A new episode of The Mystical Underground is live! “Melissa Kay Benson: VO In The MU”:
Join Trish and Rob for a conversation with…
Melissa Kay Benson is an audiobook narrator from New Orleans, Louisiana. She started acting in kindergarten and has never stopped. Her acting background in local theaters and her love of audiobooks led her to her career as a narrator.
She says the name of her game is strength and persistence in everything she does. Narrating audiobooks allows her to flex her acting muscle every day.
She particularly loves the tension of a thriller, the intimacy of a memoir, and the educational aspect of nonfiction narration.
Her educational background in medical massage therapy and intensive anatomical studies, including the performance of human dissections, lends itself well to medical narration with anatomical and biological terminology.
Finally, she is a passionate Masters CrossFit athlete. Nothing builds mental fortitude like tough physical training, and she applies that strength to her work, producing audiobooks from auditions, book preparation, narration, editing, and more.
Also, Mellisa reads a selection from Trish’s book “The Seventh Sense.”
Melissa has a distinct accent. She sounds like Reese Witherspoon who was born in New Orleans and raised in Nashville, Tennessee, with decades of adulthood in California. I still have family in North Carolina and they sound like her. All her vowels are elongated though she’s careful not to drop her consonants or drawl out the ends of her words. You were the only one in the conversation with no accent, Trish. One never loses all the southern though it can be clipped a little or twanged into Texas or Midwestern.
That being said, your words should all be spoken. Write scripts! Give them a voice.
Being born and raised in Venezuela, I should have an accent, that’s the weird thing.
In Spanish, do you have an accent? You would have acquired your speech from your years at school. How did you communicate with your teachers and fellow students? English or Spanish? My father had a southern accent, my mother does not. She was born in Philadelphia. I have, I’m told, fairly pure vowels but an elongated I sound whenever I say ‘Carolina.’ That word, my home state, always comes out with a southern i.