“Certain songs sound like places to me. A sense of place, and place as character, is something I wanted in my book…”
“As a southern writer, I believe it’s vital to have Dolly Parton on this list. She represents the best of the region, unburdened by the problematic facets that sometimes poison it for progressives, both those from here and those born elsewhere.”
“I took a lot of long walks while writing and editing this book and preparing for its publication, and a few songs would often loop in my head. It’s not a long list, but it’s one that I hope will offer potential readers a glimpse into how music can offer us some alternatives to reflexive ‘I’m sorry’ statements.”
“Even though I’m immersed in literary culture, it’s music that most influences how and what I write. From its earliest chapters, in which a Cambodian pop song lingers over a Phnom Penh street, Between This World and the Next is shaped by musical spirits as diverse as the places and times it explores.”
“As I was writing these poems, the philosophy of the blues (though melancholy, not full of sorrow) carried my pen across the page.”
“Adia Victoria is what would happen if you mixed Billie Holiday, Muddy Waters, and Jim Morrison and then raised that baby on Eudora Welty and Toni Morrison.”
“This playlist includes a selection of my favorite pump up songs from the past four or five years, many of which I listened to on repeat during different phases of writing and editing Banal Nightmare”
“Although I can’t play a lick of music, I feel the rhythms and music as words in my head as I write and typing is my instrument of choice.”
“In Daughters of Chaos, priestesses of an ancient cult of female power control men with their song.”
“Like Angie and Sheila, the sisters at the heart of Smothermoss, I spent my teen years on the side of a tree-shrouded mountain, without internet access, where the radio reception was crap and only thing I had to listen to in the early years was my mom’s collection of John Denver and Anne Murray records.”