Lydi Conklin: On Songwriting, Queerness, Burning Your Life Down, and Their Debut Novel ‘Songs of No Provenance’

Lydi Conklin’s new novel, Songs of No Provenance (Catapult, 2025), tells the propulsive story of folk singer-songwriter Joan Vole. Joan runs away from New York City one night after committing a bizarre sex act onstage. Fearing the very worst for her career and reputation, she flees to a summer camp in Virginia, where she finds a job teaching songwriting for teens. There, she meets Sparrow, a nonbinary artist and fellow teacher at the camp. Through their complicated relationship, Lydi explores themes of nonbinary identity, queerbaiting, appropriation, and love. 

Recently, Lydi and I sat down on Zoom for a wide-ranging conversation about their debut novel, covering everything from #MeToo to drawing comics, the relationship between artmaking and teaching, generational differences in how queerness is viewed, and so much more. They were an absolute delight to speak with, and it was my pleasure to get a glimpse into the process that went into this engaging new novel. 

Emma Burger: Why did you decide to make your protagonist, Joan, a folk singer?

Lydi Conklin: I’ve always been really intrigued by the life of musicians. The writing life is so solitary and unglamorous in comparison to the life of a touring musician—someone who goes out and plays shows and is making their art live in front of people, and it just seems so badass and cool. If I could choose to have a skill in any art, it would be music, so this was a way of me living out that fantasy of a life that I could never otherwise have. 

EB: How did you capture the experience of being a working musician so accurately? Did you have any experience performing? 

LC: I’ve played a little ukulele and guitar and have written some songs, just silly joke songs, but I’ve never performed or anything like that. I’m not talented at all in music. It’s just something I do privately. I had to rely on a lot of people to help me with the research components. I started out with friends of mine. I’m friends with these two people from high school who were in a band called You Won’t—Raky Sastri and Josh Arnoudse–and both of them helped me a lot. And my friend Anna Vogelzang helped me so much. Those were the three people who are the core of my consultants on the matter. 

It was funny because they disagreed on some research elements. My friend Raky, who has so many instruments, and plays so many different instruments regularly, was like, yeah, it would totally make sense for a musician to hate dreadnoughts and love parlor guitars. And then another consultant was like, that’s the silliest thing I’ve ever heard. People can barely tell the difference between the two. So people just have different ideas. I would sometimes go back and forth between them and then they led me to other people. There was someone named Cameron Knowler who helped me so much. He just knows everything about guitars and I'd be like, what would happen if you brought a guitar to Arizona… would it explode? And he would just know the answer to everything. I was really lucky to have access to those people and to get to meet new people through the process.

EB: Who do you consider Joan’s musical influences? Were you drawing from a specific music scene? 

LC: That’s such a great question. There’s one line in the book where she talks about how she gets annoyed when people obsess over one band or one song, which is funny because that’s kind of how I am. She’s kind of an omnivore though. She would listen to death metal, country, anything, and just put it in the blender and see what comes out with her own work. I would say when I was drawing her, there were certain musicians whose style of songwriting I studied a lot. The two that were the most influential to me were Diane Cluck, and Adrianne Lenker from Big Thief. Both of those musicians write songs that are so beautiful, so vivid, so narratively rich. As a writer, I love songs with narrative. I don’t like music where I can’t understand the words. I want to have a story and emotion and for it to move me. Neither of those musicians’ songs have a normal quote unquote structure of chorus, verse, bridge. They’re just meandering and strange and sometimes a little more like talking. I knew that was how Joan would approach songwriting. So I would listen to those songs over and be like, how can I write a song that’s like this? So that was how I wrote “Lakeshore.” 

EB: So there is a musical version of the song you write about, “Lakeshore,” that readers can actually listen to?

LC: There is. When I wrote the book, I had a way it sounded in my mind. But then I actually did this project where songwriters interpreted the songs from the book. When Anna Vogelzang was reading the book, she saw that I had written out the chords to this song that Joan’s playing. It was supposed to be a simple bright folk song. She played it for me and was like, this is what you say it sounds like. This is not a simple, bright folk song. This is a dark, creepy folk song. So then she was like, it would sound better if you did these different chords. Then she played the song and sang it, and it sounded so cool. Then that gave me the idea to ask musicians I knew to interpret the songs and make them real. I gave every musician I knew who was willing to participate all the lyrics that were in the book. My friend Meriel O’Connell did such an amazing job and created a version of “Lakeshore” that you can listen to on my Instagram or her Spotify.

EB: How do you think songwriting relates to literary writing? Do you see them as similar artistic endeavors? 

LC: Yeah, I totally do. Songwriting is mystifying to me. I don’t know how to write a good song, I only know how to write a silly song that sounds like a jingle or, now, the lyrics of a song in a book that someone else with actual musical talent can make into a real song. I did, for a time, date a songwriter and she’s also a literary writer of nonfiction, so we would talk sometimes about the different processes for her. She said when she wrote a song, it would come out super fast, like in an hour or two, and it would just be done. Writing prose was not the same at all for her, in the same way writing prose is not like that at all for me. I can’t imagine writing anything in one or two hours. I’m sure there are songwriters who have a different approach though. I have friends who are songwriters who have hundreds of songs, and that’s kind of how Joan is too. She has so many songs and most of them will never see the light of day, but then you hit on a magical one. They may come out fast but most of them are unusable, as I see the process. 

EB: The dialogue in this book is very well crafted and realistic, especially between Joan and her friend Paige. How do you approach writing dialogue? 

LC: Thank you, that's so nice. When I first started writing in college, I was really freaked out by dialogue. It was like, how do you make it sound like the person’s talking, but be interesting? Sometimes I do an exercise with my students where it’s like, go listen to a conversation and transcribe it out word for word. People just talk in circles. You’ll probably see it when you see the transcription of this interview, just blathering nonsense making no sense. How do you make it good but not fakey-fake and too artistic? 

Another thing that broke me through on dialogue was doing comics. Some comics have blocks of narration and interiority and dialogue, but for me, I just made an artistic decision early on that I didn’t want to use any blocks of text because my experience of reading comics is like, if there’s a block of text like in Watchmen, I’m just going to read the block and I’m barely going to look at the pictures. The image and text don’t feel integrated, so I only do dialogue, which forced me to do so much of it that it took my fear away. 

EB: How did you get into comics, and how do those two artistic practices, drawing comics and writing prose, interact for you?

LC: I got into comics when I was really young. I think I was in fourth grade and I did this two-hundred-page comic about a mouse. Then I remember I accidentally dropped all the pages and I hadn’t numbered them and I was so overwhelmed that I just gave up on it. Then in seventh grade, I had a comic called The Grim Tree that was about a very sour tree that was always yelling at people. So I was really into comics as a kid, but then around high school, I realized, what am I doing? All comic books are superhero comics or magical kids comics, and I’m not into that. I’m more into literary stories and narratives about humans and psychological dynamics, and I don’t know any comics like that, so I quit for a long time. 

Then in college, I had this amazing professor named Nancy Mitchnick, who’s an amazing painter, and she was just this wild genius. I was doing painting with her, along with short story writing workshops in the English Department. She was like, your paintings are not good. They look like cartoons. They look like they should have a narrative, but they don’t. Because painting isn’t the form for narrative usually. She was like, why don’t you do comics? And she showed me all these cool cartoonists like Lynda Barry, Chris Ware, and Dan Clowes. She gave me this whole pile of books and I was like what? I didn’t know this even existed. Then I did my first comic with her in class, which was called Middle of the Ocean, about a young girl who wants to marry her dog and has to swim across the ocean to do it. It was a metaphor for queerness. Then I was just like, this is awesome, so I kept doing it. 

The two practices don’t interact too much. Comics is something I do at night. It’s fun for me. Sadly though, it’s always the first thing that drops out of my life because when I’m always trying to write and do writing bureaucracy, and I have a full-time teaching job. I mainly do comics if I’m at residencies or in the summer when I have time. 

EB: You call Joan’s subgenre “Mad Stories,” which you describe as “both angry and crazy, a realist subset of anti-folk.” Is that something you created, or a real genre of music? If you created it, where did that idea come from? 

LC: Yeah, I made that up, because Anna Vogelzang was telling me, there are so many genres of folk like anti-folk and dark folk. I don’t even remember them all now. Sometimes music just gets broken into small categories, and I remember my friend Henry Hoke, whose book Open Throat is so good, had a category of music that he made up called “night bus”, which is music you would listen to on a bus at night. I love the idea of these really niche strange subgenres and how Joan might be in a sub genre that was just only her. I thought that was funny. 

EB: Excited from the energy of the crowd, Joan gets sexual with one of her fans onstage. What do you think came over Joan in that moment? What was motivating her? Did she intend to self-sabotage?

LC: She’s in an artistic field that’s so competitive, where it’s so hard to make money, like the one I’m in, writing, there are so few cookies that are passed out to so many thousands of people every year. Only a couple of people get this award or that fellowship, and it’s so hard to get a job, and it’s so hard to make money and get an advance and everything. At the beginning of my career, before I had done a lot of work on myself, I just felt constantly jealous, stressed out, bitter, angry, like, why am I not getting things? Why did they get that? Why didn’t I get that? It was tearing me apart. 

I actually don’t think Joan, by nature, is jealous or angry or really gives a crap about awards. She doesn’t crave institutional permission the way I do. But I do think that it’s rough being in that world where she can barely scrape by, and where she barely has money to eat normally (not that she would eat normally anyway—she’s kind of unhinged). And then when her mentee who she’s helped to get to where she is suddenly surpasses her by so much, Joan has this feeling that she’s being left behind. That really got to her and sent her on a spiral, which was a combination of this wild jealousy and hurt and feeling of abandonment. It’s like she had to prove to herself that her fans love her unconditionally, which of course, those fans can never really know her or love her. So she took things too far and harmed someone in that moment. That’s how I see it. 

EB: What do you think is so tempting about burning your life down, running away, and starting over? Do you think it’s human nature? 

LC: That narrative has always compelled me. When I was young, I was always like, if things get bad or weird or I don’t like this life, I’m just going to leave and go to some random place to start again. Just see what’s there. It’s a fantasy, and there are books that do it so well, like Nevada by Imogen Binnie is one that comes to mind. I don’t know if this still exists, but there used to be this website called Post Secrets, where they’d have postcards with anonymous secrets that people mailed into this blog. One time, I saw one, which, who knows if it was fake, but it said everyone thinks I died on September 11th. That card just haunts me. That someone would’ve taken that disaster to be like, this is my chance. I can just disappear and do something completely different. It’s even more of a fantasy these days, because it’s so much harder to disappear now, with the internet and phones and tracking devices. 

EB: What was compelling to you about the parasocial relationship between performer and fan? 

LC: That type of relationship fascinates me so much. I’m fascinated by how that type of fandom relationship ties into queerbaiting, because as a child who knew I was queer, I would obsess over musicians who were queer or potentially queer, like Ani DiFranco or Dar Williams, or whoever it was. I remember there’s this Veruca Salt album with the two band members in a bed together and I was just like, what does it mean? I don’t know anything about these people and me and my best friend in seventh grade would just listen to Ani DiFranco and be like, this song’s definitely about a woman, even though we knew nothing about DiFranco’s life. We needed some role model, though. We really needed that to get through. 

Sparrow has a moment later in the book where they’re like, I would look at this one picture of Joan and be like, I can see that future for myself as someone who’s not really a girl. I think it intersects with queerness, transgenderness, and all that. It’s really fascinating. 

EB: Did you set out to write a book exploring gender identity, or is that a theme that emerged once you started working on the novel? 

LC: One thing that’s interesting about that is I did set out thinking Joan was a cishet character, and I really wanted to write about how a cishet character is queerbaiting, writing about queerness. Is it okay that they’re writing about queerness? Can she help queer people even if she’s not queer? Then as I got to know Joan more, of course, I realized that she wasn’t cis or het. So I found that out as I went on, but I always did know that Sparrow would be trans. I really wanted there to be a non-binary love interest in the story because I haven’t read a lot of books where there’s a non-binary love interest, or even a non-binary person who’s sexy and attractive. 

I really wanted to dramatize the generational differences with queerness and transness. Joan definitely has a Gen X vibe and Sparrow actually has more of a Gen Z vibe. I wanted to show how those two different worldviews intersect around trans identity, and gender identity more generally. Joan is like, whatever, if someone’s cishet and he wants to wear a dress onstage, we just burn it down and do whatever the fuck we want, and Sparrow’s like actually no, that kind of action does have meaning and that can be upsetting or misleading. I like thinking about those two ways of seeing the world. I can see value in both ways. 

EB: Were you thinking about #MeToo at all, when you wrote this book?

LC: I definitely was. The #MeToo movement and cancel culture have always fascinated me. It was so amazing and I’ve been in awe of all of it in a way, because the old way did not work. People who were predators and caused harm did not face consequences. We see it over and over again, where the legal system fails people so brutally that even when people are harmed, they don’t want to enter the system at all for the most part. Most of the time people just decide they’re not going to go down that road because it’s so retraumatizing and fruitless, and you usually end up humiliated and out in the cold, and the person just walks away. That sucks. So when #MeToo and cancel culture started, I was like, wow. This is a way for people to take justice into their own hands and to actually help people to have whisper networks on a broader structure. 

Cancel culture can save people and protect people, but there are obviously many problems too with how it works. It’s not a perfect system. It’s a system that probably has harmed people who are innocent. Just today, I was looking on Instagram at a lady who didn’t want to give up her airplane seat and she’s completely blown up on the internet. Sometimes it’s for stupid things. That person didn’t deserve to have their life ruined for something like that. 

To me, it’s always seemed like there are growing pains. The old way doesn’t work, and there’s no perfect new way, but we’re trying our best to muddle through in this middle way that’s imperfect and harmful, but does bring justice and does do good. 

EB: Joan is torn between making her own art and teaching. You do both—can those two pursuits feel like they’re in conflict with one another for you? 

LC: For me, no. I was interested in Joan as someone who hates teaching and doesn’t want to teach, and has seen a bad view of teaching from her father and from the musicians she’s friends with who are like, teaching equals giving up your art and selling out. I don’t know anyone who’s that extreme, honestly. I teach in an MFA program, so we bring in talented writers all the time who’ve never taught, and throw them into teaching, and sometimes people love it and are talented at it and are like, yes, this is what I want to do. And sometimes people are like, this drains me. Writers are introverts and sometimes they just can’t do both. For me, I’m lucky because I do love teaching. It’s absolutely exhausting, which is why I like to do it as late in the day as possible, because it kind of crushes me for the rest of the day. But I do love it. I love having students. My teaching and writing feed into each other. If I have a craft issue that I’m struggling with, I’ll bring it into the classroom. Students will say something that will push me through, and I love that. I think it does help my writing, and it doesn’t feel in conflict the way it does for Joan. 

EB: What does your current writing process look like? 

LC: I’m working on another novel that’s pretty close to done. It’s set over a shorter amount of time, only three days. It does deal with some similar themes. It has a trans protagonist. It’s been nice to have that to focus on, while all this stuff about Songs of No Provenance is going on. It’s just nice to think about something else for my mental health.

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Lydi Conklin is the author of Rainbow Rainbow, which was long-listed for the Story Prize and the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Short Story Collection. Their fiction has appeared in Tin House, American Short Fiction, and The Paris Review. They’ve drawn comics for The New Yorker, The Believer, Lenny Letter, and other publications. Songs of No Provenance is their first novel.