“If I’m honest, I probably started writing around the same time I accepted that I couldn’t sing and would never be more than a noodler on the guitar.”
“When I lived in Austin, Texas, two things shaped the hours beyond my writing desk: books and music.”
“Here are thirteen tracks, set to Sourland’s ebbs and flows of love, loss, redemption, and weed.”
“The songs I’ve chosen are those which I’ve imagined appearing on a fantasy soundtrack for an imagine film about Carlos Castaneda, songs that evoke various people and places that appear in the book.”
“When I was writing The Endling, music was such a significant part of the process. I used it to get a sense of the culture I was depicting, to describe the state of particular characters, and more than anything else, to locate the atmosphere and emotion in a scene. It might come as no surprise that this playlist includes very few men.”
“Because the book is about ancestors, I needed music that had a certain ritual vibe to it.”
“I build the playlist to set mood, to create a headspace where my characters can swim and dance and fight and do all the things complex characters do.”
“Before Vervain Hollow was a book, it was a playlist.”
“The Grief Shop and Other Stories from a Broken World takes place after ‘the tragedy’ kills ⅓ of the earth’s population, and renders the rest clinically emotionally numb.”
“For every project, I make a playlist. I rarely listen to it while I write, but I use it as a towline back into the mood, characters and world of the story.”