairytales, myths, and legends from around the world, and
three weeks later, 10 Canadian papers picked up the feature. They too
had felt that hunger. Or maybe the journey began, truly, on a primitive
farm in South Africa where Jillian Gilliland, the illustrator of our
column, first began to draw. There's the thread that brought Dan
Dalton, salesman and artist extraordinaire working for Universal Press
Syndicate into the Whig-Standard offices where he tapped me on the
shoulder, wanting to discuss what was then called "The Bedtime Story" and
has since become "Tell Me a Story," a newspaper feature Jillian and I
continue to create that runs in hundreds of newspapers all over the
world, in places as different and faraway from each other as Shanghai,
China, and Canton, Ohio.
Maybe the journey would have ended with
the newspaper column and the two books we've published from that
column, but my journey took a turn when my younger daughter, Cassandra,
struggling with dyslexia, learned the joy and wonder of reading only
after she discovered audiobooks, and I remembered again my love of
radio. Cass may have been the ultimate catalyst that led me last year,
having published nearly 800 stories and counting for our feature (www.uexpress.com/tellmeastory), to stop waiting around for some audio publisher to walk in and tap me on the shoulder, offering a contract.
Cass and my beloved mother-in-law who passed away and left us a small inheritance she wished us to use for something wonderful.
One
day not long after Sarah passed away I attended a spoken word event
back in LA where by then I had moved to marry Dennis (after nearly 20
years in Ontario). There I was listening to Kathleen Wilhoite reading a
story she'd written, and I suddenly heard one of my favorite folktale
characters come to life. The next day in a writing class I teach, as
Lauren Tom was reading one of her stories, I heard another character,
and by the end of that week I'd decided how to best use Sarah's gift.
Soon
after that magic stepped when Lori--another fine actress and one of the
readers on the CD as well as its director—introduced me to Laura Hall.
I recognized Laura as the pianist on one of my favorite tv shows—the
improv hit "Whose Line Is It Anyway?"—but even more amazing, I recognized
her as the composer of the music I'd recently heard and loved on a film
by another student of mine. Obviously Laura and I were supposed to
meet. One of those fateful moments, and the magic of her studio, her
children—Ruthie and Eva who selected the final 8 stories—and her
marvelously talented husband Rick Hall (one of the actors on the CD) assured me I had taken the right turn in the road.
The journey
went on, but perhaps most important is this: I've always loved the
stories I've written, but every person who became involved with this
project—from the actors who read to the musicians who play to the man
who mixed and mastered it to the gent who designed it, to friends who
have helped to promote it, has added another element of magic. For me
the work is something almost mystical, a creation I'm not responsible
for but, rather, have had the opportunity to enjoy.
Whenever I
watch the faces of children as they listen to our CD, and when I watch
their faces in classrooms I visit as a storyteller I see the delight
and understanding and joy that magic creates. And then I understand
again that radio (and by extension records and CDS) truly is the
theater of the mind, and despite the endless work and the fear of
squandering money I don't have to squander, in those moments I know
there is magic in listening to stories.
That's why we're already
selecting stories for the next CD, and why as of January we'll begin
recording. (You can hear a taste of the CD at www.cdbaby.com/cd/friedmanhall and you can read more about the whole history of its creation on our website at www.mythsandtales.com).
As a teenager I read and admired Langston Hughes's poetry. Given the powerful drama of lines like "What happens to a dream deferred?/ Does it dry up/ like a raisin in the sun?.../Or does it explode?," I expected that Hughes would speak in deep, stentorian tones. 
