Queerbaiting and Appropriation Take Center Stage in “Songs of No Provenance”

Needless to say, I couldn’t wait to check out their debut novel, Songs of No Provenance, about an indie folk singer who flees to teach songwriting at an art camp after doing something sexual on stage she’s quite certain will get her cancelled. Joan Vole isn’t interested in teaching these teenagers, but joins the staff as an attempt at refuge—campers aren’t allowed smart phones, so she’s hopeful no one there can get online and come across what she’s done. Surrounded by young artists and fellow camp staff—including Sparrow, a nonbinary artist who is a fan of her music—Joan questions her past, future, and relationship to making art. Songs of No Provenance hits that sweet spot of being character-driven, yet suspenseful. As the reader wonders if (when?) everyone at camp will discover what she did, we’re offered a compelling portrait of this flawed artist. The novel dives into issues of identity, queerbaiting and appropriation, kink, fame, secrecy, art making, and more. And like Lydi’s first book, it’s really damn good. 

Lydi and I discussed their novel over a couple of weeks via Google Docs, and talked about music, queerbaiting and appropriation, and liminal identities. 

Rachel León: We have a mutual friend [JP Solheim] who is composing one of the fictional songs from the novel, so I thought we could start there. You use such vivid descriptions of Joan’s music, I’m curious if you have your own sense of what her songs sound like? And do you have plans to share JP’s version of the song with readers?

Lydi Conklin: Oh I love JP so much! Yes, JP is one of the artists who so kindly agreed to interpret and record and/or perform songs from the book! So far I have gotten five songs. Three are the same song, which I love so much, because they are all done so differently and beautifully, by my musician friends Caitlin Watkins, Anna Vogelzang, and John Shakespear. I listen to them all the time, and I love how they live in the same universe and come from Joan’s mind but are each so deeply in their own voice. And then my friends Jacob Milstein and Emily Bielagus did two different songs from the book, which they added lyrics to and completely changed the meaning/emotion of the songs. I’m obsessed with both approaches. I do have my own idea of how Joan’s songs sound, and probably Emily’s voice and style is the most similar to Joan’s, though I love seeing the songs interpreted in vastly different ways from how I pictured them. I will release the songs the musicians have interpreted in the weeks leading up to the book’s release, which I’m really excited about. Usually writing a novel is such a solitary act, and it’s been amazing to get to work in collaboration on this piece. 

RL: That’s so cool! You’ve done a lot of residencies, which often offer the opportunity to be in community with artists of other disciplines, in addition to having time to work in solitude. This novel made me wonder how much of your creative process pulls in other mediums. Like, I know you also draw comics—do you doodle when you’re stuck? Are you someone who writes with music or in silence? How does being in community with artists of other disciplines strengthen your own work?

LC: That’s such a good question! I keep my mediums pretty separate artistically for the most part. Like one editor who was interested in Rainbow Rainbow wanted to publish it with my drawings as well and to me that felt wrong. I really think of them as separate endeavors, and the way I work on them also reflects that. Like with comics, I often use speculative elements, and I have a rule in my fiction to never use speculative elements, because I’m more interested in the weirdest thing that could possibly happen in real life, whereas in comics I feel the medium is already in the world of the made-up, and so I use speculative elements like floating boobs and talking dogs to explore very real character-based emotions. 

I don’t usually use art or music in the process of writing, though I did listen to songs over and over again that inspired this book, to try to get into Joan’s mindspace and creative space and to try to learn how to write songs myself. I had only written kind of silly songs [prior] to this book, like a song about sports. Although I did write some grim goth songs in middle school about people bleeding in graveyards. I do have a lot of friends who work across disciplines artistically. I did theater in high school and a lot of my friends are still in that world, which inspired a manuscript I’m working on now, and all my musician friends formed the inspiration for this book, especially my friends’ band You Won’t, which is my favorite band. I was always so jealous of their glamorous life of touring and playing shows and writing this book was one way to get to live inside that world. 

RL: Ooh, can you share the songs that inspired the book? Or is that something you prefer to keep private?

LC: Oh yes! There is one song that was the biggest inspiration of the book that for some reason I like to keep private! But there were many songs that inspired it. Paige’s career and vibe is slightly inspired by young Joanna Newsom. Artists that inspired Joan’s songwriting and vibe range wildly, and I studied many songs to get inspiration, such as the works of Adrianne Lenker, Ani Difranco, Diane Cluck, You Won’t, and many others. Certain songs I would play over and over to wedge myself as deep as I could into a certain vibe. 

RL: I like that you’re keeping it private! Sometimes we need to do that as artists, for some things to belong to us alone…Keeping on the idea of consuming art, the novel explores the idea of how/if we can separate the art and the artist, particularly when the artist behaves problematically. It’s a question that comes up more and more with cancel culture, and I’m curious where you land on the issue: are the two inextricable, or can you separate the art from who made it?

LC: Oooh that’s such a good question, and the book definitely delves into those issues, thank you for noticing! I am especially interested in exploring that issue around queerbaiting as a phenomenon. It’s such a hard thing to think about—I recently read Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma which was an interesting read on this exact subject. I have had difficulty separating the two when I know certain things about an author. But then I feel mixed about it, because of course there’s so much I don’t know about other authors who could be doing horrible things. Sometimes that’s why it’s better not to meet your heroes. But other people I have grown to love their work even more because I know them, and I know them to be such wonderful people. But yeah, there are definitely authors and musicians whose work I cannot consume at all because of what I know about them. And I don’t know if that’s right or wrong, and I think that’s so interesting. I often bring a lot of myself into the work, and so I’m always curious about how that conflation and separation occurs, and I enjoy playing with it intentionally. Like my next book is decidedly fiction, but it plays with the idea of autofiction. 

RL: I want to talk about queerbaiting and appropriation—particularly in that context of the issue of the art vs. the artist. 

LC: This is a complex issue that I have thought about a lot. I do remember when I was young seeking out role models who seemed like they were queer or were gesturing toward queerness in some way, and I would cling to them even though, in retrospect, many of them were just using queerness aesthetically or to gain an edge or whatnot and weren’t actually queer. But I have complicated thoughts about that since fandom is already such a land of fantasy and those figures did help get me through. In more recent years I have been frustrated at times by so many books about queerness written by cishet authors, though I’ve come to realize this also is a complicated situation because I was able to write about being trans years before I was able to come out and writing helped me figure out my gender. So there’s no way to know who is writing about such topics because they are beginning to face something in themself and who is using them in some kind of bad faith manner. That is an issue that comes up in the book with some of the other members of Joan’s singer-songwriter collective who experiment with gender to various depths and with Joan vs. Sparrow’s generational differences in thinking about trans identity. 

RL: Complex for sure—like, when is it queerbaiting and when is it appropriation? Because there can be an overlap, right? Joan does both, doesn’t she?

LC: Yes, she definitely does. But I think for Joan, what appears on the surface to be queerbaiting and appropriation and is problematic when she identifies as cishet at the beginning of the book eventually shifts to mean something else later in the book when she realizes more about her own queer identity and how it takes shape. Joan is a complicated figure who has built very sturdy shields against her darkest and hardest thoughts. So while Sparrow has one interpretation of the way Joan makes work, later it turns out perhaps there is a truer reason Joan is exploring those topics. But yeah I think queerbaiting probably in general is a subcategory of appropriation, like appropriation of a specific culture, with a bad faith intention attached to it.

RL: The way Joan’s identity shifts feels really true to me. You mentioned earlier the generational differences between how Joan and Sparrow think about trans identity, which made me think of a few of your short stories and how one thing I love about your work is the way you explore liminal identities. As someone whose gender identity and sexuality is constantly shifting, I’m grateful for how you capture liminal identities. I feel like our society wants everything to fit neatly into a box, to be able to categorize people as this or that, and I think pushing against that is important, so thank you. Can you talk about capturing liminal identities on the page?

LC: Oh thank you so much, Rachel! That means so much to me to hear you say all that because that is really what I’m trying to get at. As a young person, I knew I was trans and was always drawn to trans identity, and really desperately wanted to have top surgery and change my name and pronouns, but I didn’t think it was possible to be transmasc without taking testosterone, which I didn’t want to do for various personal reasons. So for years, actually decades, I was in this space of sorrow where I felt there was no place for me in trans identity and no way forward for me to feel comfortable with myself. Then, years ago in some Brooklyn bar, I remember meeting Julia Weldon, an amazing singer/songwriter and actor who, many years later, did the narration for the Rainbow Rainbow audiobook, and I followed them on Instagram. They were a transmasc person like me who got top surgery without doing HRT. And I was like, whoa, you can do that? Why didn’t anyone tell me that? For years Julia was the only person I knew who had taken this journey, so I thought maybe just they were cool enough and no one else could! Then I had a really transphobic therapist who got in the way of my progress for a long time, but finally I got an amazing therapist who told me that the gender options are a buffet and you can take what you want and that was a big breakthrough for me. Ever since I have taken my own path no matter what people think about it. But I always thought back to how much Julia’s story affected my life, and how I wished there were more people taking similar paths that I could’ve witnessed in some form of media sooner. So I decided to explore those types of liminal identities in my own work ever after. I also frankly think liminal identities are more interesting to explore on the page, even if I didn’t have a personal stake in them, because nuance and complexity are the realms of literary fiction. 

RL: Since we’re talking about things I admire in your work—another is the intersection of sad and funny. I’m drawn to humor that hits on multiple levels, stuff that can feel wrong to laugh at…I’d love to hear your thoughts on this topic.

LC: Oh yes! I love the intersection of humor and sorrow so much. I admire Lorrie Moore for that, and there’s another story, called “Lupinski,” that my MFA student Nathan Blum introduced me to that does it beautifully as well. I always want the most visceral reaction possible from the reader, and both of those emotions are the most visceral ones you can pull out of anyone. I also feel like they go together. There is so much funny in the sad and so much sad in the funny, they can hardly be peeled apart from one another. So thank you for noticing it! 

RL: We need to wrap up our conversation, but there’s still so much I’d hoped to discuss! Let’s try to tie some topics together: fame, secrecy, kink, shame, and songs of no provenance—the link [between them] being what we keep private (and why) and what’s public, and how that [decision] can change our relationship with that thing, whether that’s art or something about our sexuality and/or proclivities. Our lives have become more public with social media, but there’s a curation involved, just as I imagine there is with fame. The question of the interplay between fame and secrecy feels central to this novel. Was there anything you discovered about these things through writing Songs of No Provenance?

LC: Oh totally! I love this question. I’ve never thought too much about fame in the past because in my field, even if my work was of a flavor that could theoretically achieve fame, literary fiction is not a realm that ever comes with that type of fame. My greatest heroes are virtually unknown to people outside my world, which always makes me sad. I also, as my friends would attest, am hopelessly out of the loop with anything related to fame or pop culture, so it’s not something that interests me. But I became very interested in it through Joan’s world. The kind of success she would want in a vacuum is not maybe that far from what she has but when pitted against what her mentor/friend Paige achieves it starts to look sickly. And I love that idea that in a time of hunger for fame, secrecy and shameful acts that cannot ever be known about would have an even stronger erotic tenor. Songs without authors become so precious to Joan—before she even understands why, they stand in for works of art that can exist without any of the terror and wonder of actual fame and success, untethered as they are from any actual person. 

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