If anyone wondered what the barking, chanting and hooting coming from Voodoo Records was all about the other week, I can tell them -- a bunch of boys, a gaggle of girls, and me in the middle were all making a sampler CD of my poems.We did a lot of "echo reading," saying the poems out loud together, giggling at all the best places, doing the sound effects with considerable enthusiasm. It was really fun.
The only thing I'd suggest to other authors with publishers who have a similar, brilliant promotional idea as this is: NOT IN THE WINTER.
Every single one of us, myself included, were at some stage of a cold.
Mike, the technician, probably had to use every single knob on his giant console to clear up the coughing, sniffling, horking and wheezing that wove in and out of the poetry recitation. The rough cut sounded like a jolly hospital ward.
But he did it, and it turned out just fine -- and certainly authentic, no phony teevee kids here, no fake-smiley hostess: we were genuinely enjoying ourselves and each other. We even did the first page of Boy Soup.
Of course, at the next school I went to, the children were all cold-free, had the voices of angels, and showed no interest whatsoever in changing the words of my poems while chanting them out loud (YES, Jack, that is you I'm talking about! He's the creative fellow on the CD who edits my poems for his version of "echo-reading"!)
This career just gets better and better...
Loris Lesynski
