Our team chose Ernest Hemingway’s in our time for the audiobook project. I like this choice because it is very challenging to do an audiobook of such a work that is concise and experimental. Its unusual narrative style and different versions once brought us many questions. Which version should we record? Should we give a note in the beginning to notify readers which version/publisher we choose? To what degree should we insert sound effects or background music that is not disturbing or twisting the original text? While preparing for the project and reading some research papers about Hemingway, I learned that he is famous for a writing technique called the iceberg theory that argues for a minimalistic style without explicitly presenting underlying content. Then it took me some time to consider what kind of edits would convey this message or if it is necessary to stick to this style for an audiobook.

As one of our group’s editors, I tried different things in different chapters and even broke the original order of chapters in the 1924/1925 versions. The result would not be a smooth reading for readers familiar with Hemingway and probably confuse new readers. So first, we asked Sean to record a production team’s note at the beginning telling readers about two versions of our time and the publisher’s information. Second, we received Sean’s amazing recordings of the 18 chapters and three additional short stories in the 1925 version. Third, I began my editing process: I am responsible for the note, the first nine chapters, “Indian Camp” and “The Doctor and the Doctor’s Wife.” I inserted a soundtrack (Etude No 1 for String Quartet) as a prelude to the story. I like the unstoppable and rapid progress expressed in this soundtrack and believe it matches my understanding of underlying themes in Hemingway’s writing. This music is my answer to the question of how we should convey Hemingway’s message without explicitly explaining the background.

I first tried the Noise Reduction feature in Audacity for all the chapters and stories and got a clear draft. Thanks to Faihaa’s time stamps, we created a collaborative mode by editing and contributing to our shared google doc. I tried to search for suitable sound effects based on Faihaa’s explanations but also discussed with her to see if we needed specific sound effects or not. For example, the horse steps sound (regular volume, faded in and out) in Chapter 1 is a great example to help readers get into the atmosphere. But I also carefully chose to reduce some sound effects’ volume (Chapter 2 bull-hitting wall sound), so they wouldn’t interfere with Sean’s voice. Gunshot sounds in Chapter 5 and Chapter 6 are a bit tricky. Finally, I figured out which types of gunshot sounds I should use to match the period. (machine gun, pistol, rifle, etc.) I also intentionally made one chapter with no sound effects. In Chapter 8, to avoid overshadowing the praying voice, I talked to Faihaa and decided not to add sound effects.

Two additional stories: I appreciate Sean’s prompt response and his amazing new recordings for the three additional stories in the 1925 version.

Indian Camp: I put sound effects for the first several scenes but chose not to insert sound effects starting from 9:07. No woman screaming throughout the story, considering here the Indian woman’s pain is not “important.” (Nick’s father’s comment)

The Doctor and the Doctor’s Wife: I chose not to add sound effects for this story because I think the two stories here have an opposing but unified structure (wife, husband, son, doctor, home, getting away from home, pain), which we could read together with a chapter in the 1924 version (bullfighting) to talk about the theme of pain. I am unsure how readers would feel when listening or if they could notice these differences, and looking forward to exploring possibilities of analytical discussion in the making/reading audiobook versions of classics.

To summarize my editing experience, I tried to be bold in exploring different options, always discuss with my members for the editing choices, and be prepared to embrace failures. Also, thanks to Hampton for his edits and combining all the files, and to Teddy and Nuraly for the final presentation.

For our audiobook project, I was in a group with Majel Peters, JP Essey, Raquel Neris, Natalie Kretschmer, Kai Prenger, and Patricia Belen. I’ve been so struck with the note in Price’s piece about people cutting poems out of anthologies to create their own anthologies, that I knew I wanted to suggest something inspired by it to our group: a collection of short stories instead of one text. I figured this was also a very practical approach to a group project as selecting multiple short stories meant that more than one person could pick a text.

As it’s getting close to Halloween, I wanted something a bit spooky, so I started with the suggestion of “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1892), in which a new mother dealing with mental health issues is driven mad by the rest cure prescribed by her doctor husband. Everyone was on board pretty quickly, and in a short span of time we had agreed to also include “The Story of an Hour” by Kate Chopin (1894), as suggested by JP, and “The Box Social” by James Reaney (likely written in the late 40s or early 50s, but not published until 1996), as suggested by Natalie. No one in our group had read all three of the stories, but we all had a sense they were told from the perspective of women, at least two of them somewhat unreliable narrators, who were unhappy and confronting feminist issues (inadequate mental health resources, confining and unfulfilling marriages and domestic spheres, and date rape).

Originally, I thought we would record each story and then decide which order to have the audience listen to them, or perhaps we’d let the audience decide which order they wanted to listen to them in, which would let us think about how the stories speak to each other differently depending on the order in which they’re heard. But the assignment rubric literally asked us to be adventurous and take risks, so I said what if we challenge ourselves and create a new text by splicing all three of the stories together. Reading aloud is itself an interpretation of the text, so why not embrace that and start by reinterpreting the text on the page first.

Everyone was on board, and JP recalled that the narrator in “The Yellow Wallpaper” is a writer, so perhaps these other stories are the ones trapped in her head as her husband refuses to let her write during her rest cure. I’m an editor by day, so I took on the challenge of creating our spliced script. After reading and rereading each story, I was struck by how much similarity there was between them, in theme, but also even in the descriptions of certain objects (e.g., wallpaper, chairs, views from windows). “The Yellow Wallpaper” is by far the longest of the texts, so I began with that as the foundation, and when she speaks of wanting to write but being unable to, I took those moments to introduce each of the other two stories. Then I inserted snippets from each of the other two stories when the themes and descriptions overlapped, until they all reach their dramatic conclusions together, the stories’ climaxes all building off of one another. The resulting text is both new but also entirely faithful to the originals. Every word of every story is presented in its entirety and in the order in which it was written, which I think speaks to and embraces the inherent tension in the relationship of audiobooks to their source text.

I shared the new text in our group Google doc so we could tweak and agree on the final script together. We had a rough idea of individual tasks from the first class in which our group was made, especially given that we had two people with audio editing experience: Natalie and Kai. With our final script, we agreed that it was important to have each of the stories read by women, and thankfully we had enough women in our group to do this. We also thought that as we have three stories, we want three readers, hoping that the different voices would be sufficient to demarcate the different story lines without extra audio flourishes. Raquel was worried about how her accent may affect her reading (none of us thought it did), so she took on the shortest of the stories, “The Box Social”. Then Majel and Patricia flipped a coin to see who would read the other two, with Majel getting “The Yellow Wallpaper” and Patricia “The Story of an Hour.” I created individual scripts for each of the readers so they could have only their story in front of them, and I indicated where the text was being spliced so they knew where they could take longer pauses and/or breaks in recording as needed.

Each reader turned their recording around very quickly, and the raw audio was great. Kai did the initial audio edit to put everything into its correct place within the full script, and Natalie did the final edit. We didn’t want to undermine any of these women’s stories, so we agreed on a more subtle audio-editing approach. However, there is a moment in “The Story of an Hour” where there’s a piercing scream, and we really wanted to include this one sound effect. An audiobook offers affordances you can’t get in text, so we wanted to acknowledge and embrace this aspect of the medium. This left JP in charge of successfully presenting our audiobook in class, which we shared notes on via email beforehand.

Overall I’m so happy with how our audiobook turned out, and I very much enjoyed working with this group. We used email and Google drive for our communications, which was sufficient, but perhaps we should have used some other way to communicate with one another or stay organized. I also wonder if we should have better defined deadlines and deliverables for each of our roles. It would have been nice if we could have played around with the audio file a bit more (would other sound effects have added or detracted from the final product?). I think we could have benefited from someone being a project manager. If we had more time, I would have also loved to be able to learn more about audio editing, as it’s something I know very little about. But these are small issues and something to think about for future group projects. I certainly have a much greater appreciation for the skills of my classmates and the audiobook format having completed this project.