The Quiltmaker, by Wini Smart
I'm changing my life. At the age of 83, I've put together a bunch of stories and articles I've saved in a file cabinet for years--and published the collection under the title Travelin' Light, which is the name of one of the stories. The book has gone on sale on amazon and the reviews surprised me. Readers saw what I hadn't--that the stories all reflected a point of view.
Obviously it was my own point of view. The stories looked back on a life that had been lived by a woman who came of age as the Feminist Wave of the early 1960s was just beginning to happen. The protagonist was navigating her way against the wall of power of men in business to carve out a place where she could speak. She wrote constantly; she aspired to be an actress, she did what she could in the world of journalism to stake out a place where she could be on a par with men. The stories are not polemic; they combine humor with a special mission of self-discovery--against a backdrop of political and personal transformation.
The response to the book from men in their sixties and seventies was a big surprise to me. Their reviews on amazon pointed out that I was letting them in on the way women think. I hadn't tried to do that. I was only working toward telling stories based on memories of my own life, and revising those memories in order to understand them better myself.
I rewrote the rewrites and revised the revisions from notes I had taken over the years. I decided to record the opus as an audiobook--and that was another surprise! My training and experience as an actor made reading my stories more vivid to me that writing them had.
And the world of audiobooks is a different world than the world of books. People who don't read books do listen to audiobooks. They need a certain kind of voice and delivery, and, knowing the stories as well as I do makes my voice the right one. It was challenging and enlightening to read into a microphone, and the result is pretty fantastic. I have a web page now, with places to click to order the book or the hear a sample of the audiobook, and a lot of pictures of me and links to other books. The pictures are necessary because I have a brand--the brand is "83-year-old female who's lived an exciting life and has a lot to say to you."
To get your attention, I'm playing the age card.
