“Concentric Macroscope is about transmissions—about radio waves and about communication, what’s said and unsaid. It’s about the transmission of information, and about echoes, and repetition. It’s about the invention of languages.”
“…the issue is maybe that I love music so much that sometimes I can’t cope with it. I am, like a lot of elder millennials, arrested in the ’90s indie scene I first fell in love with.”
“Music, as a subject, occurs infrequently in my new novel, My Lover, the Rabbi, but the book’s method is musical: questions of tone, rhythm, pitch, and volume drive the unnamed first-person narrator’s torrential, obsessive voice.”
“OK, I can’t I say I recommend this as traditional playlist in the style of old mix tapes where you listen to ‘em all the way through— unless you’re down with some serious genre hopping!”
“I had far more training as a violinist than as a writer, and the curious forms of my fiction and the rhythm of my sentences are best understood as coming from a musicality expressed through words.”
“The stories are filled with nostalgia for a simpler time, so this playlist reflects a ‘90s and Aughts sensibility.”
“Writing fiction has been surprisingly transformative to my relationship with music, though, because I use playlists to work through questions of character and theme, and to provide a mental shortcut to the world I’m writing about.”
“So, if you’re heart-broken, filled with rage over your disappointing ex and his bad behavior, here’s a playlist to see you through.”
“Music is such a time capsule for me, and this playlist reminds me of the person I was in 2001, as well as the people I wrote about in my forthcoming book.”
“Everyone arrives to the writer workbench differently. For me, I need to feel excited about the work in ways that exist outside of writing. I need to dream, and I need music to better visualize the choreography and energy of that dream. Writing is a lonely practice. When no one is around to pump you up in the process, music will always be there. When no one else understands, music finds a way.”