Interview by Kanchi Sharma
Songs of No Provenance tells the story of Joan Vole, an indie folk singer forever teetering on the edge of fame, who flees New York after committing a shocking sexual act onstage that she fears will doom her career. Joan seeks refuge at a writing camp for teenagers in rural Virginia, where she’s forced to question her own toxic relationship to artmaking—and her complicated history with a friend and mentee—while finding new hope in her students and a deepening intimacy with a nonbinary artist and fellow camp staff member. A propulsive character study of a flawed and fascinating artist, Songs of No Provenance explores issues of trans nonbinary identity, queer baiting and appropriation, kink, fame hunger, secrecy and survival, and the question of whether a work of art can exist separately from its artist.
Here is Lydi’s playlist while writing the book and Kanchi’s playlist while reading the book. Lydi encourages musicians interested in making interpretative songs of the novel to reach out. Kanchi asked Lydi if they’d like to plug an organization for the readers to volunteer with/donate to, and they suggested Trans Lifeline and the ACLU.
I couldn’t help but notice the theme of voyeurism in Songs of No Provenance. The novel begins with Joan looking at the aghast audience after she commits a transgressive act on stage and ends with her looking proudly at her students inside a classroom. Joan is always aware of eyes on her — fans, lovers, rivals, even her own. “The watching wasn’t over, would continue on to infinity,” she says. There is spectacle and self-surveillance. How did you approach writing Joan’s interiority under this pressure of constant watchfulness? In her moments of exhibition and self-display, were you thinking of performance as both empowerment and entrapment?
I’m so glad you noticed that theme! Because it is important to me but isn’t what people tend to talk about most commonly with the book. But whenever I was writing Joan I was hyper aware of all the scrutiny on her and how that state of mind would affect her interiority and how she perceived and processed the world around her, even when she’s not aware of the impact the scrutiny is having on her. For example, I think a big part of her fetish is related to being constantly observed, and having this subconscious longing for one activity that can’t be known and that would be disastrous to be known. Even just the way she talks to her colleagues and the people around her to my mind is a response to having been closely scrutinized. She’s grumpy and abrupt because she is someone who is probably neurodivergent who is being constantly scrutinized. When she starts to get romantic feelings for someone else, it’s her history with previous relationships, but also her fear of how she’s being perceived, that get in the way.
I’m thinking of Joan’s kink and eroticism as inseparable from both ecstasy and annihilation. In Songs of No Provenance, desire often seems entwined with destruction. Joan’s engagement with her kink risks undoing her: it strains her relationship with herself, destabilizes her community, alienates her from her fans, and even corrodes her art. And yet, paradoxically, kink also emerges as a refuge — a space of reclamation, a sanctuary from the strictures of normative morality, even as it remains fraught with danger. How did you arrive at staging kink as both destructive and redemptive, as a site where power is not only rehearsed and distorted but also reimagined as a form of survival? In crafting Joan’s intimate scenes, how did you negotiate their volatility and the pull between ruin and refuge?
That’s such a great way to think about it. I never heard it put like that and that is exactly right. I think that Joan’s kink is functioning in different ways depending on where her mental state is at. The kink itself is more of a chaotic-neutral force in her life and it’s her inner life that pushes it one way or the other. Like in the scene where Joan commits an aggressive act onstage in chapter two, the kink is part of it but it’s really Joan’s toxicity, jealousy, and troubling lack of direct communication with her mentee that make it a horrific act. Whereas when she has an intimate scene with a love interest later in the book, her own misconceptions about the relationship are coming into the kink but it’s also a bridge to intimacy and understanding about mutual pleasure, because she’s come a long way psychologically.
Joan notes that a man would likely be excused for behaviors that mark her as suspect. Her mistakes become a spectacle; his might be overlooked. This exposes the gendered double standards at the heart of desire — who is granted legitimacy in their wanting, and who is punished for it. How were you thinking about the politics of desire, as they play out through Joan’s precarious visibility as a queer woman in an industry that thrives on scrutiny?
In thinking about cancel culture and the way the media handles various cases and situations, I did think about the gendered dynamics of how crimes are perceived. Not to excuse in any way what Joan did, but I did want to consider how privileges of identity including status as white, straight, cis, etc, can at times make behavior more forgivable by society in messed up ways. I almost always write about queer characters and they are never perfect. Often they act in ways that are morally complex or plainly wrong. And that’s because I want queer characters to be given the same leeway to be difficult or wild as cishet white men in fiction.
At one point, Joan reflects that “boundaries were a joke.” The book refuses neat divisions between intimacy and violation, care and exploitation. Paige, in particular, embodies this slipperiness between magnetism and menace. How did she evolve for you as a character for whom this boundary blurs?
Thanks so much for noticing this. I always am very interested in blurry boundaries and nuance, and writing about situations that inhabit the gray area or where it’s a little hard to decide how to feel about what’s happening. Those are the most interesting moments in life for me. If a character is plainly evil and unsympathetic, they are easy to write off and also not realistic, in my experience of life. Paige is my favorite character, even though many don’t agree. I was really interested in the mentor/mentee relationship and what happens when a mentee excels beyond the fame of the mentor. I also wanted to write about both sides of a relationship that’s being damaged by lack of communication because I’ve been in those situations and they can be so quietly brutal.
The novel dismantles the myth of utopia within subcultures — radical, queer and artistic spaces are so often framed as “safe,” yet power imbalances persist, sometimes in more insidious ways than in the mainstream. Predatorial personalities exist even in these spaces, Paige being a vivid example. What compelled you to dramatize betrayal and complicity within spaces that imagine themselves as radical? In crafting Paige and others, how did you avoid caricatures while revealing the dangers of unexamined charisma?
That is another topic that has fascinated me, and I was just speaking with a friend about it tonight over dinner. Sometimes queer spaces are held to higher standards than hetero spaces, and I’m sure it’s the same for spaces for any marginalized communities though I can’t speak to others. I think it’s because the people who rely on those spaces have higher standards for their needs and expect more of the keepers of queer spaces, but sometimes that means that queer spaces are destroyed due to internal politics while the more sinister enemy outside is left untouched. I’ve always been interested in the complexity around that. I never want to write caricatures, so I always try to show characters behaving in contradictory and nuanced ways. I think Chekov once said that when you first meet a character they should be doing something that is uncharacteristic for them, which I think about a lot.
And yet, alongside that exposure, the book also lingers on the grace of friendships, the quiet sustenance of mentorships, and fleeting solidarities. Joan imagines community as both corrosive and redemptive, capable of exploitation and salvation at once. How did you visualize the classroom becoming a place of redemption in Joan’s arc?
I wanted Joan to have a separate arc alongside the arc around the video of her terrible night at the concert. I have learned so much from teaching and found it to be so healing and so instructive. I thought it could be that for Joan. That, especially for someone who has been an “art monster,” finding a way to take care of and see other people at last could be revelatory. Joan needs to understand the students and know them, needs to really see them, before she can help them at all. That arc needed a lot of finessing through the drafts, but I was happy with where it ended up!
Technology weaves into Joan’s life in subtle but insidious ways, amplifying her exposure, interfering with her intimacy, and shaping her audience’s gaze. Screens and devices are almost secondary characters. How did this evolve through your process of writing the novel? More broadly, digital culture remakes queer artistic life: what it means to connect, to perform, to belong. Joan is acutely aware of her audience online and offline. How do you see digital culture altering the stakes of Joan’s art? How did you approach characterizing that double consciousness of creating for oneself, and for the gaze of others?
I remember once a workshop leader said he was seeing so much historical fiction from the 90s because writers were afraid to deal with cell phones in their work. Cell phones do interfere with a lot of plots. Like someone goes missing—just text him. I was glad Joan was the kind of character who would throw out her cell phone when in distress—she’s the kind of Gen Xer who never found complete comfort in the world of technology. This natural character action spared me many scenes of Joan looking at her phone, Googling her concert, typing away to see whether she’s gone viral yet. But still, she lives in our world, or in 2017 at least, a world of merciless technology, and so she cannot escape the digital world, and it continues to encroach on her. It was fun thinking about how the internet’s reaction to the video of what Joan did would shift, how trolls can piece together digital clues in minutes, how a video can go from nowhere to everywhere in hours. I liked thinking about the flow of viral content. And of course, even before anything happens, the digital world is deeply affecting how Joan thinks about her art. She’s very aware of a colleague who was cancelled, of the ways fans ship her and Paige, and other ways the digital world is shaping her career and the careers of musicians around her.
Creative theft recurs as a theme: Paige steals, Joan borrows, art circulates in messy ways. The novel questions originality, influence, and appropriation. Art here is not pure or autonomous but it emerges through trespass, borrowing, sometimes even exploitation. What drew you to explore creative theft as both violation and inevitability? In shaping Joan’s relationship to her art, how did you imagine theft as a generative force?
That’s such a great question, and one that has long interested me. Especially the idea of who can tell what story. There’s a character toward the end who uses some of Joan’s experience in their work, and doesn’t get the response they’d hoped for. Joan writes about people in her life, but also warps them, but also has certain boundaries she won’t cross, or says she won’t. And I loved thinking about Joan’s queerbaiting in her songs and how she thinks through whether it’s okay for cishet people to tell queer stories, or whether said people are actually cishet. And how can an audience know? And who can tell you what to write? I like all of these questions because they are full of nuance. Unless you are writing about yourself sitting alone in a room, there is no way to avoid writing about other people, and, of course, people who have different identities than yourself. So it’s an ethical and craft quandary all writers must face.
Throughout the novel, you use long, spiralling sentences that resist closure with such beauty. At heightened moments of tension, such as the scene of rupture between Joan and Paige, you punctuate them with sharp fragments: clipped sentences, tense exchanges, almost a withdrawal of lyricism. It feels like a formal shift to register betrayal. This oscillation creates a kind of breath pattern for the reader — both lush and jolting. How intentional was your play with syntax as a way of mirroring Joan’s shifting states of mind? Did you think of sentence length as carrying psychological or even musical weight in the novel?
Oooh I love this question, thank you so much for noticing that. Yeah, since Joan is a lyricist, it was very important for me that the sentences have a musical quality to them. So many times I read the book out loud to make sure it had rhythm and sounded musical and good, that no moment felt sharp or wrong on the ear. And yeah, during tense scenes I try—sometimes instinctually, and sometimes intentionally—to write shorter sentences. This may at times seem paradoxical, but shorter sentences slow down the pace, and I wanted the readers to really linger in those tense moments, moments, as you say, of rupture and betrayal.
The novel refuses to punish certain characters — terrible people thrive. Paige, for instance, ascends even as she harms others. The book resists moral resolution. How do you think about narrating injustice in fiction? Should the novel mirror the world’s cruelty, or offer counter-worlds where harm is rectified?
I think either choice is interesting narratively, honestly. Joan, too, does a horrible thing at the beginning of the book and she does pay for it by being exiled and miserable and anxious, but she works her way through what she’s done by really having to look at herself and begin to learn how to take care of others. Some may think she was punished too harshly, and some may not think she was punished enough. So there’s a subjective quality as well to punishment in fiction. I also feel that the most important aspect in this regard is the moral scaffolding of the text. If the book knows that what a character did is not good, to me that’s enough, and I don’t care as much whether the character is punished in any material or psychological way through the narrative. But if a book depicts characters doing awful things and showing them happy and perfect and not exposing the consequences of those actions on the page, then that can be morally bankrupt.
Joan often appears unanchored, seeking home not in geography but in art, community, and intimacy. Traditional structures of belonging prove unstable or exclusionary. Why was it important for Joan to build a community elsewhere when the usual anchors failed her?
For me that’s the core of queerness, which Joan finds her way into. Often queer people don’t have heteronormative nuclear family structures—though of course sometimes they do. Often queer people have to find their way to community in unusual ways, and it made sense that Joan, who lives on the outside in many ways, would do just that. I’ve also often felt that the writing world is a sort of home that has no geography, and that whenever I go into a writing/book space I can find people who, whether I know them yet or not, feel like home.
Finally, the book reveals desire, art, and community as volatile but inextricable. Joan emerges scarred but not erased. What has writing Songs of No Provenance revealed to you about your own relationship to these forces — as a writer, as an artist, as a person moving through community?
That’s such a great question. I learned a lot about these forces, for sure. I like to write narratives that revolve in some way around my own worst nightmare. In this book I wanted to think about the early days of my writing career where I was plagued and menaced by constant jealousy, and explore how a character would’ve felt the way I did—panicked, unstable, rejected—and caused harm to someone else because of that feeling. I wanted to play it out and see where it took her. I think in a way it was comforting, because it revealed to me that there is some life on the other side of almost any nightmare.
Lydi Conklin has received a Stegner Fellowship, four Pushcart Prizes, a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award, a Creative Writing Fulbright in Poland, a grant from the Elizabeth George Foundation, and fellowships from MacDowell, Yaddo, Bread Loaf, Sewanee, Emory, Hedgebrook, Djerassi, the James Merrill House, Lighthouse Works, and elsewhere. Their fiction has appeared in The Paris Review, One Story, McSweeney’s, American Short Fiction, and VQR. They have drawn cartoons for The New Yorker and Narrative Magazine, and graphic fiction for The Believer, Lenny Letter, and the Steppenwolf Theater in Chicago. They’ve served as the Helen Zell Visiting Professor at the University of Michigan and are now an Assistant Professor of Fiction at Vanderbilt University. Their story collection, Rainbow Rainbow, was longlisted for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Award and The Story Prize. Their novel, Songs of No Provenance, was longlisted for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize.
Kanchi Sharma is a multidisciplinary artist, editor, educator, and veteran brand strategist from Mumbai, currently at work on a novel & story collection while pursuing her MFA in Fiction at Vanderbilt University as the Russell G. Hamilton Scholar and University Graduate Fellow. Kanchi’s work has received support from Tin House, Kenyon Review, Napa Valley Writers Conference, VONA, Fine Arts Work Centre, Community of Writers, NYS Summer Writers Institute, and more. She is a Kenyon Developmental Editing Fellowship ’24 finalist and was longlisted for the Diverse Writers & Diverse Worlds Grant at Speculative Literature Foundation. Kanchi is Editor-in-Chief and Fiction Editor at Nashville Review.