SEATTLE--Serve Washington has selected Rick Sipe as a recipient of the 2024 Washington State Volunteer Service Awards for the state's North Puget Sound region.
Sipe is a volunteer book narrator for WTTBL. WTBBL is a program of the Washington State Library, a division of the Office of the Secretary of State. It provides library services statewide and by mail to any Washingtonian unable to read standard print material due to blindness, visual impairment, Deaf Blindness or physical (cannot hold a book or turn pages) or reading disability.
Sipe, an Army veteran and retried Boeing employee, has lent his voice to narrate books for WTTBL since 2008. His mother was a patron of WTBBL. She was diagnosed with macular degeneration, an eye disease that occurs when the central portion of the retina, called the macula, wears down. It commonly affects a person's central vision and is a major cause of vision loss and/or blindness for older Americans.
After his mother passed away, Sipe said he wanted to do something to honor her, so he auditioned to be a book narrator.
Book narrators record books for WTBBL collection. Sipe says after auditioning, narrators go through a training program that can take around two to three months. The training teaches techniques for reading prose out loud and maintaining stamina while reading for long periods of time. It also gives a primer on how to use the recording equipment.
Sipe goes to a studio once a week and spends a couple of hours narrating books for patrons to listen to. After he's done recording, he goes back and uses equipment to fix any mistakes he may have made or re-record a passage he didn't think sounded right the first time. When all the recording sessions are complete, staff at WTBBL listen to the full recording to ensure it's complete, words are pronounced correctly and it and can be easily understood. Sipe says it's not uncommon for staff to come back to request additional passages for re-recording.
Sipe says there's a lot of skills you need to master to become a narrator, like knowing how and when to inflect your voice, learning to pronounce words in different languages and reading for characters without becoming a voice actor.
After the recordings and re-recordings are complete, staff format the audio files for specific materials.
The process, from start to finish, may sound exhausting to the average person, but Sipe says that just shows WTBBL's commitment to professionalism and creating a quality product for patrons.
"The most rewarding part of volunteering, for me, is the insistence on excellence," Sipe said. "WTTBL doesn't accept anything but 100% of the very best effort and they have a really sweet way of saying, 'That's not good enough. Do it again.'"
Since Sipe began volunteering for WTBBL, he has logged more than 1,300 hours of service and produced more than 450 hours of narration, according to Traci Simmons, who works in WTTBL's volunteer services division.
"Our readers love his narration," said John Pai, Sipe's supervisor. "Rick brings the true human element to his recordings. His narration is intimate, personable and peppered with great inflection and meaning. He projects an engaged style of reading that lifts the words off the page. His narration is never tired, bored or dull but animated and clear."
Washington Taking Book and Braille Library: https://www.sos.wa.gov/washington-talking-book-braille-library
