Listen closely Dan Domench's stories of ourselves BY SAM PFEIFLE

You may not have noticed, but AudioFile magazine, based right here in Portland, is doing pretty well for itself by focusing on audiobooks not in terms of the quality of the writing, but rather solely on the quality of the audio presentation. The book could suck, theoretically, but if a mellifluous reader was put to the task of committing it to digital audio format, AudioFile might like it.

With 100 new reviews in each issue, "AudioFile reviews unabridged and abridged audiobooks, original audio programs, commentary, and dramatizations in the spoken-word format. Our focus is the audio presentation, not the critique of the written material," or so reads their mission.

That this magazine could exist, let alone survive in a competitive media environment, speaks volumes (ha!) about how far these audiobooks have come in the public consciousness. Once only for poor salesmen driving long hours to cover huge territory, or those sad saps with two-hour commutes to Boston from Southern Maine, audiobooks now clearly appeal to a wider audience, even to people who could otherwise simply read the books. There is obviously a wholly different experience to be had when being read to than when being the reader.

It’s a deconstructionist’s field day, really. With a reader already once removed from the author, the listener to a reader is now once again removed. "Is that how the author meant that word to emphasized?" a listener is left to wonder, as the fallacy of authorial intent is compounded upon itself.

That question, at least, needn’t be present when listening to a brand-new and grand project by Dan Domench, an author living in Union who old-time Portlanders might know from his time on Munjoy Hill in the late ’80s. Hold Me Fast, available now on www.dandomench.com, is a collection of short stories, part one of six intended in the Speedway 6 series, that were written solely for the audio format. In this case, there is no written word. Domench has released these words only in the voices of his chosen and directed readers, some of them coming from the local music scene, others coming right out of the blue: "I’ve cast people right off the street for these things," says Domench.

It’s a thrilling collection of voices, too. Domench has created a series of first-person stories and directed his readers in such a way that they very much become the narrators of the stories, people who we can’t help but recognize as our neighbors, friends, enemies, and selves. Tapping into that oral tradition that all of us who have Maine-raised grandparents can’t help but know, Domench lets his stories unravel just as we’ve heard them so many times, not in tightly organized and crafted tales, but in meanderings and random thoughts, in round-about ways.

"I’m just focused on trying to get the words right," Domench says, "and I really hear the words as music, the sound of the person’s voice." In this way, the stories ring exceptionally true. We’ve heard these phrases, felt these emotions, said these things, and yet even when Domench himself is reading, as on "Goat Town," it never seems as though Domench is drawing particularly on personal experience.

Which is no coincidence. "I’m bored with myself," he says, and emphasizes his goal to tell stories about other people, without sermonizing.

In this he found like-minded artists in Tree By Leaf, a folk band Domench discovered in a club and fell in with, using their music to frame his stories in this collection and employing the band’s Garret and Siiri Soucy to read the project’s opening and most engaging work, "Covered Bridge."

Garret opens as a man just out of high school who’s stayed behind to work his dead father’s farm while his sweetheart goes off to college. He’s received a dear John letter, and he’s writing back.

"That’s all I can say about the way I’ve been living, I know it must be dull to you," he says after relaying the details of the life he resents. Then he gets to the meat: "I’ve sent a copy of your letter back to you so you can read it. It doesn’t look the same in black and white."

Then we get the voice of Siiri, all kinds of innocent and pure, reading that text. "I’ve been sitting in my dorm room for months," she writes. And later, "don’t be mad at me." She relates the details of their last encounter, when he disappointed her, and the details of her own latest encounter, with another boy.

"You were my first true love . . . I’m not coming home this summer . . . I know you will probably never talk to me again."

We feel this poor boy’s anger masked as self-pity. "You didn’t have to try to hurt me, but you did," he writes. He says he’s got a girl in mind for his own future dalliance and he asks his lost girl to imagine him with another woman. "Are you happy, or are you sad?"

After hearing these stories, I’m mostly sad. The voices become hypnotic and encourage nostalgia. A woman in "Accident with Boys" has never gotten over a terrible teenaged accident. "What You’re Getting Into" contains the fabulous line, "A guy like Collins Nox, all he wants out of life is for someone like you to kill him."

Maybe others are more used to this audio format, but for me the experience is completely different from reading the written word. My attention wanders, I think about whatever the story reminds me of, I come back. I can listen to the stories over and over again and keep finding new things. I never read short stories more than once or twice.

Dan Domench has given us something very new and different, and it’s worth a listen.

Sam Pfeifle can be reached at sam@phx.com

Dan Domench brings his stories to the St. Lawrence Arts Center, with the Laurie Jones Band, on Friday, June 24. See www.dandomench.com