WATCH (AND HEAR) THESE BOOKS LIVE!
If you’re only reading these writers, you’re not getting the whole story. Audio and video clips round out the experience.
Soundtrack a story
In Barbara Browning’s The Gift, the main character has a ukulele cover for every scenario. In real life, every tune is posted to Browning’s actual SoundCloud (soundcloud.com/barbarabrowning). So when a German stranger in the novel calls her cover of the standard “I Wish You Love” “sublime,” you can experience why. When she starts sending the stranger dances inspired by their correspondence, she shares those with the reader as well, via Vimeo and YouTube (youtube.com — search Barbara Browning), inviting the world to share in her self-described “inappropriate intimacy.”
Navigate Paris
For Busker, her memoir of her days as a street-corner violinist in Paris, Montrealbased storyteller Nisha Coleman created a website (buskerparis.com) that included audio clips of her performances and Google street views of the streets she got lost in.
Pump up the poetry
French-Norwegian poet Caroline Bergvall works not just with words but sounds. It’s no wonder that the work she recites on her SoundCloud (soundcloud.com/carolinebergvall) often showcases breath work, singing and soundscapes that give her poetry a language beyond mere words.
Study stripping
Burlesque dancer Loretta Jean hasn’t exactly written the book on nerdlesque (burlesque themed around some traditionally nerdy fandoms), but she is a PhD candidate on the subject at the University of Toronto. “Because I am already part of that world, I have a lot of access to places that traditional researchers might not have access to,” she says. “I literally get behind the scenes.” Search her out on YouTube.