Longtime Valley artist now painting pictures with words

GLACIER VIEW — An accomplished Matanuska Valley painter has begun another canvas, but this time her voice is the work of art.

Longtime Glacier View resident Suzie Althens is making a name for herself in the audiobook narration market, where her work for a nonprofit as well as national publishers is earning a reputation as the voice from Alaska.

“It is one of those things you can do from just about anywhere, especially these days with the advances in technology,” Althens said. “I do try to hold back on playing the ‘A’ (Alaska) card,” she joked, “but sometimes it does have some cachet with the publishers.”

Althens and her husband Lee have lived in the Glacier View area for more than 30 years. Known for her watercolor paintings and sketches, Althens said she has devoted some 40 years to painting and teaching art, but has turned that creativity more to audio narration in the last two years.

“I am not selling anything right now — I have been producing for my own pleasure,” Althens said of her art. “But I do want to get back into it. The master plan is to narrate in the morning and paint in the afternoon. That’s the perfect day for me.”

She said living an hour from “town” — Palmer — drew her to audiobooks.

“Because we live so far away I started listening to a lot of books, and some of them I was just really drawn into,” Althens said. “I guess after a while I thought it would be fun to do, so I looked into it.”

What she initially found was a competitive field sought out by some if the country’s leading actors.

“There is a lot of catch-up being done with recording audiobooks,” Althens said. “It’s is one of the fastest growing segments of the entertainment industry.”

She continued to explore the field, eventually finding Learning Ally, a nonprofit organization that aids blind, visually impaired and dyslexic students with a series of audio and tablet-based reading programs.

After some back-and-forth with Learning Ally, she said she was asked if she could work from home.

“They taught me how to work with the recording program and then I started to wonder how I was doing,” Althens said, adding that she began searching online and eventually connected with and has taken classes from renowned narrators Scott Brick, Pat Fraley and Grammy-award winner Paul Ruben.

“They are very cool people into doing things for others — helping them learn to narrate because there is just this flood of need to record books that haven’t been recorded,” she said.

Along with narrating some 40 books, mostly through her Learning Ally work and through the Amazon-affiliated Audiobook Creation Exchange, Althens also finished two books last year for commercial publishers: “Undivided,” a nonfiction work, and “Miss Ruffles Inherits Everything.”

“Miss Ruffles,” set in Texas, had a range of characters that were fun to voice, Althens said.

“There was an exterminator, a gardener — it was fun to give them different voices,” she said, “but you can go too far and it makes people forget they are in the story.

On a more local level, Althens has a weekly, half-hour segment on Radio Free Palmer in which she reads from the public domain materials. Recent featured works included authors Virginia Woolf and Gertrude Stein.

There’s a real technique to the reading, she said.

“If you go too far into a character, then it’s a caricature — it’s not a real person. But if you treat your characters like real people, then they don’t become too odd.”

She continues to take online classes and lately has been working with a Los Angeles casting director affiliated with publisher Random House.

“I am very excited about that,” she said of the L.A. connection, “because I feel like I have walked down all these trails and it just goes into another great space.”

She said the learning curve can be challenging, adding she often listens to online talk radio from Russia or France to get proper speech cadence and inflection.

“Of course I can’t understand a word they’re saying,” she laughed, “but I can get a sense for patterns. The cool thing about this is that you never stop learning.”

She also has used images of well-known literary characters to enhance her work.

“I narrated ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’ for Learning Ally and I had a photo of Gregory Peck in front of me,” she said, “because he had such a great cadence (as Atticus Finch.)”

Althens typically reads for four hours a day — usually on a tablet — from a small, insulated sound studio off her kitchen pantry. She said she has to watch what she wears, drinks and eats.

“I can’t wear anything jingly — it has to be squeaky clean in there,” she said of the studio. “And I have to drink lots of water and eat small meals — your stomach can’t be busy,” she laughed.

And yes, she does have words that can give her trouble.

“The word rural,” she laughed. “If you say it too slow, then it sounds like your IQ just plummeted. If too fast it comes across sounding completely wrong.”

All in all, Althens said being a good narrator equates to being a capable storyteller.

“You need act well when you narrate because if you want people to lean in to your story, you have to be a storyteller,” she said. “You have to have an ability to act and have, say, tension in your voice — or awe or wonder — it has to be an element of what you bring to the story.”

To hear samples of her narration and view some of her artwork, visit www.suziealthens.com. For more audio, visit Audible.com and type “Suzie Althens” into the search field.

Contact reporter Steven Merritt at 352-2269 or steven.merritt@frontiersman.com