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September 22, 2021
Casey Plett's Playlist for Her Story Collection "A Dream of a Woman"
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.
Casey Plett's A Dream of a Woman is easily one of the strongest short fiction collections of the year, a brilliant book.
Canthius wrote of the book:
"None of the characters in A Dream of a Woman are perfect and the collection is all the better for it. Instead of a simple, reductive understanding of her protagonist’s feelings or actions, Plett writes with nuance and maturity, the kind that makes great character-driven fiction that a reader can sink their teeth — and hearts — into."
In her own words, here is Casey Plett's Book Notes music playlist for her story collection A Dream of a Woman:
I grew up in choirs and school band, then left performing behind as an adult---partially because some shit just falls away, partially because I’m a transsexual woman and choral spaces in particular became a different animal after I transitioned. These days, I only sing at karaoke. Karaoke rules.
A Dream of a Woman is a book of stories about young trans women aging to be not-quite-as-young. It’s a book about beauty, time, addiction, sex, toxicity, relationships that are harmful and nourishing at once. It’s about desire and temporality and love.
I think that’s what it’s about, at least. A cool thing about author-ing: You put a book out, then people say what it means to them—and sometimes the book has different meanings than you thought. I find that moving.
Music taught me bunches about narrative as a kid—maybe equal to the literary education I got as an adult. The way sentences travel through a reader, how sonorities and rhythms of words have as much to do with how they land (or don’t land) than the words’ literal meanings.
I listened to these songs a lot as I wrote A Dream of a Woman—my range is too low to sing them at karaoke though. (Except for Alkaline Trio. Alkaline Trio forever.)
1. Wailin’ Jennys – Swing Low Sail High
I once went on a five-week book tour across Canada and the United States. The first day, I had to drive from Winnipeg to Saskatoon, and our gig was earlier in the day, so we left before dawn. And as the sun broke over the prairies of Western Manitoba, this song came on. Those fucking harmonies! The strings and vocals of the Wailin’ Jennys will forever sound to me like the peaceful side of a prairie landscape.
2. Miranda Lambert – Ugly Lights
Is there a better song about the cheery abandon , grim despair, and utter banality of heavy drinking?
3. Tegan and Sara – Not Tonight
Is there a better song about exhaustion.
4. Flower Face – Baby Teeth
Loving love that hurts you feels so deliciously, toxically good. Sure, you know this, but sometimes you know this.
5. Michael Kiwanuka – Cold Little Heart
And whose place is it to say you’re actually better off without that toxic love.
6. Lana del Rey – Cinnamon Girl
I wrote so much of this book listening to Norman Fucking Rockwell! and the andante lushness of this song, more than any other Lana track, is aesthetically representative of the art I’m drawn to. (Though Lana’s boneheadedness on race sucks---I thought Craig Jenkins had a good bead on her at the end of this Chemtrails review.)
7. The Duhks – Heaven’s My Home
I think this is one of the bleakest recordings ever. There’s something very fatalist and unadorned about how Jessee Havey sings this. It’s beautiful, but sometimes it’s too intense, and I skip it when it comes on. But it really is beautiful. I had this on repeat most of last summer and fall, when I began to finish this book.
8. Pistol Annies – I Hope You’re the End of My Story
This might be my favorite love song. It’s simple and sweet and full of longing. But a real longing, a longing that makes sense, a longing that isn’t star-crossed or impossible or storybook but peaceful, quiet, tangible, filled with sturdy promise. That kind of longing was heavy on my mind when I was writing the book too.
9. Rah Rah – Salty Cities
When melancholy can be a bulwark against actual despair, a tired heart that is parsimonious with how it may give or receive, but give and receive it still does.
10. Paramore – Future
Ok, so I would put Paramore’s entire 2013 self-titled album on this list if I could. Before this one, they’d released three albums in the late aughts—spunky pop-punk fare that made them big. Then four years went by, and half the band left, and then Hayley Williams basically wrote this whole album with her new guitarist, and it’s so complex and melodic and three-dimensional and I think about it all the fucking time. It’s not an accident that “Ain’t It Fun” comes off this record! The fact that they followed it up with After Laughter in 2017 is stunning to me, they’re two such immensely powerful acts to drop in the wake of the three albums that made them famous.
“Future” is the apotheosis of all this…the anomalous length of the track, the silence two-thirds through, the insistence of the lyrics and the dirge of the instrumentals. It’s at once a surprise and makes perfect, perfect sense. Paramore’s particular with how they look sadness in the eye. I love how they did it here.
11. The Hush Sound – Eileen
When you’re young and someone dies.
12. Rainer Maria – Life of Leisure
There’s a novella in A Dream of a Woman called “Obsolution,” it’s interspersed with the stand-alone stories. It starts out with this twenty-one-year-old trans girl who’s dicking around in Portland, then follows her story over a decade as she transitions and moves and gets into all kinds of shit. The connecting thread of the novella is her relationship with a cis woman that is probably toxic and very complicated.
The definition of the word “Obsolution” as follows: “n. An old media format that is no longer popular or easily accessible, such as floppy disks, VHS tapes or stone tablets. v. To try to access data stored in an old-fashioned media format, especially if it requires the use of archaic technology and/or protocols.”
I think about this concept not so much with technology but with more slippery entities, like seemingly plain words that connote something different than they did fifteen years ago, and you’re not quite sure how they got there. Sometimes these words relate to technology, and sometimes technology is just the jumping off point for something more human, sinister, and disorienting. “Letter.” “Writing.” “Taking a picture.” “Message.” “Cheap.” “Binge.” “Turn on.” “Turn off.”
13. Alkaline Trio – Private Eye
There’s a character in this book named Nicole. In an early scene, she’s driving to a first date on a chilly night, pogo-ing in her seat to some fun old emo-ish pop-punk and she’s like, hitting the steering wheel and singing along and shit. I like to imagine she’s listening to this.
14. William Prince – The Spark
I believe in grace.
15. Taylor Janzen – New Mercies
Always.
16. Megan Nash – Quiet
Megan Nash said this song is about watching her ex-husband drive away from her on the Saskatchewan landscape. I love all of her music, but the frenetic energy of this one is so honestly profound. It’s also one of those songs that gathers in power the more you listen to it and it provokes…concurrent disparate emotions, maybe. The bridge just ruins me these days. Metaphysically, the prairies can be a very loud place.
17. Guster – Come Downstairs and Say Hello
Sometimes you have the most naïve hope, and you’re actually about to walk into a horrible lake of badness—but you don’t know that at the time, because you have your naïve hope, and that’s real and it’s got merit, you know?
18. iskwē, Tom Wilson, Chuck Copenace – Blue Moon Drive
I got deep into this tune the month before submitting A Dream of a Woman to my editor. iskwē’s voice blended with Tom Wilson’s is just literally fucking perfect. It’s like an aural exit from chaos.
19. Prairie Voices – A Boy and a Girl
Eric Whitacre’s beautiful choral piece set to an Octavio Paz poem. It’s sung by a Winnipeg choir, and it is the dark, tender nighttime prairie parallel to the morning music of the Wailin’ Jennys. This is a song for Gemma from “Enough Trouble”.
20. The Wooden Sky – Child of the Valley
Sometimes there’s a lot of dignity hiding in choices that are given no dignity. The frontman of The Wooden Sky is from Morden, Manitoba, and this is another song for Gemma (you’ll have to read the book to get what I mean.)
Casey Plett is the author of the novel Little Fish and the short story collection A Safe Girl to Love. She is the winner of the Amazon First Novel Award, the Firecracker Award for Fiction, and two-time winner of the Lambda Literary Award for transgender fiction. She co-edited Meanwhile, Elsewhere: Science Fiction and Fantasy From Transgender Writers which won the ALA Stonewall Barbara Gittings Literature Award, and has written for The New York Times, McSweeney's Internet Tendency, Maclean's, and them, among other publications
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