Two Spokane authors are on this year’s list of finalists for the Washington State Book Award: Travis Baldree and Lora Senf.
Travis Baldree is the author of the novel Bookshops & Bonedust and a finalist in the fiction category. He's also an Audie-winning narrator of audiobooks and used to develop games, including Torchlight and Rebel Galaxy.
The finalists for all seven categories were announced Sept. 3, but the 39 authors on the list now wait until the awards are announced Sept. 24.
SPR's Owen Henderson spoke with Baldree about his work.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
OWEN HENDERSON: You're an author, you're an audiobook narrator, you used to be a game developer. To me, what ties all of those together is storytelling. When did you first realize that was something you wanted to be part of your life?
TRAVIS BALDREE: Well, oddly, from a game development perspective, I didn't do so as a storyteller.
I was not a writer. I was an engineer, and I ran several companies. And in a lot of ways, it's very, very different than storytelling because storytelling is about connecting people to the experience of other people.
And game development is all about making an experience that's purely about you, which is weirdly a fundamentally different approach to dealing with concepts of story and just ideas in general.
But to actually answer the question, I mean, I read since I was little. I've always liked the written word. When I was a kid, I wanted to be a novelist. I did not get very far in that endeavor. And then I forgot about it and did other things.
And I only came back really to books and stories when I started narrating books as a hobby on the side while I was still in game development and eventually decided that I wanted to do it full time and retired to do so.
OH: So, you're a finalist for the 2024 Washington State Book Award in fiction for your most recent book, Bookshops & Bonedust, the sequel to your very first novel, Legends & Lattes, which was also a finalist. What's the premise of this series?
TB: So both books are what's been termed these days as cozy fantasy. It basically uses the trappings and tools of fantasy, speculative fiction to talk about more everyday problems and people and to ultimately leave you affirmed or satisfied at the end of the book.
They're kind of like chicken soup fantasy books. In a lot of ways, something like The Hobbit is kind of cozy fiction, or like 70% of the movies that Studio Ghibli made, I think would also be kind of classified as cozy fiction to give you an idea of what it is.
The first book is about an orc mercenary in her 40s who has adventured for her whole life and decides to retire and open a coffee shop in a town that has never heard about coffee before, which sounds ridiculous, but it's played totally straight.
OH: You're the voice of quite a few audiobook series, and I'm sure there are lots of people out there who think, ‘Oh, it's just reading. I could do that.’ And so as someone else who speaks into a microphone for a living, what would you say are some of the skills that make a good audiobook narrator?
TB: I think one is I care for the written word. I care about the way that words sound and I care for what authors are trying to impart.
Another one is just empathy, is understanding what people are like, caring about what people are like, because that's really what underlies fiction and makes it work. It's understanding how people think and feel and how they relate to one another, and having an intuitive knowledge of that is incredibly useful for being able to get that across.
Third, I'd say is just plain endurance. If you want to find out if you'd be a good audiobook narrator or if you would like it, just go sit in a corner of a room for three hours and read out loud to yourself and tell me at the end of it if you really enjoyed the experience. And there's only a subset of people, I think, that can probably say yes to that.
OH: The fandom around the fantasy genre has really grown in recent years. Tell me more about how you ended up in this slice of life, cozy fantasy lane.
TB: Well, like you were saying, I think fantasy is definitely more prevalent these days. It's definitely a lot more accepted. It doesn't have the same smell to it that I think people might have attributed to it before.
Who didn't watch Game of Thrones? Who didn't see a serious drama played out using all of the tools of fantasy? There was a series on Netflix recently, Arcane, which is based on a video game, and it's fantasy, and it was incredibly well done. And all this stuff is very popularized.
During COVID, people played D&D all the time on Zoom, and they didn't do it just to pretend to be fantasy races. They did it to connect to each other, and to tell stories, and to spend time together, and to relate. And that was just the medium in which they did it. So I think it's all very acceptable now.
But as far as putting a fine point on cozy fantasy, I think it works kind of like sci-fi. If you think about something like Star Trek, how Star Trek used all of the mechanics of science fiction to talk about big societal ideas, to talk about the way that we relate to each other as a society, was really effective at doing that. And I think fantasy is uniquely well-suited to talking about things that we care about every day.
The real escapist fantasy of legends and lattes is finding friends in your 40s. This is something that we all understand as we get into our 40s. I know you're not in your 40s yet, but it's really hard to make friends and relate to people as you get older. This is a thing we all contend with.
None of us are going to go slay a dragon. None of us are going to overthrow an evil overlord. But we might move to a new town, and we might have a tough time finding our people.
Using fantasy allows you to kind of magnify that, and remind you that it is a worthy thing to think about. That it's not meaningless just because it's mundane. It's something we all have happen to us. And you sprinkle a little fairy dust on it, and it's possible to think of it as more meaningful than we are accustomed to thinking of it.
OH: You brought up Dungeons and Dragons earlier. Do you play?
TB: I have not played D&D since high school. I never found a group. So a lot of my work has been D&D adjacent. I played computer D&D games. I've definitely done that. But I don't have a group to play with. And I wish I did. It's a lot of work.
But I own the books. And I'm very aware of it as a property, and of all that it entails, and kind of the culture that's built up around it. And there's a real social component to it.
It's a way of storytelling with other people that you like. It's something really elemental to us as humans. It's storytelling.
It's like, we're going to tell a story together, and we're going to enjoy this experience that's unique to us. It's a way of cementing a relationship with other people. And it gives you the excuse to do it.
And while you're doing it, you're doing things that are outside of the given mold of a social interaction. If you go to somebody's house for a party, you stand around the grill, and you talk about the weather, and you talk about your work, you don't really say anything meaningful about each other, right? What kind of person you are, what you care about, what you think about. If you're storytelling, you're putting yourself in the context of events that you wouldn't normally deal with.
You're finding things out about the people that you know, that you would not have found out with these really boring kind of road interactions that we're all accustomed to doing. I think it gives you access to more depth into people that you are sitting around and playing with.
OH: Spokane author Travis Baldry is one of 39 finalists for this year's Washington State Book Award. Travis, thank you so much for joining me.
TB: Oh, absolutely. Thank you so much.
