Elena Passarello is the author of Let Me Clear My Throat Sarabande , a collection of essays on some unforgettable moments in the history of the human voice. For a decade, Elena worked as an actor and voice-over performer throughout the East Coast and in the Midwest. Carly Miller: My first question is what the revision process was like when working with this theme in your book of the human voice? Elena Passa rello: Yes. I wrote the first essay for the book before I knew that I was writing a bookβit was just for an assignment.
The voice is really the thing that I know about laughs. I wrote this essay about howβI was really interested in this, and still amβabout how we learn how to make our voices work, as people, right? Like, you know, nobody needs to say achoo when they sneeze; nobody needs to use their voice at all when they sneeze.
So, I completely re-wroteβafter my first deadlineβthat last essay in the book. And those were the major revisions, I think. The rest was just editing, making things make more sense, not spazzing out about YouTube clips so much all laugh.
I ended up doing this word-ranking of how many times I used particular words in the book, and I found that I kept on using weird ones like haggard , and wonky , so I had to sort of go back because the brain is going to get tired of doing a certain kind of descriptive work to enliven the ear, so I do think I amplified a lot of syntactical choices in order to keep the ear awake; I was doing more cartwheels than I normally would because of that specific impasse of writing about sound.
I do find, though, that I have a natural interest in being very performative and conversational. CM: Why were you drawn to the human voice, as opposed to any number of other characteristics that reveal identity? EP: laughs Yeah, yeah, I just have no visual perception at all laughs.
