INTERVIEW OF SUZAN HENNEN
Suzan, it was a delight working with you as you produced Courage Is a Redhead in audible form. Since then I’ve wanted to get to know you a
little better. Thanks for agreeing to let me interview you.
It is a pleasure, Mary, to be a part of this interview and
to have worked with you on your book, Courage Is a Redhead. It has a special place in my heart. It was my fist audiobook which was the
beginning of my voiceover career. I too
was thankful to get to know you during this project.
1. Where did you grow up?
I was born in Dublin, Texas, but lived in Dallas, Texas, as
a young child and moved to Irving, Texas, with my parents around the age of 4 or
5 years old. When I was 11 years old, my
parents moved us to Garland, Texas, and we lived there until I got married in
1972 to my husband John. All my siblings
are still alive and live in the Dallas-Ft Worth area. My father died at the age of 76 from
complications of Alzheimer's. My mother
lives with one of my younger sisters in Garland, Texas, and is not in the best
of health, having had several heart attacks, and needs some assistance due to
her weak heart.
Tell us about your childhood and teenage years.
As a child, I grew up with an older sister, two younger
sisters, and a younger brother. I was
the next to oldest and was for some reason identified as the “little mother” to
my younger siblings. Both my parents
worked, my father at night and my mother during the day, and it was somewhat
difficult for them raising five children two years apart in age and both working
opposite shifts. I developed an interest
in art during my teenage years and studied and practiced art from the 7th
grade through high school.
We’d like to know a little about your immediate family.
I am married to the love of my life, John, for 47
years. I have two sons, Justin, and
Trey, and a beautiful daughter-in-law, Jessica, with my grandson Jack, 7 years
old. We live on 98 acres East of Dallas
and love the woods and farm life. Both our sons have a home on our acreage as
well which keeps us close to each other. My husband jokingly says we have our
own little “commune.”
What values are important to you?
I grew up in a Christian home, and I became a Christian at
the age of fourteen at a church across the street from my parents’ home. I feel that I value what Jesus and God
value…truth, honesty, integrity, doing the right thing, loving others no matter
what. I value my relationship with God
more than anything else in my life. He
has made me who I am today no doubt.
Why did you decide to become a voice actor?
This is an interesting question. Becoming a voice actor was not something I
just one day said that is what I want to do, nor is it something that I have
always wanted to be neither. My youngest
sister had been doing voice acting for years before I decided to give it a try
and to audition with ACX.com in 2013. I
really did not receive any offers during that time and with my beautiful
grandson being born in August, 2013, it would have been difficult to do any
voiceover work then anyway. My daughter-in-law
worked at a pharmacy as a pharmacy tech, and with my son working for us in our
Hardware Sales company, my son and I took care of our little Jack during the
day in between working. It was very
grand to say the least! I could go on
and on about this, but back to why I decided to become a voice actor. So in 2019, I got a notification through
ACX.com from you that you had listened to some of my auditions (from way back
in 2013), and wanted me to do your book Courage Is a Redhead for
you. I was really blown away at the
offer and decided I would take on this challenge as I had no experience in
voiceover. And what an experience! It was a learning process from the
get-go! I thank you so much for the
offer and what I gained through my first voiceover.
What experiences have helped you learn to read
and dramatize novels?
I truly cannot identify any experiences that helped me to
read and dramatize novels, except that I listened to some books on tape, and really
enjoyed audiobooks. It just seemed easy
for me to read and express myself through that.
The dramatizing was a little hard as I am a softer-spoken kind of person,
and I had to listen to training audios through ACX. All the training tools they offered were so
helpful to me.
Recently you’ve recorded a large group of books.
Would you please tell us about them?
After finishing Courage Is a Redhead, I was contacted
by PureReads Books to audition for an audio six book set, Molly Grey Christian
Cozy Mysteries, and was awarded the contract to produce those books. That was a real challenge with so many
different characters within the 6 books, and I felt that I grew tremendously in
my voiceover skills producing these books.
And it was fun!
Besides recording books, what else do you enjoy
doing?
As I mentioned earlier, I love to draw, but I have not had
as much opportunity to do that with a 7-year-old grandson who is in my life
almost six days out of seven every week.
He is the joy and light of my life.
Plus, I still have a role to a small degree in our Hardware Sales Rep
business of 35+ years, keeping up with some of the accounting responsibilities
which I enjoy.
What were some of the difficulties you had
recording Courage is a Redhead?
I would say that one difficulty recording Courage Is a
Redhead was just relearning the Audacity software for recording after three
years. And I was doing a lot of digging
in ACX for how to do all the necessary things to make an audiobook great. Also, changing characters was a real
challenge as I had to practice more than if I had been doing this for a
while. It was challenging but a fun
project. All in all, Courage Is a
Redhead was a giant stepping-stone for me in the voice acting world. I am so blessed to have gotten to know you
during this project that God brought into my life and would say that I enjoyed
voice acting a clean, fun book as Courage Is a Redhead! God bless you in your many new books that
you are and will be writing!
Suzan, I would have never known you were a new narrator. Your recording is well produced.
