Petrea Burchard is a voice actor, actor, author and editor. She narrates the Westwick Witches Cozy Mystery series by Colleen Cross, and the Katerina Carter Fraud Legal Thriller series, also by Cross, soon to come.
Burchard’s novel, Camelot & Vine, and her book of humorous essays, Act As If: Stumbling Through Hollywood with Headshot in Hand, both draw from her acting experience. Petrea’s publications include flash fiction at The Sunlight Press and Rose City Sisters, and nonfiction soon to be published in Air: A Radio Anthology.
You are both a writer and a narrator! You seem to be quite an expert in both, not just a writer who has narrated her own books or a narrator who tried to write something. Which came first?
Neither, really. Acting came first. In college I majored in creative writing and minored in theater and French. I’ve forgotten most of the French, but I’ve continued to write and act all my life.
As an actor I worked on stage, TV, film and commercials, but the thing that really stuck was voice acting. I’ve voiced a lot of commercials, some radio plays, and one anime series. All that time I’ve also been writing: one novel, several short stories, flash fiction, essays, and a humor column (about being an actor in Hollywood) that became a book. Audiobooks are a natural for me.
How do you balance both sides of your career?
I’m not sure I do! When I have narration work, that’s my priority. And every day I write at least a little bit.
You have a rather whimsical-looking book called Camelot & Vine. Tell us about it and what inspired it.
Ha! How much time do you have?
Camelot & Vine is about a woman who has to leave her own life to find the way to live it. If she can figure out how to get back.
She’s a failing Hollywood actress, with what I call “an honesty problem.” She falls through a gap in time and lands in the Dark Ages, accidentally saving King Arthur’s life. He thinks she’s a magical wizard and she lets him believe it, until she’s forced to be honest with him. That’s when her life is really in jeopardy.
I got the idea on a trip to England in the late 1990’s for a summer acting course at Oxford. I came away inspired, but unsure what to do next. I stayed in England a couple of weeks after the course, and a friend and I visited the Glastonbury Tor with a guide. From the top of the Tor we could see a large hill. I asked the guide what it was, and he said it was Cadbury Hill, believed to have been the site of Camelot.
I had never thought of Camelot as a real place, and my brain grabbed the idea. As soon as I got back to the States I began the research that resulted in the book. I really wanted to set it in the time when Arthur would have lived, if he were real.
Last year I got to visit the tiny village of South Cadbury, England. I climbed the ancient hill fort that is Cadbury Hill. It felt like I had come home. I had spent a lot of time studying that hill and its history, and I knew every inch of it. And guess what? It wasn’t the hill the guide had pointed out years before! All that inspiration, all that work, sparked by an error in directions. It worked out fine.
You also have a book about your experiences in Hollywood called Act As If: Stumbling through Hollywood with Headshot in Hand. It is described as a must- read for all people trying to break into Hollywood. Can you tell us a couple incidents that you particularly enjoy recounting?
Act As If: Stumbling Through Hollywood with Headshot in Hand is stories of my adventures working as a journeyman actor in Hollywood. Journeyman actors are the people you see playing judges, waitresses, beat cops, etc. We are not stars, but we are trained professionals. It can be a grind, but Act As If looks mostly at the funny side of what we do.
I think the reviewer called it a must-read because so much of what actors learn in school is about acting, but not about the business of acting. It’s a major gap in the actor’s education. It can come as a shock to discover that talent and skill are not the only things we need.
One of my favorite essays in the book is “Primal Scene,” about how my mother taught me stage technique when I was little. And there’s a three-part essay called “Interesting Lives,” about my experiences at Oxford.
You are a professional audiobook narrator. Why haven’t you recorded your own books?
I’m just getting started as a narrator. I’ve completed five books, a teeny tiny amount in the world of audiobook narration. I would like to be more experienced before I do my own books. And I’m going to need some major dialect coaching for Camelot & Vine because so many of the characters are British males.
You narrate the Westwick Witches Cozy Mystery series by Colleen Cross. What challenges did this series pose for you?
A shout-out to Colleen for taking a chance on me. These were my first audiobooks, and Colleen has been a dream to work with.
My biggest challenge has been learning to be my own sound engineer. At first I didn’t want to do it, but at the time I had to, and I found that I love the technological side of audio. However, for Game Theory, the book I’m working on now, I’m hiring a professional audio editor.
Besides technology, the challenges of narrating the Westwick Witches series were mostly in differentiating the characters, and I had a lot of fun with them. These are comic cozy mysteries, so I had some leeway.
I’m now working on Colleen Cross’s Kat Carter Fraud Mystery Series. These are more dramatic, more subtle, so the voices aren’t as wacky. I still have to differentiate all the characters, though, so it’s a different kind of challenge.
Besides writing and acting, you serve as a professional editor. You have a section in your blog on fun with words and grammar. How did you come to love words and grammar?
My mother was my first English teacher as well as my first acting teacher. She cared about good grammar, and I think that’s why I’m drawn to it. I’m not doing the “Writing Wrongs” blog posts now, at least for a while, because (fortunately) I’m too busy doing audiobooks!
You have a fun blog! Tell us about Wilma Wednesdays.
I’m glad you like it! Wilma Wednesdays are blog posts of conversations I have with Wilma, our rescued boxer mix. She’s very communicative. All I do is translate her into English, and type it up. I post them on Facebook and Twitter, or people can just come to my blog to read them.
You voiced an anime character. Tell us about that.
It’s turned out to be my “claim to fame.” I voiced the space pirate Ryoko in a now classic anime called Tenchi Muyo! I had no idea at the time that it would be loved by so many. More than 20 years later, I still receive messages from fans almost every day. Anime fans are the best.
A year ago, you were a guest of Kitacon, an anime convention in Coventry, England. How does a con in England compare to one in the States? What was your experience like?
It was much the same as my con experience in the States, except for the lovely accents. My experience with most fans of anime is that they are inclusive. You can be old, young, tall, fat, male, female, a gorgeous babe or a pimpled nerd. It doesn’t matter. You are welcome as long as you’re not a jerk.
The people at Kitacon were incredibly good to me. And the Kitacon staff couldn’t have been nicer. This has been my experience at every con I’ve visited. People are generally good wherever you go, when you meet them with kindness.
You can learn more about Petrea at the following sites:
http://petreaburchard.com
Facebook page
Facebook author page
Twitter: @PetreaBurchard
Witches series
Katerina Carter series
Camelot & Vine
Act As If
Sunlight Press
Air anthology
Rose City Sisters
