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September 9, 2022
Jill Stukenberg's Playlist for Her Novel "News of the Air"
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.
Jill Stukenberg's novel News of the Air is a powerful and necessary debut about family, friendship, and our fragile ecology.
Sarah Stonich wrote pf the book:
"Jill Stukenberg writes the rural north as if she was born with one hand on the throttle of an outboard motor and the other taking notes on the back of a beer napkin. In News of the Air she offers an unknowable, imagined future that is utterly plausible."
In her own words, here is Jill Stukenberg's Book Notes music playlist for her memoir News of the Air:
News of the Air takes place in the thick woods that obscure the border between northern Wisconsin and Upper Michigan, between the past and the future to come. Find old jukeboxes in dilapidated bars here, but also teenaged girls who can wrestle down a satellite signal, who dream of new sounds while sawing away in their orchestras.
I didn’t know until I wrote this novel just how much music was playing (or could be playing) in the background, or within my characters’ conflicted hearts.
I’m thankful to friends on Facebook who helped me name some of these songs we all knew would be playing in the Northwoods setting, and so within the world of News of the Air.
On the old school jukebox at Tiki’s bar, somewhere in Wisconsin’s Northwoods:
“Kokomo,” Beach Boys
“Red, Red Wine,” UB40
Boats, Beaches, Bars, and Ballads (both discs), Jimmy Buffett. “Christmas in the Caribbean” has a skip from Shara the bartender’s thumping of the deck when it plays.
“The Gambler,” Kenny Rogers
Tiki’s--a tiny bar hidden under the trees alongside a small lake, just one of many lakes that interlock along the Wisconsin and Upper Michigan border--is busiest in winter when its patrons find their way there by snowmobile, crossing the corridors of frozen ice or following the shoulders of underplowed highways. In summer’s past Tiki’s was a place you could gas your boat, though its short dock was left crooked by departing ice and no one has filled the pump in years.
Similarly, the jukebox has been left untended, Shara, who lives in the small apartment behind the bar, who pours the beers and slings the fry baskets, might even tell you it doesn’t work.
The music she plays off hours is decidedly different: female singers with enough heart to leave.
Artists on Shara’s private playlist:
Roberta Flack
Nina Simone
Janis Joplin
Madonna
Other characters in the novel make their own music: the teenagers of the Northwoods Girls Orchestra. These girls are also familiar with the question of when will it be their time to leave?
Ms. Tomas, their conductor, once journeyed herself, leaving South America and everyone she knew behind.
Rehearsed by the Northwoods Girls Orchestra:
“Cuarteto Q-Arte: Suite Colombiana No. 2,” Julio Gentil Montaña
“Songs by Selena,” arr. Ms. Tomas
Preformed by the Northwoods Girls Orchestra for the state competition in Madison:
“Disney’s Lion King Medley,” arr. Mark Brymer
Similar to their teacher, and to Shara, the girls know of the existence of multiple worlds, what is and what could be.
Songs the girls hear all the time on the radio stations of the northwoods:
“Cherry Pie,” Warrant
“Rock you Like a Hurricane,” Scorpions
“You Shook Me All Night Long,” AC/DC
“Once Bitten Twice Shy,” Great White
What they might catch when the station with the girl DJ from Houghton comes in:
“Mood to Burn Bridges,” Neko Case and her Boyfriends
Yola
Lizzo
Beyonce
“The Bridge You Burn,” Reba McEntire
“Bridges and Balloons,” Joanna Newsom
News of the Air opens on a Labor Day weekend, at the end of a summer when everyone has worked hard in the bars and restaurants and small resorts of the county. The family at the center of the novel—who visit Shara’s bar, whose daughter plays in the Northwoods Girls Orchestra—once escaped to this place but have now come to understand, and in different ways, how their world is now splintering: their environment (besieged by wildfires, by toxic algae); their community (what happened to the flutist in the orchestra—what did the girls do?); and even their family, its shifting ecosystem.
One the Northwoods Girls Orchestra plays that brings a lump to Allie’s throat (not that she would tell her daughter Cassie):
“Whiter Shade of Pale”
Allie and Bud’s wedding song:
“So Far Away,” Carol King
Playing on the jukebox at Shara’s at Allie and Bud’s last visit:
“Refugee,” Tom Petty
News of the Air is my first novel. I worked on it for many years. Reader, thank you for imagining it with me. If we meet up sometime in a backwoods bar, I’ll let you choose the first song.
Jill Stukenberg’s short stories have appeared in Midwestern Gothic, The Collagist (now The Rupture), Wisconsin People and Ideas magazine, and other literary magazines. She is a graduate of the MFA program at New Mexico State University and has received writing grants from the University of Wisconsin Colleges and has been awarded writing residencies at Shake Rag Alley and Write On, Door County. Jill is an Associate Professor of English at University of Wisconsin Stevens Point at Wausau. She grew up in Sturgeon Bay, Wisconsin, and previously taught in New Mexico and in the Pacific Northwest. She lives in Wausau with the poet Travis Brown and their child. Find her online at https://jillstukenberg.com
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