“Here are thirteen tracks, set to Sourland’s ebbs and flows of love, loss, redemption, and weed.”
“The songs I’ve chosen are those which I’ve imagined appearing on a fantasy soundtrack for an imagine film about Carlos Castaneda, songs that evoke various people and places that appear in the book.”
“When I was writing The Endling, music was such a significant part of the process. I used it to get a sense of the culture I was depicting, to describe the state of particular characters, and more than anything else, to locate the atmosphere and emotion in a scene. It might come as no surprise that this playlist includes very few men.”
“Because the book is about ancestors, I needed music that had a certain ritual vibe to it.”
“I build the playlist to set mood, to create a headspace where my characters can swim and dance and fight and do all the things complex characters do.”
“Before Vervain Hollow was a book, it was a playlist.”
“The Grief Shop and Other Stories from a Broken World takes place after ‘the tragedy’ kills ⅓ of the earth’s population, and renders the rest clinically emotionally numb.”
“For every project, I make a playlist. I rarely listen to it while I write, but I use it as a towline back into the mood, characters and world of the story.”
“This playlist transports me to the dining room of my childhood house, or the interior of my beloved Volvo station wagon, which was covered in bumper stickers, or expat bars in dusty alleyways and the shared connection those spaces provide.”
“The protagonists in both my fiction and nonfiction narratives—including my memoir—are almost always people who try to do the right thing and fail.”