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June 2, 2021
Maegan Poland's Playlist for Her Story Collection "What Makes You Think You're Awake?"
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.
Winner of the Bakwin Award (judged by Carmen Maria Machado), Maegan Poland's collection What Makes You Think You're Awake? is a stunning debut.
Carmen Maria Machado wrote of the book:
"What Makes You Think You're Awake? is a wonderful debut; a collection of frank, funny, and heartbreaking stories that delve into the mire of human loneliness."
In her words, here is Maegan Poland's Book Notes music playlist for her story collection What Makes You Think You're Awake?:
I grew up playing violin, but I have a wonky pinkie finger that would often lock up or collapse on me when I stretched for a note or tried a fourth-finger trill. I know some believe that there are physiological reasons people with my issue will never be great violinists, and others will say this is hogwash — that a dedicated violinist can adapt and succeed regardless. Whichever case is true, I let my pinkie issues and perfectionism get the best of me and I quit violin when I was eighteen. I still regret it. Some days, I think all my writing is an attempt to communicate an ineffable state of being or to share a sense of consciousness that could only be translated with music. I’m working with shadows on the cave walls. I’m motivated by a kind of auditory ekphrasis. But my short story collection has nothing to do with the violin. I’m just telling you why making a playlist for my stories felt like a culmination, and I hope these songs synergize with my words to achieve something greater than their separate parts.
I listen to music when I’m imagining the shape and mood of my scenes. Many of these songs are the songs I listened to as I was drafting these stories. A few songs shared below were not part of the writing process, but they still suit the characters or the intended emotional impact of the story.
A Distorted Reality is Now a Necessity to be Free — Elliott Smith
In the first story of the collection, the main character Amy has to leave Memphis after a traumatic event. She moves to a small town in Alabama, seeking solitude and escape. In part, this is a story about seeking a certain kind of distorted reality, finding comfort in it, and then letting the distortions become too noisy. In this story, a shed can stop time, and Amy finds the addictive allure of stepping outside the stream of life. I picture Amy, hurt and trying to find a way forward, listening to this song as she drives her car, packed to the brim with all her possessions, to her new home in Alabama.
Life Size Ghosts — Mt. Wolf
This is Fran’s theme in “The Shed.” Fran is the first healthy relationship that Amy starts to build after the trauma that caused her to move and seek a more isolated life.
The lyrics and the dreamy, breathy vocals fit well with the hopefulness of what could become love:
Place your dreams where they're meant to be
Name your price to be at ease
The chorus refers to the ghosts “rushing through the cracks,” threatening this tenuous peace:
Life size ghosts
Have come rushing through the cracks
Life size ghosts
They have come to push you back
When Amy first moves into her new home and finds the shed that stops time, she unknowingly activates its power by filling in each crack between the planks of wood, making it airtight. On one level, she is sealing herself away from her ghosts, but perhaps she has trapped the ghosts inside with her.
We Were Never Young — Raised by Swans
The song begins: “From every room hearts spoke through walls too thin to hold the weight of what they heard.” In “Milking,” a relationship is strained to the brink. Youthful plans have not been fulfilled, and husband and wife now have different ideas about how to make things work. The hope for a biological child has turned into an inflexible target for the husband, and the wife, when she has different ideas about how to still build their future, is left feeling alienated and adrift. Does she even still want the same things she thought she did ten or more years ago? This song feels like a beautiful poisoned well, a tainted place you can’t return to, but in a different life, it could have been perfect.
Wife — Mitski
In “Milking,” Diane questions the dreams and standards for success she used to have, now that life is forcing her to improvise and adapt in unexpected ways. It’s no longer clear that her husband can adapt with her in the ways she needs.
Mitski sings:
“I have, I have, I watch a dream breaking
Breaking, breaking, breaking me
Away from my cliff, I am looking down from
I cannot bear you a son
I have tried
But if I am not yours, what am I?”
If I were to apply cinematic treatment to a moment in the story, I would play Mitski’s “Wife” as Diane destroys a piece of art — made of bird nests and other found objects — that she’d bought from a woman she’d dreamt could be her surrogate:
She placed the driftwood in the fire and watched the nest go up in flames first, like the kindling it was. By sunrise, the driftwood had burned to ash, leaving behind a crown of barbed wire, molten and glowing in the hearth.
Logan’s Loop — Andrew Bird
The wistful joy of the staccato violin and playful strumming throughout this song matches the mood of Betsey and Mannie in the story “Spores.” They’re unlikely, zany friends trying to make it through a tough time; they find hope in each other as they sip their tea and imagine the vindication of making a movie together. I can hear “Logan’s Loop” playing over the following scene in which Betsey helps Mannie purge bad memories:
They pulled apart the film like party streamers. They wrapped themselves like mummies in the dangling strands of eight millimeter and marched into the night, to the concrete bank of the river, that trapped trickle of tainted water. She helped him strip the memories away, piece by piece, and set them ablaze. They threw each flashing ember over the chain link fence that kept them from the narrow stream, and the flames disappeared even before they touched the ground.
#2 — Aphex Twin
In many stories in this collection, characters are made to doubt their reality. One deals with a mysterious online stalker. Another cannot account for her behavior (nor for the reactions of others) while sleepwalking. In “Modern Relics,” the main character wonders if she’s somehow manifested negative energy that has led to a ride in an unpredictable self-driving vehicle that defies instructions (and in Marian’s mind, the logic of space and time). These characters struggle to make sense of uncanny and surreal encounters that teeter on that fine line between being explainable versus defying the rules of our known world. I have often turned to ambient tracks by Aphex Twin to evoke that creeping sensation of unknowability.
Where Did I Leave That Fire — Neko Case
Neko Case sings:
I wanted so badly not to be me
I wanted so badly not to be me
I saw my shadow looking lost
checking its pockets for some lost receipts
The track begins with heavily synthesized notes that sound like water dripping from a leaky faucet in a house full of echoes. The resulting disorientation and loneliness suits many of my characters’ emotional journeys. In “The Neighbor’s Cat,” a woman feels trapped in her apartment in Argentina because she doesn’t speak Spanish and she feels increasingly disconnected from her partner. In “The Way They Saw Her,” a woman who has struggled with feeling invisible her whole life must now also deal with an anonymous online stalker. In “Like the Love of Some Dead Girl,” a woman becomes a voyeur and her new sexual desires threaten her relationship, causing her to question assumptions she has long held about herself.
Not about Love — Fiona Apple
Oh, the rage of love poorly spent. Many of my characters are coming to terms with thwarted attempts at connection. I can picture Colleen from “Overnights Welcome” — thinking about her flat-lining marriage, her affair with Zach, and his lack of emotional reciprocation — half-singing along to this song (because she doesn’t actually know all the words but she loves the angry sound) after she’s dropped her daughter off at school.
Fireworks — First Aid Kit
“Landline” begins with a breakup, but in the writing of this story, I was surprised by the amount of comfort the main character Eva derived from her neighbor Ralph. Even though this song embraces the swaying, swelling songs of heartbreak, there are also epic crescendos and a sense of self-soothing that matches Eva’s emotional journey.
In the Carrington Event, people could see the resulting aurora as far south as Cuba. In “Landline,” a solar storm has impacted much of the western United States, including Las Vegas, disrupting power grids, shutting down the Strip, and leaving the city in the darkness of a rural desert night. I can imagine “Fireworks” swelling as Eva and Ralph stare up at the aurora:
Pink strands and impossible green striations sifted through the atmosphere, traces of solar wind reaching and bending across the sky. The quiet arcs of color hid the stars.
Funeral — Phoebe Bridgers
In “Modern Relics,” even on her honeymoon, Marian cannot stop thinking about death and the looming threat of mortality. She still thinks often of her father’s death, and she worries it may be impossible to recover from losing anything or anyone else.
Tabula Rasa: Ludus — Arvo Pärt
For over two decades, I’ve been listening to Arvo Pärt while writing. This movement in particular evokes ominous tension interspersed with moments of sweet, taut violin soaring high as if breaking the surface for air, as bells toll, momentous and spiritual.
I played this while imagining Marian and Gerald lost in a dark swamp on an unfamiliar island. They lose control of a self-driving taxi and Marian cannot handle the uncertainty. As the car goes deeper into unmappable darkness, she worries that she’s caused this somehow, that she’s “manifested something endless, aimless, and lost forever.”
Call Across Rooms — Grouper
In Vogue, Liz Harris said, “The song is on one level very plain and literal, about a letter I wrote for someone I loved and could not get along with… On a more subconscious, poetic level, it is a letter to myself, as aspiration to love better.”
The book ends on a note of quiet devastation. So many of my characters seek connection but struggle with their own projections and the expectations of others. It is hard to accept the inevitably unknowable facets of those we love. In the end of What Makes You Think You’re Awake?, there is love but it’s out of reach, just beyond a seemingly unanswerable riddle.
Maegan Poland teaches creative writing and composition at Drexel University in Philadelphia. She received her PhD in English from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, where her work was supported by a Black Mountain Institute fellowship. She also holds an MFA in fiction from the University of Mississippi, as well as a BFA in writing for screen and television from the University of Southern California, where she was a Trustee Scholar.
Her fiction has been published in Mississippi Review, Pleiades, Beloit Fiction Journal, Juked, Notre Dame Review, and elsewhere. She has received a special mention in the Pushcart Prize anthology, a Tin House scholarship, and a grant from the Elizabeth George Foundation. She is currently working on a novel.
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