“Sound Puppet: A Pen Friendship Between East and West”, Text by Heidi Stalla, Sonic Composition by Diana Chester, uses letters between Ling Shu Hua and Virginia Woolf to explore literary ventriloquism, translation, and the value of using sound in academic and historical narratives to reconstruct the past. Any discipline expressed through writing will lack the spiritual and sensory dimension that drives human experience. For a biographer or a literary critic, this exchange of letters is a case in point, as it is impossible to hear the tones. Are the words angry, hopeful, bored, cunning? In the audio essay, I start to imagine an extraordinary pen friendship between East and West, between two eminent women writers, from similar backgrounds, both preoccupied with art, and frustrated by impending war. But the exchange isn’t quite that: Ling asks Woolf for help; she wants to write her autobiography in English. Woolf promises to read her chapters, and yet allows them to sit for months before she looks through them. Was this one more colonial-style exchange? Or does the form of the audio essay itself suggest there might be more there as the writers discuss autobiography as a means of portraying cultural and political landscapes.