“Neon Steel is a speculative collection of fiction set in Pittsburgh in the late ’90s and early 2000s. I wanted this playlist to reflect the flavor of the post-industrial city and project a certain energy, futurism, and joy.”
“I have to confess that I am not a music person. Paradoxically, I am very much a mix CD person.”
“Cleaner is told in one paragraph with no chapter breaks: this song is how I wanted and how I imagine the reader’s experience to be. Pure uncut momentum and insanity.”
“When you get to interview two dozen incredible women filmmakers, you get to watch at least 5 times that many incredible movies that offer up music , scoring a few memorable moments.”
“As I compose this piece on a long train journey, it occurs to me that the rhythmic, occasionally juddering, song of the rail below me is in spirit a musical companion to my novel.”
“Teen Queen Training is a book steeped in the lessons I took from Seventeen magazine during the late ‘90s.”
“I had a song or a soundtrack in mind for each of the nine essays in the book.”
“In public and in private, whenever I was writing something for On Sundays, songs would come to me—bits of jazz, a hymn I grew up hearing in church, a blues song, something moody by Hozier or Nina Simone. Sometimes the songs snuck their way onto the page as with “Don’t Let Me Misunderstood” and “There’s a Leak in This Old Building”, but most stayed in my head, happy to be hummed while I wrote out some horrible, stomach-churning scene of horror.”
“Finding a song that aligns with the emotion or experience I’m trying to communicate helps me go deeper and stay in the moment.”
“Berceuse Parish is a community record: part myth, part elegy, part songbook, and ultimately a love letter to Louisiana. It’s a poetry book you can read as a novel, or maybe a broken novel you can read as a series of poems and other ephemera.”