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Hidden in Ukraine’s troves of folk wisdom is the expression “A word is not a sparrow. Once it flies out, you won’t catch it.”
“A Word is Not a Sparrow” is the title of an upcoming audio anthology of stories — all set against the backdrop of Russian repression through the centuries — ready to proverbially fly out into the world. The collection has been created by some members of the Professional Audiobook Narrators Association (PANA) as part of the Ukraine Audiobook Relief Project.
This is an all-volunteer initiative launched in support of Ukrainian artists impacted by war; all proceeds generated through sales will be donated to the Artists at Risk Connection in Ukraine through PEN America, a nonprofit that works to protect artistic freedom.
The audiobook, which is being distributed globally through a platform called Spoken Realms, was released on June 11.
One of the stories in this anthology is “Yulia’s Morning” written by longtime Palo Alto resident Christopher Dewees, who won the Palo Alto Weekly’s 37th Annual Short Story Contest last year. The story is about a busy Ukrainian mother who doubles up as a freedom fighter to help her country brave the Russian invasion.
When voice actor Susan Iannucci, who was looking for something to narrate for the anthology, read Dewees’ story in the paper, she decided to seek the rights for it.
“I was still looking for the right thing,” said Iannucci in an interview with this publication. The Cossack folktales she was reading at the time didn’t quite fit the bill and Dewees’ fiction impressed her immediately. “I just really felt like — this is happening! It was so real to me.”
But first, she had to find the author. “It took me a while to track Christopher down.” she said, recalling the process of picking up clues about his address from the information printed alongside his story in the Weekly. He was not easy to find online, so based on these crumbs she went looking for him around Palo Alto.
“I went searching for his name and I found his name along with a woman’s name,” she said about the arduous quest that led her to Dewees’ wife, whom she found on Nextdoor. Eventually, she spoke with the author himself and secured the rights to read the story for the anthology. “He’s been a real delight to work with.”
The story touched her enough to motivate her to undertake this kind of effort. “I feel deeply for the people who have lost their homes, family members, the schooling that was disrupted,” she said, about the war. “When they got invaded, it felt so medieval — it was so amazing to me that that could even happen.”
The plot of Dewees’ piece was what piqued her interest. “Everybody was a volunteer over there; they have a professional army but pretty much all the citizens are involved one way or the other helping each other,” she said, about the situation in Ukraine. “I knew it (the story) was fiction, but very believable — you don’t have a hard time understanding that this is all very possible and happening to real people.”
The other aspect that appealed to her was the writing style. “A lot of times authors don’t read their own work out loud, making it harder for a narrator, but his was just right — I felt like I understood what he was trying to say,” said Iannucci, who has narrated over 70 books so far. “It wasn’t hard to find how to communicate this story at all. I really liked how he put it together … I could visualize it and that actually helps when you’re narrating too.”
For Dewees, the idea to write the story came from a newspaper article about recent affairs in Ukraine. “What truly intrigued me was the opportunity to contrast our faith in human progress with our continuing capacity for violence by way of an extreme example,” Dewees said in an email.
It was the “oases of normalcy in the midst of extraordinary violence” that struck him as particularly shocking. “My intent was to attempt to convey a sense of that profound disconnect with the character of Yulia and her actions in the story,” he said, marveling at the juxtaposition of mundane life and existential threat. “Modern technology, transportation and communications enable us to commute to war. What are the implications? How do you make breakfast for your family, then drive off to kill or be killed before buying groceries and returning home to prepare dinner? And, for those that do, what are the consequences of the extreme compartmentalization this requires?”
To Dewees, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was glaring for another reason — it narrowed the distance between soldiers and citizens, a reality that informed the very premise of his story.
“Ukraine is a modern, industrialized country, with several generations of citizens who, until February 24, 2022, had not experienced open war,” he said. “In fact, during the initial phase, much of Ukraine’s success in thwarting the invasion was apparently due to the efforts of ordinary civilians who brought their laptops, cellphones, drones and trigger fingers to the cause, many of them going back and forth to home and hearth in the process.”
He hopes the anthology will help raise enough money to make a meaningful positive impact for Ukrainian artists. “Apart from that, although this effort may seem small, anything done to keep the awareness of the ridiculous, meaningless tragedy that is occurring in Ukraine in the minds of the rest of the world is important,” he said.
“A Word is Not a Sparrow” was published June 11. Find more information at pronarrators.org/sparrow.