"Recording sound and listening attentively have been an integral part of my writing process for a long time now. My book " The Story of My Teeth," for example, took shape through a series of audio exchanges with a group of workers in a juice factory in Mexico. I'd write weekly installments of a story, and they would record themselves reading it out loud and giving critiques. They'd then send me these clips as well as ideas for how to continue the story."
"And, for the past five years, I've been working with my team on " Echoes from the Borderlands," a sonic essay that works like a twenty-four-hour road trip along the U.S.-Mexico border. We've recorded hundreds of hours of material-sounds as subtle as that of the wind blowing through a saguaro forest, and some as strident as Border Patrol interrogations or rocket launches in Starbase, Texas."
Recording and attentive listening inform longstanding writing practices, shaping narrative development through collaborative audio exchanges and fieldwork. Weekly story installments were recorded by factory workers who read, critiqued, and contributed ideas that guided continuation. Transcribing and translating testimonies of undocumented children produced essayistic material about the U.S. immigration system. A multi-year sonic project, Echoes from the Borderlands, compiles hundreds of hours of sounds ranging from wind through saguaro forests to Border Patrol interrogations and rocket launches. The novel Beginning Middle End incorporates binaural, hydrophone, and geophone recordings gathered in Sicily and the Aeolian islands to layer narrative with environmental soundscapes.
Read at The New Yorker
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