Sleep Away (audio) Camp

I spent last week at sleep-away camp for sound design. I’d always wanted to go to Maine, but never been, and I wanted to learn about sound design for this podcast I’m working on in another set of tabs, so when I learned about this workshop (well beyond the deadline), I asked if there was room for one more, there was, and I slipped in. I packed the car with a bunch of gear, and set out on this adventure that began with an eight-hour drive to Monson, in central Maine.

Flinging myself into the world of sound design, about which I knew next to nothing before this, is one of my ways of dealing with all the uncertainty in my personal life (still no word on the memoir) and grim state of the world right now. By immersing myself in this new environment where there is so much to learn, I figured I would improve the quality of the podcast I’m working on and, as an added bonus, distract myself from the news.

What surprised me about this experience is how much is brought together several of my other, disparate, interests. It combines the interiority and storytelling of memoir writing with my love of documentaries, along with a kind of body-spirit connection through the somatics of sound. I learned so much about the way sound connects bodies and emotions and stories.

Our assignment was to interview another person in the workshop about a dream or other interior experience, then cut that down to a 4-minute piece that had layers of sound added to it to enhance the meaning of the piece. Our instructors, Nic Neves and Kim Shirin Cupal, asked questions like, “what does a hug sound like?”

Doing all this in the company of other creative, interesting people who are intrigued by, and with loads more experience in this world, was a real gift. I recorded the audio narration for Sara Schleede’s piece, you can listen to hers here. Sara, a fellow Texas-to-NYC transplant, did a great job of capturing the sound of summer in our home state by layering the ominous sound of cicadas with the menacing of the ice cream truck jingle for her dreamscape. And, I earned my field-recording-badge by actually pushing the right button on the recorder (after a failed first attempt)!

Sara recorded my interview, which was about another kind of internal experience, of sitting with ayahuasca. So it’s her voice that you’ll hear in this short audio piece I created, with lots and lots of help from Nic and Kim.

During the week, we spent most of our time at the Tenney House, one of the many buildings that Monson Arts owns in this small town. The residency and many of the buildings in the small town of Monson are made possible by the Libra Foundation, which was created by Elizabeth Noyce, who got a “vast settlement” following her divorce from her husband, who was a tech billionaire. She died in 1996.

As I was standing outside the Tenney House one day, in the middle of working on this piece about my mother (now Glinda to me), I noticed the back was wrapped in orange lillies. These were my mother’s favorite flowers and she planted them along one side of our house in Corpus Christi. Seeing those, I once again felt surrounded by love.

And I wondered: what does that sound like?