Lydi Conklin’s Songs of No Provenance is a great American music novel. It’s a story of love, creative community, and the blurry boundaries around queer and celebrity identity.
Joan Vole is an edgy middle-aged folk singer with an obsessive cadre of devoted fans. Upon the revelation that her younger, longtime mentee and occasional lover Paige has gotten signed to the holy grail of indie folk labels, Joan unthinkingly reveals her shameful lifelong sexual predilection during a solo set. After the show, she flees New York, destroying all evidence of her existence aside from her prized 1930s parlor guitar. Desperate, she drives through the night to an arts camp in Virginia, where she had been invited to teach the summer session. There she meets Sparrow, a nonbinary comic artist and enormous fan of Joan’s, along with a host of other teacher-artists who lead her to both question and fear who she is, and what might be revealed on social media in the aftermath of her onstage revelation. Songs of No Provenance is a lush, wild story, textured with sensory and technical descriptions of music and performance, set upon the New York cityscape in the past timeline, and the green of rural Virginia in the present day. We follow Joan’s journey as she’s forced to reckon with her queerbaiting as a minor rock star, and as a dedicated songwriter who can’t find a way to forgive herself for her fetish.
I met Lydi Conklin last summer when we were in residence together at the Ragdale Foundation, and at the outset I was frankly intimidated. With work featured in The Paris Review and The New Yorker, culminating in the remarkable story collection Rainbow Rainbow, Lydi holds rock star status in queer letters. However, with our adjacent rooms at Ragdale, we shared a kitchen, and we both made regular use of the kettle for coffee and tea. We got into a rhythm of refilling the kettle for each other, a gentle nod of respect to one another’s time and space at an artist residency. I was so pleased to continue to get to know them through this interview about Songs of No Provenance, which we conducted via email.
JP Solheim
You imbued Joan Vole with such passion and authority about her music, and about music in general—there are the technical aspects of playing guitar, which become significant to her character, but also her deep love of music, her tastes in blues and marginal artists, like a found CD of the recording of a teenage choir from the 1970s.
Joan’s obsession with music is also her fatal flaw. It’s a safe place to hide, and she cloaks herself in it, keeping herself from being fully known by anyone. Was Joan a musician from when you first conceived this novel? And how did you develop her character through music, what kinds of research did you do?
Lydi Conklin
Thank you so much for saying all this, JP! I’m so glad all that is coming across because you have understood my intentions exactly. Yes, Joan was always a musician right from the start. That was always very intrinsic to her character. I have always wished I could be a musician—it’s a sexier art form than novel writing. So I got to live that life through Joan for several years while I wrote this novel, which scratched the itch for me a little bit.
So some of the research was just immersion in the world of music that happened naturally through my life. A large number of my friends are musicians, and people I’ve been involved with romantically, so observing their lives was the original inspiration. But then a lot of research had to be done as I wrote the book. I had a few friends, namely Raky Sastri, Josh Arnoudse, and Anna Vogelzang, all friends from high school, all musicians to this day, who I could call on to ask questions. And then those friends led to more friends who led to strangers and friends of strangers. Sometimes my sources wildly disagreed—most notably, about whether it’s reasonable to hate dreadnoughts! Not that I mind, because Joan is often unreasonable. So I had to rely on my own intuition about Joan’s character. I also strangely and randomly moved to Nashville a few years into writing the book, so I began to go to a lot of shows as research, as well.
Once the book was finished, I had three music friends (those named above) read the book and tell me where I had made mistakes. They caught a lot of things. With research it always works better for me to fudge it on my own first and not get bogged down with the details of reality before I write. There’s always a way to finesse things after the fact and make them accurate without getting in the way of the creative process.
Joan’s relationship to music is also inspired by my relationship to writing, especially in my younger years. Her jealousy and obsession, her fear that the music world is a zero sum game, her obsessive constant working, that all comes from ways I’ve felt at my worst (and best).
JP Solheim
I found it fascinating how the songs she wrote, the way she approached writing and arranging, are part of her character: when she wants to wear armor, or is aiming to impress rather than move people, she works with a capo, finger picking, minor scales, or elements that are offkey or lifted from other songs. Were there particular artists that inspired Joan, in sound or in look? I have my own theories about this. She’s taken shape so vividly in my imagination as someone singular but who also is very carefully constructed, both personally and artistically.
Lydi Conklin
Oh wow, thank you for noticing that! So Joan’s queerbaiting vibe comes for me from musicians I was obsessed with as a kid, like Ani DiFranco or Dar Williams or Sleater Kinney or Veruca Salt or whoever, who I was always trying to figure out were they queer or not? And listening obsessively to lyrics to find out—is this song addressed to a woman or a man? Who is this person dating in real life? And sometimes finding out those artists weren’t queer or were but were in heterosexual relationships or whatnot. And that being crushingly disappointing because I really just wanted there to be someone I could point to who showed me there could be a cool exciting life ahead for me, as I knew not a single queer adult. Joan was originally based on a real musician, just to help guide me, but she grew so far away from that person that she’s now completely her own person!
JP Solheim
I don’t know how much you want to share or reveal about Joan’s predilection, her shame that serves as the driver of the novel—but how did you think about shame as a motivation both for her character and her creative work and professional life?
Lydi Conklin
Yeah shame and her “kink”—which goes deeper and is more pervasive for Joan than most people’s kinks—were huge parts of Joan’s character for me. The kink used to actually be separate from her music, and as I uncovered more layers of Joan’s character I realized they were deeply tied together. I feel like ambition is more erotic than we give it credit for, and Joan is someone for whom those wires are deeply crossed. I’m also very interested in shame and how it motivates people, how it is developed and sexualized over a life. My dear friend Kate Folk once said (though she doesn’t remember it, the comment haunts me!) that publishing her first book felt like mooning the world, which I totally understand myself, and I think there is a certain amount of shame that goes along with the artistic process, and not all of it is bad. It can definitely be a positive motivator for me. It also can be awful and debilitating. It’s an emotion so nuanced and bizarre that I never tire of exploring it.
JP Solheim
The erotics of ambition! I mean, what a double whammy—we are often ashamed of what we find erotic, and those of us assigned female at birth have largely been socialized to be ashamed of having ambition.
Lydi Conklin
Totally. Which is why I respect Joan and find her to be admirable—not the way she treats people—but in her ability to achieve pure art monster status. It’s the way I want to be half the time, just throwing away my other responsibilities and throwing everything into writing. Of course I love community and it sustains me and saves my life every day, so I could never go in as hard as Joan.
JP Solheim
Contrary to her shame and longstanding competition with Paige, collaboration and camaraderie with other musicians, and other artists at the summer camp where Joan teaches, is part of the setting of this work, whether in New York or Virginia—the people are part of what set both atmosphere and stakes. By placing Joan at the heart of these communities, did it help you explore the question of what separates the artist from her work?
Lydi Conklin
That’s such a good question! Yes, for sure. I’m obsessed with writing about closed spaces, like camps and workplaces and artist residencies. I sadistically love pressing my characters together into a small space where they cannot flee. I also love communities like that in my real life since I haven’t made a traditional family of my own. Small collaborative communities are rife with inspiration and often conflict. I didn’t realize it as I was conceiving of the project but I found that putting Joan in intense community with other musicians and artists was a way to externalize her issues with artmaking. Both Paige and Sparrow have very different—and I think I can safely say much healthier—relationships to making art. Joan learns from them through the course of the book, and sees reflected in her peers and colleagues ways of interacting with artmaking that she both admires and disdains.
JP Solheim
Artistic community is fundamental to both the setting and atmosphere of Songs. The story moves back and forth in time between the story’s present, as she flees New York after the incident on stage and makes her way to Virginia to begin teaching, and the story of her career and personal life in New York from the late 90s forward. How did you think about these two communities for Joan, as you were drafting and revising? How did you develop and hone your cast of characters in each time and place?
Lydi Conklin
So actually, the four short chapters that take place in New York—not counting the first and third chapter, but the later chapters that start in the mid-1990s, my brilliant editor Kendall Storey suggested I write. That was probably the most significant edit I embarked on after selling the book, and it unlocked the book for me. When I workshopped this novel in the Stegner Fellowship, people were always saying they were curious about some version of the book that showed Joan’s old wild life as a musician scraping by in New York, making art in a collective and living her weird marginal life. But I could never figure out how to shoehorn that material in—I wanted the book to start right in the middle of Joan’s crisis, when she’s running away from that life, and I knew all her panic and growth had to happen in Virginia. Kendall had noted how much exposition I had in early chapters, trying to cram in that whole world so quickly so the readers could understand where Joan was coming from. That didn’t work and had to be dramatized in scene. Also Paige appeared so briefly in the book, and she was one of the most vital and important characters. So slashing all that exposition and writing those scenes was huge. I also liked the reader getting the chance to slowly understand in scene Joan’s relationship to Paige in all its complexity. Because there are aspects of the relationship that Joan can’t see or understand, but that the reader can observe and draw their own conclusions.
In terms of developing the characters in each place, I did work at a similar camp to Joan in Virginia, although the people represented are nothing like the people who were really there—except for Sparrow having a bit of me in them. So that world came easily to me. And then the world of the Gonewriters felt alive to me as a fictional universe.
Thinking about how Joan operates in the different communities was also crucial, because communities exert pressure, whether or not you are consciously aware of that. Like, for example, the Gonewriters look down on any kind of formal teaching, and that is a value that has seeped into Joan after twenty years of collaborating with them, and that she cannot seem to shake even as she embarks on at least a short term teaching career. It was fun to think of the different values that form in communities over time and how Joan would operate differently and form a different relationship with herself depending on which she was in.
JP Solheim
Joan lives with another kind of pressure in relation to her age, relative to her mentee Paige and colleague Sparrow. She also predominately bonds with younger folks who seem emblematic of Gen X and Gen Z AFAB folks. Paige is a musician; Sparrow is a comic artist. Could you talk a little bit about how these two characters emerged, what you think each of them mean to Joan and to the story?
Lydi Conklin
The relationship Joan has with Paige is sort of the deepest heart of the story, even though it takes Joan a long time to realize that. The ways she’s failed Paige speak to the deepest issues that she has to face in her life. Musically, Paige was inspired by a young Joanna Newsom. Character-wise, I made her up completely, but she feels like one of the most real characters (to me) I’ve ever invented. Sparrow is similar to me in some ways—also a cartoonist, also nonbinary, and in other ways. But I wanted to combine those facets of myself with an ideal of a healthy relationship to artmaking, some vibe Joan could learn from, which is also embodied in Sparrow’s generation, they have a Gen Z vibe of clear communication that Joan [Gen X] takes forever to access. In my collection Rainbow Rainbow, I wrote in “Sunny Talks” about how the older generation can learn at times from the younger one, especially in matters of queerness. There is a dynamic like this between Joan and Sparrow. I wanted Sparrow and Joan to push on Joan in different ways, about art and relationships, to force her toward her worst and then ultimately best self.
JP Solheim
So do you also play music? Did you learn to play music for this novel? Did it make you want to write songs? Of course, to some extent, you did write songs: I’m excited to see what emerges from the Joan Vole “covers” project of which I’m part!
And of course, I’d love to know what you’re working on next.
Lydi Conklin
I don’t really play music. I did take the guitar for a bit as a kid but never went too far, and I learned ukulele in graduate school and play it very sporadically for fun. I do write songs but they are ridiculous silly songs that drive the people I live with crazy. I’m excited for the covers project too! So far I have three versions of the same song which are wildly different and I listen to them all the time. It’s so cool to see how musicians interpret the same lyrics into utterly different songs.
My next project is a novel. It’s about a nonbinary academic who ruins their entire life in three days because of an obsessive affair. I’m hoping it will be set in motion not too long from now, but we shall see. Novels always take so much longer than I ever think they will!
JP Solheim
That brings me to my final question: what does it mean for you, as a nonbinary artist writing about nonbinary characters, to represent?
That’s the crucial reason I write, to represent queer and trans characters in literature in their own messy, specific ways. I want trans and nonbinary characters to have the same dignity cishet white men have always had in literature—to behave however they want without worrying that if they slip up they will have to answer for it. When I was little and reading novels, I could hardly ever find anyone like me, and I wish that trans and queer characters had been able to be the protagonists of their own books, acting wildly and badly and beautifully and in a way that felt true.
FICTION
Songs of No Provenance
By Lydi Conklin
Catapult
Published June 3, 2025
