#sparkchamber 012422 — Jim Johnson
From the it’s-just-not-what-you-say-but-how-you-say-it department, #sparkchamber is so thrilled to welcome dialect coach, Jim Johnson. Jim got on our radar through the marvelous happenstance of researching rhotic vs non-rhotic speech inspired by a tweet from British author Neil Gaiman.
In his own words:
I’m a professor and dialect coach, but I came into this by training and working as an actor. In grad school, I got the nod to teach a voice class, and continued to stumble into teaching gigs after I graduated, teaching English composition while I continued to work as an actor and director, and while studying teaching voice — speaking voice for actors. Eventually I realized I’d probably need to learn phonetics, which I’d forgotten ASAP after grad school, and I’d need to coach accents for actors. That’s the door that kept opening for me, bringing us [my wife is an actress] from Chicago to Houston.
Now I’ve come to specialize in accents, and I’ve been working on AccentHelp.com for about 15 years, which has become my legacy project. I travel all over, spending a lot of time stealth-camping in a van, asking strangers if I can record them. In addition to teaching at the University of Houston and working on AccentHelp, we spend every summer teaching and performing with the Prague Shakespeare Company — another wonderful connection that we stumbled into.
1.] Where do ideas come from?
I think most of my ideas already exist out there somewhere, and I’m just piecing them together. I’m constantly amazed at how often I have an idea, and then I can’t believe that I hadn’t been able to realize it before then — it’s so damned obvious! How could I have missed it?! I think most of my ideas are actually just a mix-tape of concepts that already exist out there — someone else had all of these ideas before, but I may be combining them in some slightly original fashion. Of course, ideas don’t really matter unless we take action on them...
2.] What is the itch you are scratching?
A lot of it is simply work ethic: I feel like I need to keep working. I’ll die with a To-Do list. Too often I just keep pushing the boulder up the hill, but I do need to stop occasionally to figure out if it’s the right boulder and the right hill. That is probably something I need to do a lot more, but I’m grateful for the almost mindless devotion to remaining in motion. I owe that to my Midwestern, Depression-era mom. In the last couple of years, I’ve gotten more aware that I’m over halfway towards death, so I need to keep in mind how much luck and privilege I’ve had, and that I need to stop working on occasion to simply be with the people I love and to take care of my health. The plague is a huge kick in the ass to my awareness and gratitude.
3.] Early bird or night owl? Tortoise or hare?
I tend to work ahead of due dates with most things, and then procrastinate the hell out of everything else. My calendar is a massive prompt for me, and I am a planner and a decision maker — but I’m quick to change plans and abandon a decision. I can’t stand to be in limbo, to be in the unknown. I need to make a decision NOW, and then feel free to change it. Once I start working, I tend to keep working, so that first work action is the key for me. My spirit animal is probably a donkey. I just keep my head down and keep plowing. Once I’m in that mode, I have to remember to stop, take off the yoke, and look around.
4.] How do you know when you are done?
When I’m dead. I’m grateful that I will never be done. I need to be more conscious of when/how to start [get in motion with a task] and when/how to stop [look up at the people and beauty around me].