Need advice using Festival (text to speech)

Using Debian Lenny

I am having trouble finding a good tutorial for Festival. I would
appreciate some information on using Festival. I'm am using
Festival through the command line (I can't get the voices I want
to use through kttsmgr).

I would like to be able to do things like pause, go back or
forward, choose the voice I want to use. I would like to be able
to copy and paste text into the command line to listen to (for
listening to email).

Appreciate any help. Thanks

try text2wave