Audio Books
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And the Audie Winners are... |
Features:
One of the best ideas that grew up with the development of audio books was that of DeWitt Daggett, when he started a small company in Colorado called, with nonchalant grandeur, The Audio Press. DeWitt’s inspiration was to have Western writers do their own readings of their own works and, with diligence and masterly editing and tape production, one by one he fetched them: Wallace Stegner, Edward Abbey, Terry Tempest Williams, Gretel Ehrlich, Barry Lopez, Gary Snyder, Ann Zwinger, among others.
When my turn came, first with This House of Sky and then Heart Earth, DeWitt happened to mention that one great book was eluding his microphone: A River Runs through It. He and Norman Maclean had tried, but Norman’s ailments there near the end of his life made them give up on the taping session. Norman and I were a mutual admiration society—my personal copy of A River Runs through It sits on the shelf glowing to me with its inscription from Norman, “To Ivan Doig, who for my money is one of America’s finest writers”—and I instinctively offered my own voice to get Norman’s words spoken into the world, if it ever came to that.
With Norman’s death, it did. DeWitt and I both knew we were handling an heirloom jewel, and we were determined not to fumble it. Our collaboration I think drew the best out of both of us. For instance, DeWitt tamped me down in the reading of the section where Norman bails his brother Paul out of jail, and the flat-toned wariness in that dialogue even now gives me drama chills. On the other hand, I knew to put a bit of deviltry into the remark by Montana women perpetually faced with these big-fish fishermen when all they want is a decent fish-fry: “We like the little ones—they make the best eating.”
Evidently our combined insights worked. A River Runs Through It rode the audio national best-seller list for five months. Nor was that all. The burgeoning young audio industry that year decided to institute their version of Oscars, and so the ultimate accolade to Norman’s undying words, DeWitt’s tenacity, and my Montana tone of voice came when A River Runs Through It won a first Audie.
A lot of water has flowed through a maze of fishing holes since. DeWitt Daggett went to a new career, Audio Press was sold, then resold, its titles scattered and obscured; but now that original version is back with new life from HighBridge Audio, whose audio line of stars includes Garrison Keillor, Calvin Trillin, George Carlin and so on. So, I like to think of a next generation of wordlovers, in the mind’s eye or on the road along some valley of flow in the West, coming into sight of a stretch of water that looks as if it might have fish in it, and clicking the ON button to those first words: “In our family, there was no clear line between religion and fly fishing.”
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A River Runs Through It, read by Ivan Doig
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Bringing the Voices Back:
the trek toward This House of Sky
and the long route of Heart Earth
The trove of tapes that helped to bring the voices of the past into This House of Sky began before the book did, when I first took a recorder to Montana for the sake of a magazine article I was tackling. The old-timer whom I was scheduled to talk to informed me he couldn't get together with me until the next day. That left an open afternoon ahead, with me sitting around my father's and grandfather's house, with a shiny new tape recorder and reels of tape. To humor me and my new machine, my father began storytelling—of his misadventures with horses, and of killing a marauding bear by the light of the moon—and my grandmother in turn began by recalling an exasperation with Charlie Doig of a full forty years before, when she and my mother had planned a birthday party for him and he didn't show up because he had been hospitalized by a bronc.
Onward the captured remembrances went from there, a few helpful voices at a time arriving to my tape recorder whenever I went back to Montana. Then came the book contract, based on a manuscript sample of what would become This House of Sky, and back Carol and I went for the final blaze of research, the summer of 1977.
There were two constancies in that whirl of summer. Carol, taking photos to back up my notecard descriptions of places, and me perpetually going out, tape recorder in hand and notebooks in pocket, like a door-to-door salesman. And the voices from the past began to be a kind of summer chorus: Tony Hunolt, who had been choreboy at the big Dogie ranch and now, in the last year of his life, was swamping out the local grocery store; Harold Chadwick, garageman of Dupuyer, with his memory of the Metis fugitive, Toussaint Salois, sitting by a campfire in a buffalo coat; Kathryn Donovan, my mother's teacher at the one-room Moss Agate school; these and fifteen or so others. In a circle of completion that I still find remarkable and moving, those voices that helped give me the words of This House of Sky now are kept alive by my voice conveying their words in this audio version.
Heart Earth grew out of a packet of family letters I didn't have for the writing of This House of Sky. When they finally surfaced to me, more than forty years after their immense route from Montana sheep camps to a destroyer "commencing zigzagging" in evasive action in Pacific combat, they gave me the chance to base a book into the one life that was missing from Sky—my mother's.
The letters, old airmail ones, were from the last six months of my mother's life, the last half-year of World War II. They, and the book, follow a trail of postmarks that tell of my parents' momentous route up and down the West, pinballing from Montana to Phoenix to Wickenburg to Montana again, in a quest against heartbreak. In This House of Sky, I wrote that memory is the near-neighborhood of dream, and this book seemed to want to dance itself along those brainwall edges—so I let it. The resulting constellation of "deliberate dreams" won the $10,000 Evans Biography Award. It is, I think, my most "written" book—words and moments turning into the private pivots of history—and our two voices, hers in ink and mine on tape, chorus a time and a family saga that otherwise would have stayed lost.
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This House of Sky, read by Ivan Doig
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Heart Earth, read by Ivan Doig
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All the Words: unabridged versions
available from Books On Tape 1-800-626-3333
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Dancing at the Rascal Fair |
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English Creek |
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Ride with Me, Mariah Montana |
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This House of Sky |
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Heart Earth |
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The Sea Runners |
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Winter Brothers |
Quicker Listening: abridged versions
available from your local bookseller
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Bucking the Sun |
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Mountain Time |
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