An Interview with Lydi Conklin

Lydi Conklin’s fiction brims with strange and unflinching truths. Their debut novel, Songs of No Provenance, follows an indie folk singer grappling with their own actions. Both tense and tender, this powerful debut turns an eye toward ego and art. Conklin spoke with previous associate editor, Kira Compton, about cartooning, artistic collaboration, and toxic jealousy.

Idaho Review: Something I kept being struck by while reading the book was the many ways that different artistic mediums interact. We meet so many different types of artists in the novel. Playwrights and visual artists and writers and, of course, the main character is a musician.

I’d love to hear more about that, especially considering that you yourself work in several different fields.

Lydi Conklin: I am a multimedia artist, like you said. I do comics and writing and in the past, I’ve worked in theater and done fine art as opposed to cartooning. And I’ve gotten a lot of inspiration working across the different mediums.

Obviously, this book is about a singer. I’ve had really close friendships with a lot of different touring musicians. Following their careers and their lives on the road… I’m just fascinated by that world. The different way of making art, as opposed to sitting and writing as you and I do. We’re not there when people read it. But with live music, every night is the final product and you’re always making it anew.

I did ask some musician friends to interpret songs from the book. It was the first time I collaborated on anything artistic since I was a kid, so it was really cool. They brought them to life in ways I couldn’t have imagined.

IR: Does working in all those different spaces help inform your other art? Like, do you feel that you’re drawing from the same well, or does the writing come from this place, the cartooning from that place, etcetera etcetera…?

LC: The only two practices I maintain to this day are writing and cartooning. Sometimes the raw material is the same. I’m working on a graphic novel about codependency and toxic relationships, which is a theme that comes up in both of my books. But when I explore it in cartooning, it’s speculative and weird. There are talking horses and flying boots and all these weird things I would never in a thousand years put into my fiction. It lets me approach the same topic with a different orientation.

IR: Something I really admire about Songs of No Provenance is that it handles some very complex things in a non-complex way. It feels very true to life. Did this come naturally, or was it something that took a lot of revision?

LC: Some of the content in the book was definitely hard to handle. Like the fetish stuff, or the bad thing Joan does in the beginning of the book. I had to do a lot of calibration around those two things. 

For the fetish stuff, I didn’t want to fall into the trap of backstory. Just asking, why is she into this stuff? I worked with my editor a lot to stay away from the simplistic narrative of, oh, you have trauma and that’s why you like this kink. Sometimes that’s how something plays out in someone’s life, but more often I think it's just like this psychological mess and you don't exactly know why. There’s no picking it apart in an easy way. Sometimes books want to offer that since it’s more narratively satisfying, even if it’s a damaging or non-realistic narrative.

With what happened at the concert with Joan? I had to rewrite the beginning so many times. I wanted her to do something clearly bad and damaging to another person, but I also wanted her to remain a likable character. I wanted her to move through different feelings about it as the book progressed.

I wanted to understand psychologically why she’s doing what she does, even if the book doesn’t forgive her, and then let her reckon with the results. I also wanted the person she harmed to have a surprising interpretation, just because when you harm someone, you don’t always know how it landed.

It was a lot of calibration. There are a lot of drafts where this thing she did is not even bad enough to abandon her life. I went up to the limit of how bad it could while still finding empathy for Joan.

IR: So, the book is called Songs of No Provenance. I think this just really echoes these questions being asked in the book. Do you need ego to create art? If you do, how much? When is it damaging, when is it helpful?

And I don’t think the book really comes to hard conclusion on these things which, like everything else we’ve been talking about, just brings it closer to real life. I’m curious where this came up in the writing process, since it’s such an essential part of the story.

LC: Well, the original seed of the book was the character of Joan. She was the Ground Zero inspiration. Who is this feral musician who says whatever she wants? Who has endearing qualities, but also does things that are not great?

Pretty soon after, those questions followed.

For me and my own writing career, especially in my younger days, I was constantly plagued by jealousy of other people’s success. It felt like a zero-sum game. You know, if someone gets this thing, that’s a direct relationship to me not getting it.

Later, I realized that if the people around me are getting good things, it’s good for me too. It’s good for everyone.

So I wanted to explore a character who had been pushed to the edge by a toxic jealousy and had found her way into a very unhealthy relationship with art making and arts practice.

IR: This is your debut novel, but you’ve also published one of my all-time favorite story collections, Rainbow Rainbow. What’s the different been between published a short story collection versus a novel?

LC: The main difference is that I am someone who really likes routine and some predictability in my day. I don’t really get that with short stories. I have an idea for a few weeks, and then I finish it. Or I get to a point where I hit a wall and have to put it away. It leaves me bereft and with loose ends.

With the novel, it’s literal years. You have your work cut out for you every day. There is something to work on, every day. I really like that.

IR: Alright, final question I ask everybody. Any advice for writers early in their careers?

LC: Tell your story, no matter how you feel it will be perceived. Don’t try to make it this broadly appealing thing. Have faith that there will be someone out there who will relate to what you wrote.


Buy Songs of No Provenance here, or anywhere books are sold.

Lydi Conklin is an Assistant Professor of Fiction at Vanderbilt University. Previously they were the Helen Zell Visiting Professor in Fiction at the University of Michigan. They’ve received a Stegner Fellowship in Fiction at Stanford University, a Rona Jaffe Writer’s Award, four Pushcart Prizes, a grant from the Elizabeth George Foundation, a Creative & Performing Arts Fulbright to Poland, and fellowships from MacDowell, Yaddo, Djerassi, Hedgebrook, Sewanee, Bread Loaf, the James Merrill House, the Vermont Studio Center, VCCA, Millay, Jentel, Lighthouse Works, Brush Creek, Caldera, the Sitka Center, and Harvard University, among others. They were the 2015-2017 Creative Writing Fellow in fiction at Emory University. Their fiction has appeared in The Paris Review, One Story, American Short Fiction, VQR, and elsewhere. They have drawn graphic fiction for Lenny Letter, Drunken Boat, and the Steppenwolf Theater in Chicago and cartoons for The New Yorker and Narrative Magazine. 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.  

Photo Credit: Emily April Allen