Operator: You've probably never heard the name Robin Miles, but there's a good chance you've heard her and maybe at some length.

Robin: "Stop your nonsense, Wilbur," said the oldest sheep. "If you have a new friend here, you are probably disturbing his rest, and the quickest way to spoil a friendship is to wake somebody up in the morning before he's ready. How can you be sure your friend is an early riser."

Operator: Robin Miles is an actor who has appeared in over 400 audiobooks, 400, and all sorts of genres. From E. B. White's classic Charlotte’s Web to Isabel Wilkerson’s Caste, which is a deep analysis of race in America. Audiobooks are a booming segment of the publishing industry, and Miles has cultivated that as a specialty. She describes herself as a vocal chameleon, skilled at imitating and playing with accents for different characters, even inventing new accents. Daniel Gross, who's an editor at the New Yorker has been writing about Robin miles, and they've gotten pretty deep into the craft of reading a book out loud.

Daniel: Robin records a lot of her books in her closet. It's a little trap as a widow closet, which is smaller than like a shower stall. Robin has impeccable posture. She has a ballet instructor's posture, and she has these sharp cheekbones. I remember that she took her shoes off before she walked into the studio. Even when I went to a professional recording studio with her, she took off her rain boots, and then she walked into the studio. She always records in barefoot. Teach me one of your warm-ups, I want to try it out, we're in front of a microphone now.

Robin: Okay. Basically starting with your middle range, and then going down with a kind of a nasally why sound so [onomatopoeia] and then coming forward, and I do an in breath [onomatopoeia] till I get to that buzzy spot where you hear it going in and out, it means the sound is popping in and out of different sinus chambers, loosening everything up in there.

Daniel: I feel like I'm at the beginning of a classical concert and everybody's tuning their instruments.

Robin: Yes, that's sometimes how I feel too, definitely.

Daniel: You trained as an actor, you could have worked in TV, film, Broadway, you did work in some of these areas.

Robin: I have.

Daniel: Why narration?

Robin: Oh, wow. Well, all right, I'm going to tell you the good, the bad, and the ugly. The good is telling a story, fully, all of it from all the aspects of it, and creating the intimacy between you and your listener is so satisfying. Being in a great play, means you have to have the money and the other actors and a script and a director. This is just me in my book, and I love that. Secondly, it's bottoms dream from A Midsummer Night's Dream. Let me play the lions part too. I should play frisbee in a monster small voice. I love to play all those different characters.

I'm a vocal chameleon at least that's what I've been called, and I loved it. I was like, "Okay, I'll take that." I feel like a vocal chameleon sometimes, and transforming myself into those things, and trying to find a truthful way to do that. There's nothing else like it, really. I get to exercise every muscle in my body and my mind too, so why this? Now, the practical or the ugly is when I got out of drama school. "Oh, man, I think I got out in 94," I don't remember exactly when this began, but there was up stretch where Hollywood or television did not create one Black or minority character in the television lineup for the new season, and I had a powerful agent at the time. There was almost nothing for me to go out for.

Daniel: That was the world he graduated into.

Robin: It's timing, sometimes somebody else comes out and it's like, whoa, they're in the Shonda Rhimes period. That's fabulous. I've been waiting for the Shonda Rhimes period to come where we have these writers creating opportunities, and we have a population of people in the United States who are beginning to see, they're beginning to expand their notion of who can be American. Because I do think that's really what's at the base of it. You have an Asian actor, you have a Black actor, you've got Middle Eastern actor, why can't pay to play in American? During that period, especially, we didn't have access to those roles, so you had to wait for something to match your ethnicity.

Daniel: Not just your ethnicity, but the ethnicity that was perceived when a person saw you graduating into that world.

Robin: I thought, well, let me park myself here. Let me hang out over here, but I got so much from doing the books. Then I realized, of course, there was an after job I was after, but I had health insurance. [chuckle] I had health insurance.

Daniel: That's always what doesn't.

Robin: It was my second book, Cane River by Lalita Tademy. Seven generations, I believe, might be six of family members in slavery in Louisiana, and the creating of that family line, mostly through rape. That is what it is in this book, but the slave owners were French, and so a lot of the men are coming literally from France. That first generation, all those men, now cease, they all have a very crisp, French accent, and then they have their children.

What I did was I started to create what would be a Creole dialect, because it doesn't start out that way. Then each generation start to have a little [unintelligible 00:06:56] going on like the rhythm and the vowel sounds. I thought, nobody's ever going notice, and then the review came out and I thought, wow, people are people really listen, the reviewer was really listening.

Daniel: If was to say you were basically inventing a language or a dialect because it was in that middle space between different--

[crosstalk]

Robin: Yes. I do that now a lot in fantasy and in sci-fi. I'll take-- I call them mashups. It's the Jimmy Caan term is a mash-it-up. I'll have a character, let's say that's from a dominant race in the universe, or that has some power, and I'll say, all right, in German, and Nigeria, Nigeria is a power on that continent, and Germany's a power on that continent, and I'll take the German consonant sounds or vowel sounds, and I'll mash it up with the rhythm pattern of somebody who might come from Nigeria so that it doesn't sound exactly like one of those things. You can't just say, "That's German," but it's not it, there's something else in there.

Daniel: How do you keep it straight, so that when you return to that character, 10 pages later, you're in the same voice, and not in some other voice?

Robin: Oh, I've had some-- that took me a while to really, I think, nail. What I do as I start reading the book, and I'll get about 80 pages in and stop. I'm underlining and highlighting any characteristics about a character-

Daniel: This is when you're reading for preparation.

Robin: -and I'm doing a pre-read, I'm just prepping now, I'm reading the way anybody would read a book, maybe a little bit more slowly. I highlight, underline, and I stop about page 80. I take everything and put it into my tracking doc. I want to know how old they are. I want to know if they're tall or short. Do they have a barrel chest? I want to know what they look like. I'm going to put the length of their hair, the color of their hair, that they speak out of the sides of their mouth. Anything big like a lisp or an accent, of course, I'm going to notice and notate.

Then I'm looking at what are their reactions. When they're in scenes with other people are they quick to anger? Are they snarky? Who is this person? Then I have all that written down.

Daniel: Why is it important to know if they're tall, or if they're barrel-chested? How does that figure into your performance of it?

Robin: Oh, imagine, I have a character named Fran, and she was in 12 times blessed, well, okay, I remember that. Fran is described as being-- she's like 661. She's described as being able to drink a guy under the table. She's the best friend of the protagonist. I thought if I were 61 and a woman almost every single person that I have conversations with I'm going to be looking physically down several inches at them. If my friend is 5'6, I'm literally going to be looking down. One day I was just reading and I thought, I put my finger on my chin and I went-- My face, the plane of my face would always be tilted down. As soon as I did that, it compressed right there. There's Fran. It compressed my vocal cords, and there's Fran. She's just your great everyday gal. She's got her feet on the ground, no-nonsense. I got a mattress up the stairs. I can do that, that's no problem. The plane of her face would be tilted toward this floor all the time.

Daniel: It's physical. It's not just auditory. It's actually in the body.

Robin: It was in my body. I have used other ways in, like in the book Windy City Blues. It's the story of Chess Records. The two brothers who ran Chess Records are prominent characters. In that book, she describes what they sound like. He gets on the phone and he's trying to sell his black artists because it's a Black Blues label. He gets on the phone and then when he shows up, they're shocked that he's white. There was something about how he was talking that needed to have a little molasses in it. That's what I call it. Then that came from that nugget.

Daniel: Wow. You don't have to know what it is that makes him sound Black.

Robin: They're shocked when he shows up and he's not Black. I know how that feels. People are shocked when I show up and I'm not white. [laughs] I get that. I just did a historic piece, Shanna, which is by a writer who wrote all romances, but it takes place in the 1700s, and so I had to have characters that sounded like that. The jailers, they were all like cockney characters in the jail and they're brutalizing other people. I had to be able to do that, which means way open through [unintelligible 00:12:22] shocking a lot. I love playing pirates, yo ho ho, and a bottle of ram. [laughs] How much more fun could an actor ever have playing a pirate?

Daniel: There's this push in Hollywood and in stage acting to be a lot more thoughtful about casting. You're less likely now to see a Korean actor playing a Chinese character, a South Asian actor playing a Latina character. The rules seem slightly different in audio, and I wonder what they are. From your perspective, do you think of audiobook narration in that same way?

Robin: I think about it similarly in that if there's a book with a main character who is from a place, and a lot of the other people in the book are from that same place, it makes sense. It just does to try and find someone from that culture who narrates. The second part of that someone who narrates not just an actor because it is a different medium. Learning how to approach this material in story form like this is different.

I know as an audiobook director when I've had celebrities, sometimes you really got to give them more time to make that transition from what they know to this new thing. You also get books where you have an international cast. At that point, you need somebody who has a background like I do, who feels comfortable doing, okay, there's a Swedish character, there's an Irish character, there's a Jamaican, there's a this. You're going to need to have somebody who can pull that off.

Daniel: A vocal chameleon, you said?

Robin: Yes, a vochameleon. I don't know. I will say though, I think this idea of authenticity in entertainment because it's really the broader stroke is film, TV, stage, et cetera. Authenticity is not just-- I don't know how to be clear about this, but we have a population of people here that are from all over the place. A lot of the marginalized people who have not been allowed to be an American since forever have also been oftentimes barred from even playing themselves. They were casting white actors as Latinos since the beginning of time, and white actors in blackface, white actors in yellow face with their eyes taped. I mean there's that horrible Mickey Rooney cameo.

Daniel: That's Breakfast at Tiffany's.

Robin: Right. The actors were here the whole time. The way I describe it is this. We have a big bin full of shoes. The shoes are from all these different countries. They're culturally specific shoes. For years and years and years, white actors have been pulling whatever shoe they want out of the bin. The actors whose shoes they actually belong to haven't even been able to approach the bin. They can't even get their own shoes out. Right now what's happening is the entertainment industry is saying, "Wait, wait, give those shoes back. Let the person who's Korean wear the Korean shoes, et cetera. Give them their own authentic shoes back."

We're claiming them and saying, "Oh my God, I get to be me." Over time, we all want to be able to have a shoe bin that we can draw from. A Korean actor should not be only playing Korean characters and Japanese characters. They should be playing all Asian characters I think in the long run, but right now we are in what I consider the healing beat. It's a restoration of people's rights back to them.

When those actors and cultures are ready to put their shoes back in the bin and when they're allowed to draw from the bin, the American shoes they've been barred from drawing from, then we'll have a world where those things are much more open. Okay, we can go in that direction, but no Marginalized actor, POC actor, LGBTQ actor wants to be only playing inside that box. They haven't even been able to get inside that box for a while. Well, since forever really.

Daniel: What kinds of roles would you not take?

Robin: I think if something especially is first person and it's from specifically an Asian culture or even a Russian culture, we have actors who can do that. Think about African Americans are 12% of the population. That's it. 12%. How many white actors have grown up around Black families? It's only going to be a handful because we've been living with segregation. We're still living with segregation. I'm acknowledging when and where would most white actors in our country have extended time with Black families and friends.

Think about it from the other side, we're only 12% of the population. Every room we go into, everywhere we go, we're surrounded by a culture that's defined by white culture. We either grow up in it and we know it like the back of our hand, or if we don't and we grow up, let's say, more of a specifically black neighborhood that's separate, as we go along and go into college and go into jobs, we have to know the dominant culture to survive, but that's not true for white actors. I've met several who they have grown up around Black folks, but it is a thorny kind of a thing right now.

I think we'll get through it because we are beginning to realize that we have to respect that there are cultural differences. I do not expect to be casting Crazy Rich Asians, the audio drama. There are too many things that I don't know from an insider view. I was doing ADR, which is Additional Dialogue Recording. I used to do that a lot in New York. We were dubbing a film and we were doing a scene where everybody in the room was a black guy. It was a bachelor party, so I'm the only woman in the room [chuckles] because I'm voicing the two women.

One of the guys in the loop group was a white guy who's cooled down, he's got lots of black friends. He's just got that coolness and that urban coolness. Two guys get in a fight and we have to improv on the mic. He said, "Whoa, whoa. Somebody called the cops." Every Black man in that room stopped their improv and just looked over at him like, "No, that's not what would happen."

Daniel: You're instantly out of character.

Robin: Well, it's because he didn't know that if a group of Black men are in a hotel room having a bachelor party and they call the police chances are somebody is going to walk out wounded, and that's a best-case scenario, but he didn't know that. They were all shocked into silence for a second. The poor guy, he was like, "What? What?" He had no idea why it wasn't appropriate. You need somebody with that insider knowledge when you're doing cultural work. I will say this, I narrate, or I've been doing this for so long and I do it so often during the week that I live in a state of emotional openness, that can be a little frightening to exist in that state of no defenses. I have to make sure that the people around me and my friends and thank God for my husband Ty, they understand that I just live in a very vulnerable state day in and day out.

Daniel: You're channeling all of the stories that you tell.

Robin: [crosstalk] Yes. I need to be open enough as a human to let whatever that author put in there, register and then bounce back out.

Daniel: Robin Miles, thank you so much.

Robin: I had a really good time. Thank you for having me.

Daniel: Me too. Thank you.

Robin: You're welcome.

Operator: You can read more from Daniel Gross on Robin Miles and her work @newyorker.com. She's the narrator of hundreds of audiobooks and here she is reading from Jacqueline Woodson's another Brooklyn.

Robin: For a long time, my mother wasn't dead yet. Mine could have been a more tragic story. My father could have given into the bottle or the needle or a woman and left my brother and me to care for ourselves, or worse in the care of New York City Children's Services where my father said there was seldom a happy ending, but this didn't happen. I know now that what is tragic isn't the moment, it is the memory.

[[music]

[00:22:03] [END OF AUDIO]

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