Author Ellen Meeropol writes about how she and other authors are rallying to promote a new book by a friend who has no speaking voice:
Novelists are, by definition, imaginative people, but there are a limited number of ways to promote a new novel. We rely primarily on readings and events to transform our words on the page to a dramatic life for an audience. Face to face; voice to ear. This is not easy during the pandemic.
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| Cai Emmons | |
For Cai Emmons, that process recently became much more challenging. In the year leading up to the September publication of her fourth novel, Sinking Islands, talking became difficult. Her voice grew slow, slurred, monotone, and gruff. Her words became difficult to understand. Six months ago, she was diagnosed with bulbar onset ALS, the kind that first robs a person of the ability to speak.
The author of three previous novels, a story collection, short fiction, plays and screenplays, Cai has received multiple literary awards and fellowships. She knows what it takes to promote a novel. How could she do this with no speaking voice?
Cai and I met at a Red Hen Press authors event at AWP in early 2018. We connected over a shared interest in writing fiction about activist issues and did some book events together promoting her third novel, Weather Woman, and my 2020 release, Her Sister's Tattoo. During the months Cai struggled to get a diagnosis, I read an early copy of Sinking Islands, loved it, and started thinking about events around her novel. Then I received her e-mail about ALS.
Some writers are so generous that people--friends, writers, former students, readers--gather around them naturally. Cai is one of those people. So, my response to her e-mail, "Let your friends be your voice," wasn't the only one, and Cai had already thought of it, too. Her September 14 book launch hosted by Denver's Tattered Cover Bookstore will include readings by Cai's special guests Aimee Liu, Ellen Meeropol, Sands Hall, Elizabeth Harris, Debra Gwartney and Miriam Gershow.
Other events are in the planning stages, including a signing in her hometown of Eugene, attendance at the Pacific Northwest Book Association conference, and possibly a trip to New York City. All dependent, of course, on the Delta variant and whatever comes next. And throughout these months of tests and infusions, Cai has been busy writing. She has two additional novels forthcoming in 2022 and is brainstorming about how to promote them as disease symptoms progress. And of course, a diagnosis like this changes more than a book tour. Cai and her long-term partner, playwright Paul Calandrino, got married on Valentine's Day.
A Team Cai reading is not Cai's first out-of-the-box idea to promote a novel. The summer before Weather Woman was published, she covered her van with a large image of the book jacket and drove to about 70 independent bookstores in Oregon, Washington, Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, Colorado and Utah, meeting booksellers and distributing ARCs of the novel.
Looking at the silver lining of doing events with her text-to-voice computer, using her sister's synthesized voice, Cai notes that a slower pace can make for more thoughtfulness. She writes in her blog, "People will have to slow down in order to interact with me, but if they're willing, I'll be there listening and offering what I can. I won't be narrating every thought that passes through my mind, but less of a running commentary is probably a good thing. After all, something needs to be saved for the writing."