Author interview, conducted by email. Jude Gaillot's answers are his own, lightly edited for clarity. AudiobookSoul has not listened to Welcome to Eureka Springs - this is a conversation, not a review.
Jude Gaillot's Welcome to Eureka Springs collects 60 true tales from a small Arkansas town, from the Crescent Hotel morgue to Carrie Nation-era saloon signs and a seven-story Jesus statue. The full subtitle sets the tone: The I-Sh*t-You-Not History of America's Quirkiest Town.
For the audiobook, Gaillot handed the microphone to the town itself: 60 chapters, 60 different local narrators, with syndicated radio host Ken Rundel introducing each reader and editing the final product.
We asked Gaillot how a town talks itself into reading its own history - and which pairings turned out to be almost too good to be coincidence.
When did you decide that 60 chapters should mean 60 different Eureka Springs voices - and how did you talk your neighbors into stepping up to a microphone?
I knew I had to deliver on the promise that a town of 2,100 in the middle of nowhere is the nation's quirkiest. The audiobook couldn't be ordinary or an afterthought. It had to hammer the point home.
A big part of Eureka Springs' quirkiness is the sheer range of personalities who find their way here. I realized the only way the narration could reflect that would be to have narrators who did, too.
Paying that many people would have been a paperwork nightmare, so instead I offered to make a small donation to the local charity of each narrator's choice. That made participating more fun.
Whenever we finished a chapter, I posted a photo of the narrator in the sound booth. People loved seeing which chapter someone they knew narrated and which charity they picked. By the end, people were approaching me to take part.
Some of the pairings feel almost too good to be coincidence - Bill King reading about the attorney who represented him, or Mayor Butch Berry, an architect, reading the chapter about E. Fay Jones. How did the matching come together, and was there a chapter that proved hardest to cast?
Anyone who's been in Eureka Springs a while will tell you coincidences happen here all the time. (Woo-woo? Maybe.) I didn't know Bill was part of Cheryl Maples' same-sex marriage lawsuit when I asked him to narrate her chapter, only that he was a prominent member of the local gay community at the time. When I asked Butch, I knew he was an architect, and that he had studied at the University of Arkansas where Jones taught, but it was nice to find out he spent a lot of time with Jones. I also had no idea Wendy Carlisle was an investor in Don McGuire's bar when I asked her to narrate his chapter.
I did seek out most of the other connections. In a town this small, it's easy to find someone who knows someone.
The hardest chapter to cast required singing! In the early 1900s, a Sunday school superintendent wrote a cheesy but fun theme song for the city's Tourist Social Hour Club, to the tune of "glory glory hallelujah." Since regular schmucks sang it back then, that's what I initially wanted. Imperfect would have been perfect. However, no amateur I approached wanted to risk embarrassing themselves, so I ended up asking my friend Megan Henry, who has professional singing experience and a captivating reading voice. She gave a stirring rendition.
Your narrators are shop clerks, chefs, mayors and mystics rather than full-time voice actors. What did the recording sessions actually look like - and how does Ken Rundel's narration hold 60 voices together as one listen?
Ken is a neighbor and friend, and a consummate radio pro. He and his wife MJ syndicate a classic rock show from their home studio, which is where we did the recording.
Since Welcome to Eureka Springs is a series of more or less independent profiles, we could record one bunch of chapters while I was writing the next. That let us spread recording over more than a year. Each session typically took a half hour or so for two takes of a five- to ten-minute chapter. I attended as many as I could, to answer any questions that came up.
Ken narrated the opening and closing, and introduces the narrator at the start of each chapter, so his voice becomes the listener's guide on the journey. He coached the narrators, most of whom had never set foot in a studio, based on his decades of DJ experience. He also edited the final product.
This being Eureka, even the recording process wound up being quirky. The old stone stairs leading to Ken's house are among the most uneven in the city, which is a high bar to clear. His sound booth is a tight squeeze - it's literally a remodeled bathroom closet.
Chapter 11 gives listeners the voice of the late Bill Ott, who played Santa at Eureka Springs holiday events for years. Did any moment during the recordings stay with you?
Bill was as jolly as they come. People smiled more around him.
We encouraged narrators to indicate quotes by using a slightly different tone. Bill went full Looney Tunes with character voices. I couldn't forget that if I tried, and thankfully his performance has been captured so he can continue to make people smile.
Your subtitle promises the I-Sh*t-You-Not history of America's quirkiest town. For a listener who has never set foot in the Ozarks, which single chapter best delivers on that promise?
That's a tough call. I guess I'll pass over the UFO researcher and the anarchist hippie biker mayor, and pick Cap'n Don.
Don McGuire opened a bar and grill, Cap'n Don's, on Main Street in 1973, but booze wasn't the intoxicant that landed him in the book. "Outlaw country" musicians such as Willie Nelson, Waylon Jennings, David Allan Coe, and Billy Joe Shaver visited Eureka Springs often in the 1970s and '80s. Sure, they enjoyed the city's vibrant Americana music scene, but the real draw was the hybrid strain of pot that Don grew. About half the town has some crazy story involving Willie and/or Don.
One of those stories, a Willie Nelson after-party at the Crescent Hotel, is in the chapter. Growers from miles around brought bales of their finest. The Crescent, which many believe is haunted, makes an appearance in more than a dozen chapters.
Find Welcome to Eureka Springs
- Welcome to Eureka Springs book page - full 60-narrator roster
- Welcome to Eureka Springs on Amazon (audiobook)
- Welcome to Eureka Springs on Spotify
About Jude Gaillot
Jude Gaillot (pronounced "Guy Yo") is the board president of the nonprofit Writers' Colony at Dairy Hollow. He lives in Eureka Springs, Arkansas, with his wife and their three yappy little dogs, as well as the occasional groundhog, armadillo, or fox.
