INTERVIEW: Lydi Conklin
Songs of No Provenance
Lydi Conklin
Catapult
An interview with Anu Khosla
Lydi Conklin’s new novel, Songs of No Provenance, begins when cult folk legend Joan Vole escapes her den in Coney Island after conducting a private act of deviance in public. On stage, actually. Later, Joan finds herself in rural Virginia, at an arts summer camp for teenagers, where she begins to try to teach songwriting while shutting out any news of how her reputation may have changed since she left New York. At the camp, she meets other, better-adjusted artists, like Sparrow, a cartoonist whom she begins to fangirl over. In her bid to erase her own history, she tries to sell her three quirky but ambitious students on the idea of “songs of no provenance,” which are songs with unknown authorship.
Songs of No Provenance is a romp of a Künstlerroman, showing an artist technically mature in age attempting to mature in conduct. Lydi joined me on Zoom to talk art-making, queer baiting, and the physical shape of guitars.
Anu Khosla: Were the songs you used in the book all real songs of no provenance that you had learned about? Were some made up?
Lydi Conklin: Most of them are made up. I mentioned the “Barges” song, but I don't remember any other song I mentioned in the book that's actually real. All the songs that have lyrics are entirely made up. Actually, I'm doing this cool project where I have a lot of friends who are musicians who inspired the book, and I gave them a document with all the lyrics, and they're interpreting some of the songs and performing them. It's cool to see how they took the prompts, because some people did the song very faithfully to the lyrics I had written, and some people completely twisted the song. There's a song in there called “Gumball” about a racehorse, and it was based on the old traditional song, “Stewball,” that's also about a racehorse. My friend Jacob Milstein took some of the lyrics and wrote his own lyrics and made it into this song about this toxic gay relationship. It's so different, but still the words are there.
AK: There's a lot about the physical shape and structure of guitars in the book. These were some of the most moving scenes in the book, for example, where you wrote about restringing a guitar so lovingly. I didn't know that there was so much feeling behind the shape of the guitar. How did you uncover that?
LC: That was a big thing in my research. I knew there were different shapes of guitars: parlor, dreadnought, jumbo, are some of the shapes, going from the smallest to the biggest. I knew that basic fact, and I wanted Joan to be very strange and to have very particular opinions that wouldn't be popular or common. I asked a lot of my friends who are musicians, would anyone ever just hate dreadnoughts and love parlors? Some people were like, “No, I'm a musician and I don't even know the difference, and I don't care.” And I was like, well, that is the normal opinion, but that's good, because I want Joan to be a little bit of a freak. But a couple of my friends were like, “One thousand percent, I feel the same as Joan. I do not like dreadnoughts.” The shape does make a big difference if you're a certain, particular person. The editor of the UK version of the book is a musician too, and she also loves parlors and hates dreadnoughts. I'd worked with her on my first book as well, and I didn't even know she had this particular inclination. That solidified it as, okay, this is something that someone could conceivably care about..
I'm lucky that I have so many musician friends because I had friends I could consult throughout and even friends of friends. There's this guy named Cameron who knew so much about guitars, and he would answer all my emails. I was lucky to have people who knew more. I like to make things up and then see if it's real rather than do the research first and let it impede my imagination. Sometimes that means throwing stuff out that turns out to be nonfactual, but I think it's a better move for me overall.
AK: The book feels like it suggests the existence of two kinds of art-making. One is an individual approach to art making that's solitary, and the other is an approach to art making that is art done in deep community. That made me wonder what your own approach to art making looks like. Do you see yourself as someone who makes art in a solitary space, or do you make it more in community with other artists?
LC: I definitely did want those possibilities to be shown in the book. For me, it's what Joan comes to in the end. She has this catastrophic experience with her individual motivations going off the rails. Then she tries to go to the other stream and be like, okay, you can only write a song if it's on a piece of toilet paper and you disintegrate it afterwards and it's gone and whatever, this sort of more in the ether style of art making. Where she comes to through the book is, she does need other people to point out when she's being toxic, when she's saying messed up things, when she's doing messed up things, when she's off track to help her and guide her, but then ultimately the art she does find in herself. I'm not saying that's the only way to make art. That's just the journey she took.
For me, it's similar. I am a very social person. I'm also an introvert, and I need to write alone when I'm producing. But then I really need my community to edit my stuff, guide me, and help support me. Support me emotionally and support my work. I have people I brainstorm with. If I'm stuck on something and I know some friend has read it, I'll text them and ask, What if this happened? I definitely could never do it without a community. I love the spaces that Joan has set up, her collective of songwriters in New York, and this group of other teachers who are all artists. Those are the spaces where I thrive the best.
AK: I'm going to just go full cis-het woman on you and ask this next question. I noticed that the character Meredith is often messing up Sparrow's pronouns, and Joan is always getting them right and is maybe a little judgmental of Meredith because of this. But we also see there's a level of trust between Sparrow and Meredith that, at least until maybe at a certain point in the book, has obviously not been built with Joan. I was reading this as a cis person, embarrassingly, self-consciously zeroed in on the pronoun use, and trying to understand the dynamics. I was wondering if you were trying to include a message for cis people or binary people? But then I thought, well, are you even writing this for cis people at all?
LC: I love that you noticed that because that was actually something that I went back and forth with my editor a few times about, getting the pronouns right and wrong and whatnot. I think to answer the last part of your question first, my friend Jamel Brinkley answered at one time so beautifully, where he was like, “I'm writing for black people. Those are the people in the front row, and that's my community. But anyone can be in the room and just hear what I'm saying over their heads or whatever.” That's how I feel, too. I never want to alienate the queer and trans community because that would be the first people I would want to write to. So I would never be like, “trans means this,” or say something dumb that they'd be like, you lost me. But at the same time, I definitely want readers of any identity to be able to read my book, too.
For that particular part, I was thinking about it because people mess up my pronouns a lot. I don't mind because I frankly mess up my pronouns, too. It's a new-ish thing in the language, and is hard to adjust to. I really don't ever think twice if someone messes up my pronouns, though it is nice if they quickly correct themselves and move on. To me, Meredith does the more annoying thing of being like, “Oh, my God, I messed up,” and then making it into a big thing that's like, okay, I don't want to derail this conversation and have to then make you feel better about it and whatnot. Even though Meredith and Sparrow do have a relationship and they do have trust, Meredith has some problematic ways of moving through the world and is not able to understand Sparrow's transition on a deep level. Where Joan and Sparrow don't have that level of trust, like you noted, Joan, just from coming from New York and coming from an edgier scene, has the vocabulary a little bit more down. But then, of course, she asks some questions about Sparrow's transition later that are a bit flat-footed and a bit offensive to Sparrow. I was just trying to think about how various people integrate that cultural knowledge and respond to it. It interested me, too, that Sparrow would be the person who wouldn't correct Meredith but would just quietly take it, whereas Joan is the one who gets upset about it.
AK: There are definitely some elements of both queer baiting and transvestigating in the story. I was curious if these elements were meant to underscore the value of the songs of no provenance and art detached from the artist?
LC: It's interesting because those questions were the foundation of the project originally, because I was complaining to my therapist about how there are so many books by cishet authors that were winning all these prizes, and I was like, “I'll never be able to have as much success as that.” It was a time when trans and queer writers weren't getting their projects bought, really. So I thought, if most readers are cishet, which they are, then, of course, they'll read a book that was conceived by someone who has their same worldview as opposed to someone like me, who's writing about my experience that may have a more legitimate experience of queerness because I am queer and trans. Still, it will come across as more alien to them because I'm different. I was complaining about that, and she was like, “Why don't you write about that?” And even though this was my old therapist who was really bad, I was like, actually, that's a good idea. So then I started writing about it, and I was interested in creating this character who is queer baiting.
Joan does fall into the queer baiting somewhat innocently through the artistic process of being genuinely interested in writing this lesbian song that just serves the art. And that's just what that song is. That's innocent and perfectly fine. But later, she intentionally courts this audience, this queer audience, by obscuring the fact that she was at that time identified as cishet. As I continued writing deeper into her, I realized that's not who she is, and that's why she's interested in this stuff.
The whole process of writing the book changed my views on being irritated by the thing I was irritated with at the beginning. I wrote a story about being trans when I was in grad school, years before I took any steps to transition. I always knew I was trans, but I didn't realize a lot of people who seem to me like maybe they're cishet, and are writing these books about queer topics, probably aren't completely cishet, or have some part of themselves that they're trying to explore that they haven't fully faced yet. It just gives me a lot more sympathy for people exploring whatever they want to explore and not judging them as much. So that was a cool result that I didn't expect to happen.
Growing up, there were musicians that I loved who I imagined were queer, and it was before the Internet before you could figure out if people really were queer or not. At times, it would annoy me when I find out, oh, no, they're straight, and why are they writing these gay songs? But then I was like, they did really help me get through some stuff.
AK: There's an important plot point and character trait that's central in the story that can be seen, maybe, as a sort of deviance. Why were you attracted to this idea of the deviant act as a storyteller?
LC Joan has these two impulses, and one is toward fame or artistic success. But I think deep in her heart, she actually doesn't want that. She wants to be able to make her art. She wants to be able to make good art. She wants to have fans. But I think if it weren't for Paige, her mentee, who's suddenly blowing up in this bigger way, she wouldn't feel like she needed this more public thing. Her work also, of course, centers around performance and performing in front of people. She has this fetish, but I think for Joan it is more than a fetish. It's more ingrained in art-making and her personality, and her shame is very private. It can't be known, or she'll be laughed out of town, or people will think she's a sicko or whatever. It's two sides of the same coin: this longing for performance and exposure, and needing that in her life, but then because of that being the main impulse, fetishizing or eroticizing this secret, shameful act that's running alongside it.
AK: Switching focus, I wanted to say that you wrote Coney Island so compellingly. Why did you choose that particular setting for the New York scenes of the book?
LC: I was always obsessed with Coney Island when I lived in New York, and I liked to go there in the winter when no one was there and just walk around. Joan is a character who moved all the time, all over New York, and had this chaotic lifestyle of not really caring about her domestic life. But out of all the neighborhoods, Coney Island just felt like the place where she could walk and think and be in her head, which is hard to find in New York because it's always so chaotic and overstimulating. I do think of her as being in some way neurodivergent. That was always a challenge for me in New York. I lived in Chinatown, and no matter where I walked, it was so loud and there were so many people. And so I thought Coney Island would give her space. It was also a random and undesirable neighborhood to live in, especially at the time when she lived there, very far away and very inconvenient, but it has so much weird charm that I could see her loving it and ending up washed ashore in this strange corner of the city.
AK: This is your first novel out in the world, and you're at a point in your career where you're becoming more known and more recognized for your work. I'm curious if you feel like your relationship to fandom has changed yet?
LC: A couple of years ago, I dated someone who was a screenwriter. When I was talking about writers who are famous, she was like, “None of those people are famous outside your world. They might be so famous to you, but like no one knows them…” Because in her world, it's like Matt Damon. It’s people who are legit famous. I like that that's the case, because I feel like if my work had the potential to become actually famous, which I don't think it does, because I think it's a little too weird and niche, I think it would be a horrifying prospect.
I have had some weird experiences of people writing to me or coming up to me that I didn't know, and they just knew who I was somehow, even though it's rare. It has occasionally occurred, and it is a weird experience. It's mostly cool because it's cool that your work can actually find people, but it's also weird. When my first book came out, people would be like, “I read your book,” and I’d be like, “That's private! Why would you do that?” I was uncomfortable because I felt like it was just my personal document on my computer, and now people actually read it and probably know or infer things about me that are really personal. So, yeah, it's a mixed bag. I do like people reading my book, but I'm a little shy about it.
