Daring to Tell - Making of Sushi Tuesdays AUDIOBOOK with Charlotte Maya

Duration: 1h 21m
Broadcast on: 05 Sep 2023
Audio Format: other

Debut memoirist Charlotte Maya now has a self-narrated audiobook of Sushi Tuesdays: A Memoir of Love, Loss and Family Resilience, produced by Michelle Redo. In this episode they talk about writing the book about the suicide death of Charlotte's husband, Sam Maya, as well as sharing what it was like to read and produce the audiobook.

Listen to Michelle's first conversation with Charlotte Maya on Daring to Tell in April of 2023.

Watch Karin Gutman- The Spirit of Story video interviews with Charlotte Maya among others.

More music by Phil Redo

I think it does speak to how hard it is to talk about suicide and how many of us have a story to share. If by writing I can help just one person, then it's worth it to me. If you or someone you love is struggling with thoughts of suicide, please call 988 to connect with the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline. Help is available, please ask. This is Daring to Tell. The podcast where writers read their own true stories of personal daring, then we talk about writing and life. I am your host, Michelle Radow. When I first met Charlotte Maya, we were each in our own little chiclet boxes of a Zoom writing workshop in January of this year. Each person introduced themselves what they were writing about, what phase of their project they were at. Somehow even through the Zoom, I felt a bit of a collective whoosh of air escaping the spaces we each occupied when Charlotte told us about her memoir that dealt with the suicide death of her husband, Sam, and how she was left to raise two sons, Danny and Jason, ages 8 and 6. The book was called Sushi Tuesdays. She was weeks away from her publication date. Her tone was serious and measured, and even and calm. What that woman must have been through, I thought. But I immediately felt a magnetic pull I sometimes feel in my core towards her, when something invisible pulls us to a person or sometimes a place for an unknown reason. Suicide of a loved one, such a tragic, contorted trauma to be thrust into. Like many people, I had a story of suicide in my family history, and I needed to learn more about hers, what she had learned through this unimaginable life detour. In April, I had her on this podcast, and we talked about her newly released memoir Sushi Tuesdays, which was what she called her day for self-care. There was a second big surprise for me once I started reading the book, and that was pretty much the topic of our first conversation. I'll put a link to that episode in the show notes, however, when I stopped recording after that conversation and was chatting with her more about writing and publishing her book, I asked her about something I had noticed. She didn't have an audio book, and she was wonderful reading her own work. So I said, Charlotte, I noticed you don't have an audio book. Do you have plans for one? Are you planning to read it yourself? Well, that opened a door to a first for each one of us. For her, a debut narration, although she had done much reading aloud, for me, the first professional production of an audio book, although I had done much audio production in my life, but never a project of this magnitude. So it was a summer where she and I spent many, many hours recording and producing the Sushi Tuesdays audio book, which I will very proudly say is available right now through Audible. But the culmination of that project, I wanted to have her back for another conversation where we could discuss her book more fully, as well as give a little peek behind the scenes at what it was like for her to narrate her own audio book. When we spoke again through my Riverside FM virtual recording studio, I greeted her with this. I have to say this is very bittersweet because it's like, here we are talking again, and

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