Deborah Kendrick
When I learned that David Van Der Molen was a professional audio book narrator, I knew he belonged in the Employment Matters series. As it turns out, that was only part of a genuinely fascinating and unique picture of employment. When we began our interview, Van Der Molen clarified that his audio book narration is a job for evenings and weekends, but that his day job, Monday through Friday, 9 to 5, is something entirely different. That day job is as a member services associate for the Canadian Council of Christian Charities, and he has been doing it since 1994. I found the story of how he got that job 26 years ago as compelling as any actual job itself. It also provides a shining example, a road map of sorts, that other job seekers with visual impairments can follow.
Building a Network
When he graduated from Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Michigan, in 1992 with emphasizing BA in English and journalism, Van Der Molen initially went back to Ontario. He lived with his parents, gathering eggs and milking cows on their dairy farm, and getting some work as a freelance writer. He took a correspondence course in broadcasting, and another at his local office of CNIB (Canadian National Institute for the Blind) on marketing oneself to find employment. The course focused on building a professional network and Van Der Molen committed himself to doing precisely that. Employment experts will tell you to treat looking for a job as if it were a job itself, and that is exactly what Van Der Molen did.
He made appointments with people and asked their advice.
“I never asked for a job,” he explains. Instead, he asked for feedback on his resume, suggestions of careers he might pursue, and recommendations for other people with whom he could confer. When he began the process, he reached out to Lions Club and church for potential drivers, and had a pool of about ten people willing to ferry him to and from his network-building appointments. He met with business leaders, two members of his provincial parliament, the premier secretary (similar in status to a US governor) and others. All gave him feedback and connected him with others. Eventually, one referral led him to an appointment with the CEO of the Canadian Council of Christian Charities (CCCC), who offered him a job. The CCCC, advises some 3,000 member charities on best practices. The organization provides information, insurance, and certification to charities throughout Canada. They guide members through understanding legislation and regulations affecting charities, as well as afford charities who have met certain standards the opportunity to display the 4C’s seal on their own websites. Van Der Molen’s job is multi-faceted. He develops insurance quotes for charities with a staff of 25 or less. He monitors all incoming email and directs it to the appropriate colleague. And he manages the company phone system, directing all incoming phone calls. He uses JAWS, two QBraille XL displays, and a system called Accessaphone. The latter, he was quick to tell me, is a wonderful solution that he learned about in an article by Aaron Preece in the October 2015 AccessWorld.
Elmira, Ontario, is a small town. From his home there, where he lives with his wife and three children, Van Der Molen can walk to such nearby services as the library, bank, medical offices, and more. Typically, he walks about a mile to and from work each day with his standard poodle dog guide. At the time of this interview, Canada’s lockdown response to COVID-19 was new, and the staff of CCCC had had their first virtual meeting by way of Google Hangouts just the day before. His job, albeit now performed from his home office, will proceed pretty much as it has for 25 years. Even while he and all coworkers are working remotely, he can direct phone calls to any of his coworkers, develop insurance quotes, and manage incoming inquiries from any of CCCC’s 3,000 members. His second job—the vocation that, you might say, sprang from an avocation—found him with an already well-established home set-up for work when COVID-19 forced CCCC and everyone else to move work from office to home.
Narrator in the Attic
About ten years ago, the pastor at Van Der Molen’s church asked him to do a scripture reading. People responded so positively that he was soon invited to participate in a performance of Charles Dickens’ "A Christmas Carol." That reading, too, met with favorable “reviews” from his fellow parishioners. Those experiences prompted a “what if” kind of internal dialogue and Van Der Molen was soon contacting authors, offering his skills as an audio book narrator.
Today, he has a comfortable studio in his attic. Foam egg cartons line the walls and his desk holds a laptop, braille display, and his Matias keyboard for controlling the recording program Audacity. Other than locating and landing assignments, probably the biggest challenge early on was figuring out how to read braille without the act of reading being heard! Back in 1993 when he took the correspondence course in broadcasting, he recalls the instructor’s puzzlement at hearing an unidentifiable sound in one of Van Der Molen’s submitted recordings. That sound, of course, was the sound of hands moving across the words on braille pages.
Today, there are no paper pages in Van Der Molen’s attic studio. Authors send him files in either Microsoft Word or .pdf files. He loads them on to his 40-cell QBraille XL, and records on his laptop using Audacity. He has used a variety of braille displays over the years, but he says the QBraille XL is particularly quiet. His microphone is lifted slightly above his desktop on a stand, which also helps distance it from the sound of his hands moving over refreshable braille.
In nine or ten years of work as an audio book narrator, Van Der Molen has recorded some 100 titles. He has narrated books on the keto diet, alcoholism, the Mormon faith, emotional intelligence, and more. He has recorded works of fiction, including one seven-book series. A lot of the books he reads are self-help. These are easier to narrate, he says, because you don’t have to look ahead to make sure you are interpreting the tone and character correctly. The largest book he has recorded to date was 21 hours long, although many are in the 3-hour range. He recorded his first book, a 13-hour novel, in its entirety twice, simply because he was dissatisfied with the first recording.
He does a fair amount of work for the British Columbia Libraries Cooperative. They have a project called the National Network for Equitable Library Service.
When working for individual authors, Van Der Molen negotiates rates, but says a narrator can make from $30 to $200 for finished hour. If that sounds like easy money, consider some of the factors that are included in those negotiations. Van Der Molen explains, “Some books have a lot of words for which I need to research word pronunciations. Some books even have whole paragraphs or several lines of poetry in foreign languages, which requires even more research.”
Do the authors who hire him know that Van Der Molen is blind? Sometimes. It’s not relevant at the auditioning stage. (He uses the ACX website to browse narration opportunities, downloads the audition file, and uploads his audition.) On the other hand, if authors want to know more about him and locate his promotional YouTube video, they will see him reading braille. While it isn’t relevant as an up-front factor, Van Der Molen does passionately believe that it is a good thing for his authors to know that he is blind at some point.
“It is good for them to know that a blind person can do this,” he says, “because that will help them understand that a blind person can do all kinds of things. … If they learn that I am blind and are happy with the job I’ve done with their book, then maybe they will hire another blind person to do something else.”
Tools for Success
Van Der Molen emphasizes that he has had plenty of input from others to be where he is with his doubly employed status. He has studied a variety of braille displays (he is currently studying a newly acquired BrailleNote Touch Plus) and credits the many lists of blind users for helping him master such tools. From lists, he learned about Audacity. From Jonathan Mosen, a popular blind technology expert and podcaster, he learned to connect his microphone and laptop with an audio interface box. In that interim almost 30 years ago now between college and career he learned the power of networking and continues to exercise that skill.
“Build a network,” is his leading piece of advice for aspiring blind job seekers. Join groups. Research all the technology available to blind people and learn from other blind people how to use it.
“Be willing to try new things,” he says. “Research and educate yourself about technology,” so that when a question comes up regarding how you can accomplish a task, you already have the answer.
He is an avid reader of AccessWorld, and read TACTIC and VersaNews before it. He used a Braille Lite when he began his work with CCCC and has explored and learned many braille displays in the intervening years.
“At first, when people find out that you’re blind,” Van Der Molen reflects, “they might be fearful and think that you’re hopeless. You need to make the right choices technologically, so you will be as successful as possible. And you need to present blindness in the positive light it deserves." He is a powerful example of how such strategies can work.
To learn more about the Canadian Council of Christian Charities, visit their website. Visit Audible and search for "Van Der Molen" to find the books he has narrated.
This article is made possible in part by generous funding from the James H. and Alice Teubert Charitable Trust, Huntington, West Virginia.
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