Joshilyn Jackson on narrating a good friend's audiobook

How's this for coincidence: Joshilyn Jackson, author of Someone Else's Love Story, narrates the audiobook of How to Tell Toledo from the Night Sky by Lydia Netzer. Get it? Someone Else's Love Story author narrates someone else's love story. Love it. Here, Joshilyn shares how she met Lydia and how she ended up narrating her audiobook …

Joshilyn: I first met Lydia Netzer in 1992, when we started at the same creative writing grad school program.

I didn't like her.

She was a wild-eyed girl from Detroit who stomped around in boots and mini-dresses, wearing MAC lipstick and being very cynical and Northern. She was barely over 5 feet tall, played in a rock band, and her love for the American Romantics, especially Melville, was so strong it bordered on belligerence.

To be fair, she didn't like me much right back. I wafted into our first department meeting in palazzo pants and a colorful top. She does a killer imitation of her first impression of me, where she tosses her head and chirps in an exaggerated Southern accent, "Hey, y'all, I'm Joshilyn Jackson! I'm real friendly, and I have long curly hair and a boyfriend!"

We didn't want much to do with each other, but we ended up in the same workshop. There, we got to read each other's early fiction. It changed our interest level and opinions of the other.

I was straight-up dazzled. Netzer's early short stories were so fresh, so odd and wholly original. Even then, barely legal to drink, she was pushing boundaries, writing stories in which love could be expressed as a mathematical formula, where communes and characters alike could swing open on hinges and reveal themselves entirely, where a baby might be born a sea turtle and a man might enter an equestrian show jumping competition — as the horse.

Soon after we read each other's work, I ran into her in the English department. I followed her out of the building and got onto her bus. I rode with her all the way to her tiny apartment in the heart of boy's town. She invited me in, and I stayed for hours, charming her dog and eating up her ramen noodles.

We talked about writing and our ambitions, parsed our pasts and set goals for our futures. I didn't leave until I felt that we were well down the road toward friends. As a writer and an avid reader, I wanted very badly to see what she would do next.

That hasn't changed. More than 20 years later, Netzer's work flat sets my heart on fire, defying genre or classification, melding rich, smart-as-hell explorations of hard science, philosophy, religion and math with page-turning, very human tales of love and loss and hope and death. As one charmed but slightly puzzled reviewer on Goodreads put it, How to Tell Toledo from the Night Sky "doesn't resemble anything else I've read except for Netzer's first novel."

This makes my work as her audiobook reader intimidating, but also pure, unadulterated fun. In How to Tell Toledo from the Night Sky, I voiced half the Babylonian pantheon of dead gods, a Marilyn Monroe sound-alike, a woman who "was raised mute" and communicates almost entirely via singing, bird chirps and whistles, and a coder named Belion who lives half his life as a shamanistic buffalo-human hybrid Archmage.

I've been reading the audio versions of my own books for 10 years now. I know exactly what every character I invented should sound like, know the emphasis as it sounds in my head on each word and syllable. My greatest challenge is to let my single, limited, human voice express as closely as possible the way I hear it in my head.

This didn't fully prepare me to read Netzer. I am not sure what could.

I don't know if I could voice her books if I didn't have the best friend luxury of calling Lydia 19 times a day as we tape. I asked her everything from how to pronounce "anwa" to how to create periodic oscillation in the style of a black hole. I had her listen to my take on a character she describes as sounding "Like a robot, if a robot talked like a duck." And we went line by line through an obscure Western Pennsylvania accent that I'd never heard before.

I do know I can't wait to take listeners on a trip to Netzer's Ohio, where Toledo is the spiritual twin of ancient Babylon, Lake Erie full of Narwhals, gods stalk the wastelands around I-75, and you can meet your dead mother in a dreamscape from the Black Swamp.

Check out an audio excerpt from How to Tell Toledo from the Night Sky.

To find out more about Joshilyn and Lydia, visit their websites, www.joshilynjackson.com and lydianetzer.blogspot.com.