Author Roberta Price is sharing with us her experience recording the audiobook narration of her memoir. Find Huerfano: A Memoir of Life in the Counterculture out on Audible!
Guest Post
Huerfano: A Memoir of Life in the Counterculture
The Story Behind the (Audio) Story
by Roberta Price
I wrote the first draft of Huerfano: A Memoir of Life in the Counterculture during a year off from practicing intellectual property law. I had a “Time Out Grant” from my alma mater, Vassar College, and received a second grant from the Wurlitzer Foundation, which gave me a little adobe in Taos, New Mexico to work in. While writing I often read aloud to myself to work through difficult stretches. I wanted to maintain a strong, consistent voice throughout, and hearing myself say the words helped a lot.
When the book came out and was well received (L.A. Times Book Review, Vanity Fair, awards, etc.), I went on tour to many of the great bookstores in the West; Book TV filmed a reading. At each one I read from the book. Huerfano is assigned in colleges and university courses, and over the years I’ve talked in those venues too (Amherst, Williams, University of Texas Austin, Vassar, Yale, etc.), where I also always read from the book.
My brother-in-law, Joe Boyd (author of White Bicycles: Making Music in the 1960s) and my editors urged me to record the audiobook myself. A young New Mexico musician, Julian Martinez, enthusiastically helped me start off, setting up his Reflexion Filter X Pro Vocal Booth, an AKG C-300 Condenser large diaphragm mike, and a MOTU 828 mk2 in Garage Band connected to the Apple Mac in my office.
I had flirted with majoring in Drama at Vassar; Meryl Streep was younger and down the hall. I had taken acting classes in New York before college. All I had to do was speak and record, right?
But recording the book was different from reading to crowds at the bookstores and large college classrooms, where I read a short sample and got to explain, elaborate, and answer questions. Recording alone was an extended effort, a marathon. It was more intimate, spare, more ardent. I was in an empty room with my words, reading about my past and a time that was rife with passion and emotion, a time when members of my generation rode a kind of tidal wave that swept us up on uncharted shores. (We were stupid, we were stardust.) I found myself alone with the prototype Charlotte Bronte addressed so directly in Jane Eyre (“Reader, I married him.”)
The events in Huerfano took place almost five decades ago. Recording the memoir was a deep dive back. As I read, I didn’t forget that I was a seventy plus year old woman who had lived a full life for decades after those events, but I also never forgot the young woman who’d lived those experiences, nor the woman who wrote the words about them almost twenty years before she recorded them. Recording was a dance between me and my earlier selves; it turned out that it required all of me for it to sound right. At moments, late at night, the empty room felt crowded — the people I was reading about were floating around as I read.
When we talk about our pasts, we’re still in the present. And when recording a memoir, mortality is in the room. [A central character in Huerfano is a man who was gorgeously alive then but who died of AIDS ten years after the time I wrote about.] I read passages about one young girl in the book at the same time decades later when her grown daughter asked for a photo of her dead mother. I read and relived a brief passion for a man who I’m not sure is dead or alive now. I read the chapters about beat poets Allen Ginsburg, Peter Orlovsky, and Gregory Corso, who stayed with us for several weeks and at night read poems that are now in books on the shelves of the room where I recorded. I fought to keep the loss of those folks out of my voice – they were so alive then and deserved to be so in the audio. I recorded pages about children whom I’d seen born who were now living exciting and brilliant lives as I read into the mike. I got calls from dear friends then who are dear friends now – a university professor, a director of a big film festival, a successful artist who is traveling to Dubai to talk about her huge sculpture there, a famous movie and television actor….. our conversations gave me the energy needed to speak about a time that was so vibrant, so vivid and has become hard to grasp.
Huerfano was edited by a professional audio engineer, Luz Fleming, whose birth I wrote about in Huerfano. When he was three years old, he would walk up the steep ridge path for a quarter of a mile alone and visit with me over milk and cookies. At the time he worked on the audiobook, Luz and his family were taking a six month sabbatical from life in New York City and lived at Libre community – where Luz had been born, and the site of the action in Huerfano (yes, reader, Libre lives on). Luz’s editing was both highly professional and a labor of love; there were multi-layered memories for him too.
Luz suggested short guitar riffs between chapters, and we asked my former husband, David Perkins (the Yale graduate with whom I moved to Libre in 1970 and from whom I separated seven years later), to write and play some guitar music. David generously wrote and played the brief melodic riffs that reflect the mood of the chapters. He too was in the book then and in the recording now. Finally, the introduction was read by my husband of 33 years, whose baritone is usually heard in courts in New Mexico towns to the Supreme Court in Washington, D.C. He wasn’t there then, but he inherited that time and the people from the Huerfano Valley when he married me.
Listener, I recorded it. I hope all the layers of experience and memories, and — to quote the Beatles once more — all that love — come through.
The Book
Title: Huerfano: A Memoir of Life in the Counterculture
Author: Roberta Price
Blurb:
In the late 1960s, new age communes began springing up in the American Southwest with names like Drop City, New Buffalo, Lama Foundation, Morning Star, Reality Construction Company, and the Hog Farm. In the summer of 1969, Roberta Price, a recent college graduate, secured a grant to visit these communities and photograph them. When she and her lover David arrived at Libre in the Huerfano Valley of southern Colorado, they were so taken with what they found that they wanted to participate instead of observe. The following spring they married, dropped out of graduate school in upstate New York, packed their belongings into a 1947 Chrysler Windsor Coupe, and moved to Libre, leaving family and academia behind.
Huerfano is Price’s captivating memoir of the seven years she spent in the Huerfano (“Orphan”) Valley when it was a petrie dish of countercultural experiments. She and David joined with fellow baby boomers in learning to mix cement, strip logs, weave rugs, tan leather, grow marijuana, build houses, fix cars, give birth, and make cheese, beer, and furniture as well as poetry, art, music, and love. They built a house around a boulder high on a ridge overlooking the valley and made ends meet by growing their own food, selling homemade goods, and hiring themselves out as day laborers. Over time their collective ranks swelled to more than 300, only to diminish again as, for many participants, the dream of a life of unbridled possibility gradually yielded to the hard realities of a life of voluntary poverty.
Price tells her story with a clear, distinctive voice, documenting her experiences with photos as well as words. Placing her story in the larger context of the times, she describes her participation in the antiwar movement, the advent of the women’s movement, and her encounters with such icons as Ken Kesey, Gary Snyder, Abbie Hoffman, Stewart Brand, Allen Ginsburg, and Baba Ram Dass.
At once comic, poignant, and above all honest, Huerfano recaptures the sense of affirmation and experimentation that fueled the counterculture without lapsing into nostalgic sentimentality on the one hand or cynicism on the other.
“A wonderful memoir of learning, doing, sharing, and loving. The sunshine of this book is in the telling: humorous, resonant, occasionally pained, but always life-embracing.”—ForeWord (
“For many people a road not taken that is fascinating to read about. Libre was no utopia, but its members were committed and it felt more like family than the nuclear kind. Sweet children, with a sweet, sweet dream.”—Los Angeles Times Book Review
“I like this book. I like its attention to detail, its honesty, and the author’s clear distinctive voice. More than a tale of communes and hippies, Huerfano is a classic coming-of-age story, in which a young woman learns life’s lessons, one by one.”—The Santa Fe New Mexican
“Roberta Price’s book captures the moral fervor, the enormous amount of work, the sexual explorations, and the personal growth curve of one very smart, very attractive, highly educated woman who ‘threw it all away’ (as her parents might have said) to found an alternative community in the mountains of Colorado. This is a very very good book and deserves a wide audience.”—Peter Coyote, actor and author of Sleeping Where I Fall: A Chronicle
“A Splendid book that beautifully captures the spirit of the moment, and it does so in the best possible way—by recollecting and working through the specific details so often lost to memory and history. Huerfano is a virtual archive of data—an early edition of The Whole Earth Catalog come to life with a compelling narrative and vivid characters.”—Nick Bromell, author of Tomorrow Never Knows: Rock and Psychedelics in the 1960s
“An impressive and important book. There is a paucity of good literature on the commune movement of the ‘60s and ‘70s, and much stereotypic misrepresentation of the counterculture. What Price’s memoir reminds us is that the counterculture was intensely political, although the politics were personal as well as national.”—Alexander Bloom, coeditor of “Takin’ It to the Streets”: A Sixties Reader
You can find the audiobook of Huerfano: A Memoir of Life in the Counterculture out on Audible!
The book is also available in print and e-book.
About the Author
