“If I were in a club today with some of the historical women I write about in my book, people who would have no idea what a synthesizer is let alone the hipster cocktails I would serve them, here are the tunes each woman would choose from a list of female-forward pop songs from the last decade or so.”
“I think of these songs as calling to me and my stories in turn responding in a conversation across space, time, and borders.”
“I imagine that after Ed’s regrettable ska/punk phase, he got into a bit of a punk/hardcore phase. This seems like the natural progression to me for rock music kids in the ’90s.”
Daily book & music news & links.
“I sometimes wonder if my novel makes the most sense when read aloud. The tension between the human and the natural when spoken is so much more apparent than on the page.”
Daily book & music news & links.
“The novel is about an off-the-grid metal artist who welds sculptures out of the discards of this often-disregarded region. It is also a novel about stepmothers and daughters, and about cultural estrangement, the painful divides between where I live now, in New York, and where I return often to visit my family in rural Pennsylvania.”
“My poems often try to render the ordinary strange, and the strange ordinary.”
Daily book & music news & links.
“My playlist for Confidence reflects the boom-and-bust instability of all-consuming limerence: when it’s good you’re unassailable, and when it’s bad you’re either in major trouble or about to be.”