Current Issue – Snopes

In the past, one of the only ways you could only hear the words spilling out of your favorite author’s mouth was if you braved the masses and attended a reading. And even though you got to see said author in person, you only got the story once. No repeats. Now, because of the ever-growing world of the online literary journal, you can listen to a new or well-known author time and again, with the added bonus of being in your own home. Sure there are some earlier examples of author’s recordings such as ones of Yeats and those collected by Caedman, but none of these are so easily accessed as those on the internet. Shenandoah is featuring a couple of them in their newest edition. Both “Love, Creusa” by Amina Gautier and “Three Scenarios in Which Hana Sasaki Grows a Tail” by Kelly Luce have audio versions of the stories.

Audio recordings and readings affect me in different ways. The author can either completely ruin the story for me or make it entirely better. Either way, it always changes the way that I will read the story in the future. Sometimes, if the author has a bad reading voice, hearing one of your favorite stories being read aloud is like seeing your favorite book being made into a movie: shocking and somewhat disappointing, nothing as you had imagined it.

I usually find I am more receptive to an author’s own telling when it is one I have never read before. That way I have had no time to imagine the voices of the characters in my own particular way. I can more easily see them as the author sees them.

Typically, once I can get past the initial shock of another person’s voice grabbing hold of what I have come to think of as my characters, I can see the benefits. For example it is an extremely useful tool if you wish to have a greater understanding of the work as a whole. Good recordings allow you to get more of a glimpse into the author’s intentions. Hearing the story aloud, with the author’s own particular inflections and breath, adds an entirely new level of depth.

So what do you think of audio recordings of stories? Good or bad?

One of the English classes I am taking this semester is Twenty-First Century Poetry: Here, Nowhere. The course is taught by the esteemed professor and poet, Lesley Wheeler who is a contributor to the current issue of Shenandoah. In Professor Wheeler’s class we are reading poetry and assessing how the poet describes a real or imagined space. We spent the first part of the term reading works focused on Hurricane Katrina. During the past few weeks I have become immersed in New Orleans and the Gulf Coast region, studying poetry by Cynthia Hogue, Nicole Cooley, and Nathasha Trethewey. Although I have never visited New Orleans or its surrounding areas; their poetry transported me to this beautiful, tragic, and unique landscape.

This week, however, we shifted to reading poetry depicting an imagined space, The Hollow Log Lounge by Shenandoah’s very own R.T. Smith, to be exact. I expected that reading poetry about a fictional place would be a completely different experience than reading about an actual place. However, I was surprised by what I discovered. After finishing Smith’s book, The Hollow Log Lounge was just as real of a place to me as the Mississippi Gulf Coast or New Orleans’ French Quarter.

It is the author’s job to transmute a real or imagined space on to the page, so that the place becomes real for the reader. This is the beauty of an immersive reading experience. To me, there are few better experiences then becoming totally engrossed in a poem or work of fiction. What are your thoughts on immersive reading? Do you think it is a detrimental experience? Is it better for the reading to be constantly aware of the author’s artifice?

To Record or Not to Record: A Question

Poetry as Place