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August 28, 2020
Vanessa Veselka's Playlist for Her Novel "The Great Offshore Grounds"
In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book.
Previous contributors include Jesmyn Ward, Lauren Groff, Bret Easton Ellis, Celeste Ng, T.C. Boyle, Dana Spiotta, Amy Bloom, Aimee Bender, Roxane Gay, and many others.
Vanessa Veselka's novel The Great Offshore Grounds is filled with humanity, all her characters leap from the page as their paths converge. One of the year's finest books.
Veselka's debut novel Zazen is one of my favorite books, I highly recommend it as well.
Publishers Weekly wrote of the book:
"Astonishing depth and scope . . . Veselka blends fascinating details of seamanship, cab driving, and boot camp with intimate, spot-on descriptions of contemporary American poverty . . . This gritty and unsentimental work is compassionate, funny, and deeply human."
In her own words, here is Vanessa Veselka's Book Notes music playlist for her novel The Great Offshore Grounds:
The Great Offshore Grounds took me eight years to write. I became increasingly isolated at times and my mental health declined. Songs like Laurie Anderson’s "Born, Never Asked," "Bellringer Blues" by Grinderman, "Look Around" by Tune-Yards, and "Empty Head" by Old Light, capture that feeling for me.
I was also writing about wildness and freedom. "Dancing Barefoot" and "Campanero" come from that and "Cranes in the Sky" and "Wuthering Heights" like the personal cost of desiring it. "The River," by Bruce Springsteen feels like America. I can never hear it without longing for something that never can be attained.
While making the playlist, I debated how deeply to have the characters drive the soundtrack. I decided not to do that, though their personalities come in and out. Often that came down to choosing between songs from the same band.
Kirsten’s theme song would have been "Lady" by Stevie Nicks. It has such emotional fatigue paired with such fearlessness about the unknown, as if faith is uncertainty.
Essex’s theme song would have been "Darkness on the Edge of Town," another Springsteen song.
Livy’s theme song would have been "Come Undone" by Duran Duran. I discovered this song by accident a couple of years ago and it struck me how much it felt like her interiority and propulsive, solitary tendencies.
Cheyenne could have had several theme songs. She lives somewhere between "Do Re Mi" by Woody Guthrie and "WAP" by Cardi B, but the one that nails it is "I’ve just Destroyed the World" by Willie Nelson. That is definitely her theme song.
Vanessa Veselka is the author of the novel Zazen, which won the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize. Her short stories have appeared in Tin House and ZYZZYVA, and her nonfiction in GQ, The Atlantic, Smithsonian, The Atavist, and was included in Best American Essays and the anthology Bitchfest: Ten Years of Cultural Criticism. She has been, at various times, a teenage runaway, a sex worker, a union organizer, an independent record label owner, a train hopper, a waitress, and a mother. She lives in Portland, OR
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