You Can Now Leave A Voicemail About A Book You Love
By Radhika Iyengar
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Call Me Ishmael is a website that is a quasi-book club which also functions as a repository of beautiful human stories and experiences. It invites people to call from various parts of the world and narrate an experience about a book they read that changed their lives. The callers are nameless, yet all of them share that remarkable bond of treasuring books and keeping them close to their heart. Thrice a week, Call Me Ishmael handpicks one voicemail, transcribes it and sends it out to the universe, for souls like us to listen to.
To me, each voicemail is like a billet-doux dedicated to the unceasingly imaginative and phenomenal world of literature. These letters exist, I believe, to inspire us… to the extent that, in some strange, inexplicable way, there is always something that hits a chord within. My favourite experience is the one on The Diary of Anne Frank — I think that a lot of people are inspired to survive in this terrifying world through the books they’ve read.
I managed to reach out to Logan Smalley, Director at Call Me Ishmael, also a TED fellow. Thankfully, he was ready to give me his time of day, so I picked his brain about the inspiration behind this simple, yet beautiful idea.
What sparked Call Me Ishmael?
Call Me Ishmael actually has a somewhat Bohemian origin story. At a pub at the West Village in New York City, some friends and I were discussing books and websites we love over beers. We were riffing on an idea about creating a blog named Call Me Ishmael, and thought: what if Ishmael had a cell phone? We launched the site six months later.
‘Call Me Ishmael’ is the opening sentence of Moby Dick by Herman Melville. We have, of course, taken a bit of liberty to re-imagine that line as more of an invitation to pick up a telephone than a mysterious start to a Great American Novel. At his core, Ishmael is the perfect narrator. He’s open-minded, has a constantly evolving view of the world and doesn’t judge the characters and stories that unfold before him in Moby Dick. Likewise, our Ishmael (or at least, his cell phone) isn’t a critic of the calls and stories he receives, but a curious observer and collector. The Call Me Ishmael team is also fascinated with the lore of Moby Dick, so yes, if you spy a stray whale tail, it’s in homage to the great book!
Many callers use Call Me Ishmael as a medium to express their feelings, share their secrets or talk about a life-changing moment. Do you believe this project is therapeutic in some way?
Sometimes the best therapy in the world is simply to say something out loud. However, it can be very difficult to share secrets with friends, family or people who see you on a regular basis. Call Me Ishmael is anonymous, so there is a freedom to say things that might otherwise be very difficult to communicate.
How do you curate the posts? What draws you to a particular voicemail?
Our favourite calls are the ones that tell a very specific story about a book. We get tons of enthusiastic, intelligent, funny calls that review or summarize books, but what our listeners are really drawn towards are the calls that tell one unique story that no one else in the world has experienced. We like calls that answer questions like: How did you come to own your copy of the book? Were you in a public place when a book was so powerful that it made you burst into tears? One of the best examples is a caller who loved a book of poetry so much that she decided to read it out loud to the trees in a public park.
How many calls do you receive on a daily basis? Have there been instances where callers have returned?
Our call volume varies; on slower days we average about 25 calls, but when one of our favourite authors shared the site with his Facebook fans, we got over 400 voicemails within an hour of the post. All calls are anonymous, so it’s tricky to tell for sure if the same storytellers are returning to talk about different books, but readers have repeatedly asked if they, “can call back again?” The answer, of course, is yes.
Which places have readers called from?
We’ve added stories from all over the world to our library of calls. Everywhere from Ecuador to the UK to the Philippines. None from India yet, though, we’d love some of your readers to be the first!
Where do you see this project heading? Do you intend on compiling these letters and publish them in a book?
We’ve been imagining how Call Me Ishmael could use technology to reinvent book clubs. In a way, a book of the typed transcripts is always in the works. We just haven’t bound them, yet. The typed pages are currently scattered all around my walls and living room, like a bookish version of A Beautiful Mind.
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This article was originally published on the author’s blog, Five Silver Rings.
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