McSweeney’s Publisher Eli Horowitz

When we decided to launch audiobooks last year, we immediately began brainstorming how to make them more “eMusic,” if you will. Discovery, independence, prestige — these are the qualities that we prize on the music side. How could we maintain those same characteristics with books as well? One name kept coming up: McSweeney’s, the incomparably great and idiosyncratic publishing collective founded by Dave Eggers that churns out great words and ideas on its website, in its quarterly literary journal, in its magazine The Believer and in its oddball DVD series Wholphin. If anyone in the literary world embodies independence, it’s these guys.

Fortunately for everyone, they were up for it. McSweeney’s Notes From the Field is the first of four audio introductions to the McSweeney’s world, each built around some loosely cohesive theme, this inaugural collection tackling the notion of danger in a number of different permutations. We recently chatted with McSweeney’s publisher Eli Horowitz to discuss the nature of McSweeney’s, plans for future installments and the peculiar recording process that lead to volume one of this series. Read it below to fully understand just how special and unique this project is.

WHAT IS MCSWEENEY’S?

“We’re an independent publishing company based in San Francisco. I guess we’re ten years old now. We do this quarterly journal, we do a monthly magazine called The Believer, we do books — all sorts of books, like novels, art books, humor, all sorts of things — and now we have this DVD project Wholphin, a quarterly. But the stuff we are doing now for eMusic is all from our sorta flagship publication, the Quarterly. That’s short stories and other things of different shapes and sizes.

“No one here, basically, has ever been a part of a big publisher. I came to this job as a volunteer carpenter helping to build our tutoring center. I had never done this before, and everyone else here was basically an intern that stuck around. So more than being consciously different it’s more that we’re blissfully ignorant of how things are done. [T]he main thing is a sense of spontaneity and possibility and wanting to challenge ourselves.”

ON THEIR FIRST AUDIOBOOK EXPERIENCE

“The idea is to have four themed collections, and this one is danger. That’s the word for this one. Stories with physical action and fraught tension and actual violent people or animals involved.

“We’re still learning about this audio stuff. Everything we do, we do it before we understand it, and that’s how we start to understand it. We learned that we really need to tell the writers not to say their “p’s” too loudly. A lot of this one was just figuring out what kind of mic was good enough. It was a pretty encouraging experience technically. We got this mic for $100 off the internet and sent it around to the people wherever they were and they recorded it directly into their computers using Garageband or whatever.

“We mail [the mic] around. Maybe we’ll try and make that required; they can carve their initials into the mic stand. Part of the learning curve was just figuring out how to do that. The first thing we were excited about with this project with eMusic was that I hadn’t realized how relatively few audiobooks there are. I guess the barrier is the cost of making them: the studio time, the actors and all of that stuff. So a book has to have sold 50,000 copies to even be in the audiobook realm, and we of course know that there are so many great books that don’t sell anywhere near 50,000 copies, let alone 5,000 copies.”

ON THE AUTHORS

eMusic: My favorite moment in this whole collection is when Jonathan Ames says he needs a glass of water.

Horowitz: [Laughs] Right! That was all Chris Ying, who did all of the technical work on this. I don’t think Ames intended us to keep that; Chris just noticed it was a nice moment. So we’re all about accidental moments like that. Or one other thing I really like is that Jack Pendarvis got Joey Lauren Adams to say two lines, this minor minor thing. We didn’t know that was going to happen; I guess she was just hanging out with him. I don’t know how it happened. I still don’t know. So we’re still trying to figure out how to encourage unpredictable things to happen. We’re still getting the hang of that, but I imagine it will happen more and more.

I’m guessing for these writers this was the first time they had done an audiobook.

Maybe not for Ames. Certainly he’s done radio before. For everyone else, though, definitely. I was really impressed with how well they all read. That was not a given. When I talked to some other audiobook person about this project, they were warning against it because they said authors always wanted to read their own books, but you can’t let them, you have to get an actor. Amateurs shouldn’t get involved. But, of course, we’re all about amateurs.

ON THE COVER

We thought, we’re doing this just for eMusic, just for this page, so that’s an advantage. Instead of repurposing something we’ve done for a whole different context, we make it just for this. So everything was about that: a bold image, text that would stand out. A dinosaur? I don’t know.

Who can argue with a dinosaur?

It’s a basic format that we can repeat for the next three. A different dinosaur maybe? [Laughs] The next one is all going to be romantic stories, so maybe we should do two dinosaurs holding hands.

ON THE FUTURE

“We have done some [pieces] that are mostly or entirely spoken, dialogue between two people and then there’s one that’s dialogue between about 16 people that maybe we’ll do eventually. We have dreams of doing one that’s a radio play, a radio drama. Hopefully we’ll figure that out someday. [T]here’s a piece online actually — yeah, this is the one — that’s a list of email addresses that are really hard to say over the phone. Let me find this. Yeah, okay. I can’t even tell you these because it would be impossible. I’ll just send you a link.” [Editor's note: this is the link.]

ON GI JOE AND RECORDING ON LOCATION

Why did Keith [Pille] decide to record [his story about training for the COBRA army] on a bridge?

That was our first attempt at ambient noise.

You mean he couldn’t go on location to a COBRA base and record it?

He animates himself and heads over… I think it was just, well the house seems kind of boring, so let’s go somewhere. We’re still learning. That’s a point to underscore. These are our baby steps. Being on a bridge? Better than not being on a bridge. There’s danger. Things happen on bridges. They get blown up, people fall off them. Things go quickly over them. Drawbridges. You know, how could there not be a bridge?