I love being a special guest at book clubs. Bookworms tend to be the polite type — no one criticizes an author who is sitting right there!Sipping on wine,munching snacks, talking about writing, what’s not to like? I had such a good time at a neighborhood book club that I asked Mel Theobald, one of the attendees, if he’d be willing to write about it for our blog. Thank you for saying yes, Mel. I may just start using “The Nearly Famous Beth Finke” as my signature now!

More than a Book Club
by Mel Theobald

Publishing a book is no easy feat. Neither is walking into a roomful of strangers to talk about it. Yet, there she was, the nearly famous Beth Finke, author of Writing Out Loud, sitting in the unfamiliar turf of our party room with eleven eager souls, ready to respond to their most pressing questions.

Beth and the book club.

Although there was no shortage of snacks and wine, the author asked if there was cheese on the table. No cheese. Yikes. I rushed to fetch my favorite smoked gouda and returned midway through the introductions. It was already apparent when I took my seat that this was going to be a fun evening.

Al Hippensteel, my altruistic next door neighbor, happens to also be one of Beth’s students. Anyone who knows Al is aware that he possesses a droll sense of wit and irony. At his invitation Beth was our condo association book club’s first ever visiting author. With humility and humor, she impressed everyone with her ability to remember names and recognize their voices after a single round of verbal, mini-bios.

That’s Al Hippensteel looking on as Beth signs a book for one of the club members.

From the outset, those around the table peppered our guest with questions. They were most interested in her teaching techniques and the secrets of the publishing industry. Beth answered every question. She confessed to changing the names of a few characters. At one point she admitted getting miffed that her editor for asking her to withdraw a story. “But you pick your battles,” she told us. To be a writer requires patience, detours and sacrifices.

With barely a wobble, she wove the narration of her own writing into that of her students. Blindness is one of the themes that runs throughout her writing. In one chapter of Writing Out Loud she writes about being invited to drive a car on an open slab hundreds of yards wide. Paired with a professional race car driver, she chose to accelerate to a speed of 80 miles per hour. When asked what possessed her to do this, her face blushed red, “I got to sit in a Ford Mustang next to a friend of Paul Newman!”

Beth allowed that it was due to the success of one of her students that she was granted an audience with the future publisher of her latest book,and when asked about the pronunciation of her name, she answered, “Finke as in stinky.” Allright then.

As the evening drew to a close, Beth invited Al to read one of his class pieces. His beautifully written essay was impossible to finish without knee slapping laughter. In brief, it was about his courtship with the woman he would marry, who just happened to be right there with us: she’s a member of the book club. The piece was a light-hearted mix of metaphors of popular music, cars and youthful innocence. Everyone erupted in applause.

And just think. He might never have written it, had it not been for Beth’s class.

More than 300,000 people lined Pennsylvania Avenue on this day in 1963 to watch a horse-drawn caisson carry President Kennedy’s casket from the White House to the Capitol Rotunda. Giovanna Breu, a writer in one of my memoir classes, was there, but Not as an onlooker. She was covering JFK’s funeral and burial for Life Magazine.

WBEZ’s page for the feature includes a photo of Giovanna’s press pass–click on the image to see it–and listen to the StoryCorps piece.

I didn’t know a thing about Giovanna’s illustrious journalism career when she joined our memoir writing class back in 2013. I suppose the essay she read in class about meeting her husband at the School of Journalism at Columbia University should have been a clue, but many more months would go by before I’d discover she’d worked at Life. “I don’t really like talking about myself,” she told me years later, acknowledging she was finding writing in first-person very difficult. “When you’re a journalist, You always have to keep that space between you and what was happening, you know, so you could look at it with a reporter’s eye.”

Giovanna was at Life Magazine’s New York office when legendary editor Richard Stolley was negotiating for the right to reprint stills from footage of the assassination filmed by Abraham Zapruder,
and in an essay she wrote for class she described sitting with her fellow reporters there, reviewing the film frame by painful frame. “It was horrific,” she wrote, explaining that out of decency and respect for the President’s family, they decided not to publish every single frame.

With so much attention to the JFK files released this past summer, and knowing the anniversary of the assassination was coming up, I contacted Chicago media types earlier this month to see if any of them would be interested in talking with Giovanna about her experience reviewing the Zapruder film. WBEZ responded, but they were more interested in Giovanna’s life as a female reporter in the 1960’s then specifically about her experience with the Zapruder film.

WBEZ and the Chicago Cultural Center are partners with StoryCorps, a non-profit set up to “record, share, and preserve the stories of our lives.” Would I be willing to interview Giovanna for a StoryCorps interview?

I arrived at the recording booth last week with questions for Giovanna swimming around my head.

Giovanna arrived with November 1963 issues of Life Magazine in her bag. I’d been unnerved when WBEZ had asked me to have her bring something along to prove she’d actually worked there, but Giovanna understood. She’d started out at Life as a fact-checker. “They’ll see my name in the masthead,” she said. “I brought my press pass, too!”

I couldn’t believe she still had that press pass. Even more unbelievable: she was able to find it. When I asked her to describe the pass for me, I could picture her scrutinizing the little card, considering what to say. “Well, the front has a picture of a girl with lots of curls” she finally answered in a playful lilt. “Gray eyes, you can see her shoulders, must have been hot the day they took that photo, the yellow dress she’s wearing is sleeveless!”

The 45 minutes we spent in the recording studio flew by. Whitney the Seeing Eye dog sat at our feet the entire time and never made a peep. StoryCorps editor Bill Healy (the renaissance man who took the photo of Whitney and me that’s on the cover of Writing Out Loud) did a heroic job cutting the piece down to four minutes.

One of the more poignant parts of the four-minute piece comes when Giovanna reads from the handwritten notes she’d saved from the funeral procession. “I phoned them in to the New York office,” she explained. Listen carefully to the StoryCorps interview online now and you’ll hear the pages rustling as she reads them out loud — the very notes she called into Life Magazine 54 years ago today.

This just in! The Hinsdalean newspaper did a great article on our visit. You can read it here if you want to get another point of view on our class visit.  

Whitney and I spent an entire day last week with sixth-graders at Clarendon Hills Middle School (CHMS). I’ve visited students at hundreds of elementary schools over the years to talk about disability awareness and service dogs, but last Friday marks the first time I’d ever been asked to visit a middle school and talk specifically about memoir-writing: the CHMS sixth-graders are preparing to write their own autobiographies.

Before we arrived, teachers had them read six chapters from my new book Writing Out Loud that demonstrate how autobiography and memoir can communicate a specific theme:

1. Prologue, in which I explain how it is I decided to write a second memoir
2. The Brown Envelope, in which I’m asked to lead a memoir-writing class for the City of Chicago’s Department on Aging
3. My Turn, in which I relate my own family history
4. Hanni and Beth Hit the Road, in which we start traveling to promote my children’s book Safe & Sound
5. Mustang Beth, in which I drive a race car 80 mph
6. Tough Guys, in which a man in first class worries if I was okay sitting between two scary-looking guys on a flight to New Orleans

I arrived in Clarendon Hills prepared to talk about making a memoir come alive, engaging readers, choosing which life episodes to include in your memoir, that sort of thing. What I wasn’t prepared for was how thoughtful and insightful the sixth-grade questions would be after my presentation. Some examples:

• If someone asked you to sum up your life story in one word, and that word couldn’t be the word “blind,” what would that one word be?
• How do you picture the modern world?
• What is your favorite word to use when you’re writing?
• Was Minerva the only one in your class who took a tape recorder?
• Do you ever think about what your life would be like if you were an author who could see?
• Do you think you perceive the world differently because you’re blind?
• You say you can only see the color black now. If you could pick another color to be able to see all the time, what color would you pick?
• What was your first thought when you got into the Mustang?
• What is your favorite chapter in Writing Out Loud?
• When you were driving the car with Tommy Kendall, was the experience what you thought it would be beforehand?
• What is your favorite word to use when you’re writing?
• If you met a kid who was blind, or a kid who knew he’d be blind someday, what advice would you give them?
• If you could be sighted again for just one hour, what would you want to see?
• Why did you laugh when that man in first class told you the guys next to you looked scary?
• Did you write stories when you were little?
• If the girl you were before you were blind could see the future and found out you would become a famous author, what would she say to you?
• Has anyone ever judged you for being blind? How about for being a writer?
• You told us how you learned to use rubber bands and safety pins to keep track of things. You’re a good problem solver, do you ever want to be in a group that invents things for people who need them?
• How are you able to write about yourself without sounding pretentious?
• Would you do all these amazing awesome things if you weren’t blind?
• Did you think that guy in first class was being rude, or being helpful?
• I don’t have a question, but I have a comment. I keep looking at your dog, and now I know Whitney is my spirit animal.
• Do you wish you would have not been in the hospital all those months and just saw everything you could instead? I mean, do you wish you just went blind all of a sudden so you didn’t have to be in the hospital all that time?

Whew! What can I say? Those sixth-graders at Clarendon Hills Middle School are wise beyond their years.

Beth’s a voracious book listener, and as she’s mentioned before, I end up hearing large parts of lots of her books—if I want to, anyway. She usually falls asleep each night listening. If it’s something I like, she places her little audio device so we both can hear it as we fall out. If not, she puts it under her pillow—she can hear it, I can’t.

I’m not a big fiction reader, but I’m pretty happy with this one.

Lately it’s been something I like, a lot. It’s fiction called “A Gentleman in Moscow.” In short, a Tsarist aristocrat is confined during the Russian Revolution to house arrest in Moscow’s grand dame hotel named The Metropol (a real hotel back then and today). A little far-fetched but it works. It touches on Russian history—and although it’s no textbook—by my reckoning it’s accurate. Which is not saying all that much—but I took Russian in college and realized then that we Americans are painfully ignorant of Russia’s epic history, and like back when I was in college, Russian history is kind of worth knowing these days.

The book’s just extremely well written, great characters, great dialog, witty and funny. And the great old hotel is something of its own character. Which alone gives the book a couple stars in Beth’s review. Regular readers know that for Beth Finke, heaven is a well-laid-out, compact hotel room. In that room is a closet with complimentary bathrobes. And next to Beth’s side of the bed is a nightstand with a drawer. I’ve taken to calling it Beth’s squirrel drawer, because all I see is a mess of lozenges, chewing gum packages, and insulin pens—but for her, it’s perfect.

The Hilton’s one honkin’ hotel.

We’ve written about The Pfister Hotel in Milwaukee, where they immediately greet Beth as we walk into the lobby. “Hello Ms. Finke!” Staff hands her key cards that have already had the corner snipped off so Beth knows how to orient the card in the door lock slot. They leave rubber bands in the room—Beth uses them to identify things. Staff doesn’t say much to the guy carrying the bags. But I’ll take it.

A nice hotel is a refuge, an oasis of a kind. It’s a different state of mind. Hotels—especially the big conference ones—are like little cities, subcultures all their own.

Beth and I both belong to the gym at the Hilton Towers on South Michigan Avenue—for those of a certain age, that would be the 1968 Democratic Convention Hilton. But it’s a lot more than that—Queen Elizabeth and Elizabeth Taylor and presidents, not to mention Harrison Ford and the rest of the cast of “The Fugitive”—have spent a lot of quality time there.

I don’t believe I’ve ever actually stayed overnight there. But as a kid growing up, and now as an adult, it’s my epitome of a big old hotel. For gym members like us, it’s always fun to try to figure out what conferences are there. How busy the gym is on a given day is often a hint—when it’s a conclave of physical therapists, for example, it’s hard to find an empty treadmill or a swim lane. Sometimes you can smell the seriousness—the frolicking radiologists are in town! And sometimes you can smell the money—pharmaceutical sales people everywhere.

Sometimes it’s scary numbers of awkward teenagers there for  a youth convention, waiting around in awkward stances to be told what they’re doing next. Sometimes it’s a sports team  convention with everyone decked out in fan garb and one time, it was the International Leather Convention. Can’t tell you much about that, as that group takes over the entire hotel so as not to scandalize unwitting guests. I did hear stories, though.

So, there you have it: Bolshevik Russia, Milwaukee, and a gym in the Hilton Towers.

My mind wanders sometimes.

In case you missed my last post:

You can now buy the audio version of Writing Out Loud.

You heard that right: The audio version of “Writing Out Loud” is now available at Amazon.com. And Audible.com, too.

But wait. There’s more! Thanks to my publisher — Golden Alley Press — you can win a free audio book! Just email bethfinke@goldenalleypress.com and enter WOL Freebie in the subject line. Golden Alley Press will choose the winner from the first 50 entries.

Robin Sitten narrates Writing Out Loud, and she generously agreed to let me interview her about recording the book. So here goes with Part II of the interview:

What were some specific challenges in recording “Writing Out Loud”?

Nancy and I had talked about the excerpts from your class members, and how to approach them. It is a fine line between a characterization and a caricature…and knowing these are real people, who will certainly listen to the book, I wanted to be respectful of them. Nothing cartoonish, or stereotypical. I wanted the attention to be to their words and not my voice. This is always tricky. Giving Hannelore an accent was the most delicate of these, because her writing is so powerful and I didn’t want to be a distraction.

A lot of authors, and readers too, I should say, are looking for an audio performance — a radio play. When these are done well, they can be very captivating. But I see my role as representing the author’s words, not putting on a show. That’s my background in disabilities access, for sure. We are taught to be “invisible.” Being told “I forget the narrator was even there” is a compliment in my world. But audio book readers expect something else these days.

Were there any passages in “Writing Out Loud” that were particularly fun to read/record?

In spite of what I’ve said about giving Hannelore an accent, her passages were the most enjoyable because of the challenge of it. Because I am reading cold, this is a challenge for me to see how much I can internalize the voice and accent. And that puts me in “the zone” in some ways.

How do you deal with words that are hard to pronounce?

God bless the Internet. I have on hand a wonderful 1940s dictionary with a pronouncing gazetteer – tissue-thin paper, thumb tabs, the whole thing. But when I can’t find it there, I can usually find a video on YouTube where someone pronounces the word.

I recently recorded a memoir by a woman from Kenya, and since it was in the first person, I wanted to make sure I used the local pronunciation for places, and not the English way. I was able to find news stories and interviews on Youtube where I could hear this pronounced, then got on the phone with the author (Wanjiru Warama, “Unexpected America”) who coached me through it.

How do you feel about using accents when reading?Mixed feelings, really. I like doing accents, and can do a lot of them. But they are difficult to sustain over a book, and sometimes the writing makes the accent that much more difficult. I am also skittish about an accent that sounds stereotypical, and is clearly someone imitating an accent that is not their own.

Do you listen to your own recordings?

I do my own editing, so yes. I guess that counts. But to listen to a book after I’ve recorded it, no. I’ve heard it too many times by then.

Have you ever met an author face-to-face after reading their book out loud? What was that like? Odd? Surprising? Disturbing? Thrilling?This answer is a bit of a cheat, because I have recorded Jeremy Flagg (“Children of Nostradamus”), who is a neighbor and a friend. I knew him before, though. Your question is have I met anyone after recording them? Not yet!

I know now that you’ve recorded textbooks for Learning Ally (Recording for the Blind and Dyslexic) for decades, but when we were deciding which narrator to choose, it was, pardon the pun, a blind audition. The publisher and I had no idea you had any experience with reading for people who are blind before we chose you to read “Writing Out Loud.” Do you think working with and knowing other people who are blind, being familiar with assistive technology and white canes and audio description for live theater and such, was an asset when recording this book about a woman who is blind?

You know, I do, but in tiny ways that maybe no one else would notice. I know how dog handlers talk to their dogs, for example. You have to be around a lot of guide dog users to hear that cadence. The story of being confronted on the street by “helpful” strangers is a story I have heard many times. I was excited to get this project because I feel like part of the blindness community, and because I wanted to support you in this project as a community member. And I suppose I thought to some degree that we probably know many people in common, and I am connected to a potential audience for this book. But at the same time, your experience as a child from a big family, a Chicagoan, a wife and mother… none of that is my experience. So I had to tell your story your way through your words.