« older | Main Largehearted Boy Page | newer »
March 22, 2022
Colleen Kinder's Playlist for Her Anthology "Letter to a Stranger"
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.
Letter to a Stranger is an anthology filled with essays both poignant and thought-provoking.
Library Journal wrote of the book:
"Sweet but often poignant collection . . . Mesmerizing . . . This highly recommended collection of letters would appeal to many types of readers, including individuals interested in creative writing, the epistolary form, or travel literature."
In her own words, here is Colleen Kinder's Book Notes music playlist for her anthology Letter to a Stranger:
When I translate Letter to a Stranger into music, here’s where my imagination goes: to the window seat of a plane or bus or bullet train. I’m somewhere, anywhere: Cairo, Connecticut, the Canary Islands. I’ve got my headphones in, because we’re off--finally, after all that packing and prepping and ticketing--the journey’s deliciously underway, and nothing could better conspire with the elixir of motion than the beat of whatever song I’ve just cued to play.
The stories in the Letter to a Stranger anthology send you all over the world--from a truck crossing the Rwanda-Tanzania border to a ship shored up in the Arctic Circle to the back of a DHL delivery bike on its night-ride across Caracas. To read Letter to a Stranger is to get drunk on the fumes of past journeys, and during an era of so much limitation, so much masking up, so much staying put.
I hope this playlist is as transporting as the book itself. I chose songs steeped in place, thick with ambiance--my private anthems to an era of life lived in Mexico City, to that first descent through the clouds over Reykjavik, to a four-month stint on a cruise ship. Making a playlist, turns out, has certain joys in common with curating an anthology. For one thing, you get to be eclectic, favoring surprise over cohesion, throwing your audience for a loop every few minutes. Also, sequencing is where the magic lies, as each song borrows a bit from its predecessor, carrying forward some piece of its mood or message.
Musicians are potent strangers in all of our lives: meaning-makers we rarely get to thank, or narrate the meaning back to. Never was that clearer to me than when I sat down to curate this playlist, suddenly wanting to thank Patty (Griffin) and Michael (Jackson), as though they were key players at radiant moments. Arguably, they were. So while I first envisioned this Letter to a Stranger playlist as a world tour, you could also call it a series of postcards to the strangers whose songs imbued charged junctures in my life with what I call soul-swell: that molecular uplift I feel nowhere more than out on the open road--and doubly so, with the aid of music.
1. “I Wonder,” by Rodriguez. Rare is the travel-mate I jive with easily; Erik was one of those--more compatible as a fellow wayfarer, in fact, than as a partner. A PhD in music and the most sound-attuned person I’ve ever met, Erik introduced me to Rodriguez. We played his album “Cold Fact” at least thirty times while driving the Skeleton Coast of Namibia, pulling over wherever we glimpsed a shipwreck, hellbent on having no greater plan or center of gravity than wreckage. Listening to Rodriguez now, I love his commitment to his refrain; how persistently he repeats those two words: “I wonder.” There’s a section of Letter to a Stranger subtitled “Wonder,” devoted to stories about strangers who left the author in a state of lasting wonderment. To me, wondering and wandering are acts so inextricably, so sacredly tied. “Wonder don’t you?” Wonder I do.
2. “Man in the Mirror,” by Michael Jackson. I can’t think of a better theme song for the opening section of Letter to a Stranger, which I subtitled “Symmetry.” Every essay in “Symmetry” is fundamentally about glimpsing a piece of yourself in a stranger, beginning with Leslie Jamison’s missive to a drunk magician in Granada, Nicaragua, whose sloppiness reminded her of her younger self’s destructive bent. Addressing this stranger in her beautiful letter (the very first “Letter to a Stranger” essay that Off Assignment published, the story that inspired hundreds more), Leslie found a channel that led straight back to the self. I took delight in grouping her essay with letters by masterful storytellers like Alexander Lumans, Michelle Tea, and Lia Purpura, who similarly understood themselves better once they’d met--and later recounted--their stranger.
3. “Andar Conmigo,” by Julieta Venegas. To my ears, this song is such a playful invitation to a stranger: that brand-new, out-of-the blue person who so quickly gains significance. “Andar conmigo, cuentame/Walk with me, tell me stories.” Venegas’s lyrics encapsulate so well the frisson of a first conversation--that sense of infinitude, the suspicion that you could tell this person everything, and listen to their private everything in return. “Hay tanto que quiero contarte; hay tanto que quiero saber de ti/There’s so much that I want to tell you; there’s so much I want to know from you.” The person who ushered the music of Julieta Venegas into my life has since vanished; I have to scrounge around in memory for his name. Still, he’s a part of my past—specifically, the chapter set in the leafy avenidas of La Condesa in Mexico City. This song both reminds me of that impact, and bears proof. After all, I still listen.
4. “I & Love & You,” by The Avett Brothers. Once upon a time, when I lived in Brooklyn, an ex of mine watched me play around on Kayak.com as I scoped out the prices of flights to Cambodia. That night, upon noticing how I knew by heart airport codes for many places I’d never been, he nicknamed me “Bolter.” As in: she who loves to bolt. As in: she who booked a flight to Managua as soon as she and he split up. So many tales in Letter to a Stranger were set in motion when someone had the moxie to bolt and availed themselves to the tide of strangers and whatever came next. Something always comes next. Something big. Or, as the northward bound, Brooklyn-seeking Avett Brothers put it: “The highway sets the traveler’s stage.”
5. “Glosoli,” by Sigur Ros. This song for me is both steeped in place and also placeless, because I discovered Sigur Ros while living in Iceland for a summer (hearing this song performed at a free concert in a Reykjavik field will cinch “Glosoli’s” place as sacred in anyone’s heart) but because I’ve since savored the otherworldly notes of “Glosoli” all over the world--including on the cruise ship where I spent four months working. “Glosoli” and I have sailed this world, weathered Pacific storms, rounded the Cape of Good Hope. And to this day, whenever I sit down to write and need to be swiftly lulled into creative reverie, I choose “Glosoli.” I’ve ruined many beautiful songs by overplaying them; I seem to have a knack for that. But it’s apparently impossible to drain “Glosoli” of its power. Similar things could be said about Letter to a Stranger’s essays. They are fiercely ambient--set in Dakar, Granada, Beijing, Yonkers--and yet their core magic seems to transcend any one place. In editing this book, I’ve read its 65 essays many times. I can’t seem to tire of these short missives, nor have I quit marveling at how much they express, in so few words.
6. “Travelin’ Soldier,” by The Chicks. If only all songs were as narrative as this one, would the radio give the library a run for its money? All I know is this: the story tucked into this Chick’s song is a heart-render—specifically, how the soldier asks a total stranger whether he can write to her from Vietnam. So often letters are born out of loneliness; the writer is working against the sense that they’re all alone, and therefore unheard, unseen. The “travelin soldier” in this Chicks song just wants a listener, a recipient, someone to channel his thoughts towards--a quasi-sweetheart. There’s a whole section of Letter to a Stranger devoted to quasi-love stories: missed connections, lovers for a hot second, friendships imbued with rare charge. If that section of the book (“Chemistry”) has an anthem, it’s “Travelin Soldier.”
7. “Desperado,” by the Eagles. Always, since first hearing this song (belted out acapella, in college), I’ve always felt weirdly called out by its narrator—as though the singer is summoning me back from my wandering, back to the balm and stabilizing force of company and community. “Your prison is walking through this world all alone.” Before I worked on this book, I was much more of a lone-wolf writer, “out riding fences, for so long.” Curating Letter to a Stranger coincided with a larger shift in my life--one towards collaboration, towards feeding other people’s creative lives as much as my own. If I can blame the obnoxious length of the Acknowledgements of Letter to a Stranger on a song, I blame “Desperado.” Because at a certain point, I came to my senses. I heeded the song’s call.
8. “Heavenly Day,” by Patty Griffin. My husband was once a handsome Canadian stranger dating someone else, once a face and a kindness that made me think, of course he’s taken. Seven years later, I would understand why our first meeting--on a sidewalk in Luxor, Egypt at 7am--was so bright in my memory, as though there were two suns in that Egyptian sky over our heads. A whole lifetime of love would sprout from that intersection, though we didn’t know it back then. On the day of our wedding, as we trailed our wedding photographer’s pick-up truck through the winding roads around Banff while she sleuthed the horizon for an acceptably jaw-dropping Canadian Rockies vista, I turned on and up Patty Griffin’s “Heavenly Day.” We were alone, he and I. All the prep was done. The guests were doing whatever guests do; time was carrying us forward. I had no words, but the song did. All you really have to do is have yourself a heavenly day... I think of this Patty Griffin song as a magnifier: flick it on to magnify a joy or ecstasy already nascent. Explode the boundaries of that joy; blast everyone within earshot. Some days--in the sprawling, messy and mostly mundane schemes of our lives--stand out. Sometimes the reason is glaring (your wedding); sometimes the reason is subtle (how a kind stranger lifts your suitcase right off the sidewalk). I loved working on a book that made space to depict and contemplate those days, and to sort out the mystery of why nameless strangers sometimes loom so large in the stories of our lives.
9. “Leaving on a Jet Plane,” by John Denver. The last time I danced with my father, it was to this song. We’d choreographed a silly dance--complete with a mock-tango move and some remedial twirls--for the father-daughter dance at my wedding. Both bashful and skill-less dancers, we were doomed to screw up the dance no matter how many times we practiced in my parents’ kitchen. It stressed us out identically, because I am my father’s daughter, recipient of his left foot as well as his wandering gene. The song was so apt for the wedding of Drew Kinder’s third daughter, the one forever leaving on a jet plane. When dad and I actually pulled off the dance on my wedding night without only a couple inconspicuous mistakes, the high was mutual. I had no idea I’d lose him within two years, no idea that this song’s notes would one day fill me with pain. The last section of the Letter to a Stranger book is subtitled “Farewell,” and it features a story by T Kira Madden, about a stranger at a restaurant who conjured up her departed father. When I edited this essay, I still had a dad to call on the phone, to plan trips with. When the book came out into the world, he was gone, lost to cancer. T Kira’s essay means something radically different to me now. I hope the essays in this book are ever-evolving for their readers, too—that they whisper new truths to you every time you return to them.
10. “Strange,” by Celeste. To journey through Letter to a Stranger is to ponder the definition of strangeness, and to feel the very contours of the word “stranger” expand on you. Rachel Yoder wrote to the man who stalked her in high school; Carlynn Houghton wrote to the baby she miscarried on a road trip. Celeste’s “Strange” is the perfect backdrop to those musings, that expansive journey with the concept of “strangeness.” She tugs our attention to the fluidity of it all--how we can move through roles--intimate, unfamiliar--with both ease and speed. A beautiful mystery, and one worth sitting with--in stories and in song: “Isn't it strange? How people can change from strangers to friends, friends into lovers, and strangers again.”
Colleen Kinder is an essayist and editor whose work has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The New Republic, National Geographic Traveler, Salon.com, and The Best American Travel Writing. She has taught writing at Yale University, the Chautauqua Institution, and Semester at Sea. A Fulbright Scholar, Kinder received her MFA at the University of Iowa and is the author of Delaying the Real World and the cofounder of the online magazine Off Assignment.
If you appreciate the work that goes into Largehearted Boy, please consider making a donation.
