A Monster with Friends: Barrelhousing with Lydi Conklin, Author of “Songs of No Provenance,” by Kasey Peters
If, like me, you read Lydi Conklin’s short story collection “Rainbow Rainbow” in 2022, and its diversity of queer narratives affirmed your whole self-knowledge, then you probably followed Conklin on social media to keep up with new publications. If you followed them on social media, you might have seen them go from teaching at Vanderbilt during the academic year to working as faculty at one conference or workshop after another, and then working at one writing residency after another—and then back to the academic calendar. You might have wondered: When is Lydi Conklin not working?
Of course, if you follow Conklin on social media, you’ll also see that for them, working and writing are woven into the very fabric of relationship and community. That may contribute to their sustained career of fellowships, publications, awards, and appointments. (I won’t list them here, but trust that the list is long.)
In their new novel, “Songs of No Provenance,” Conklin grapples with the art monster in us all, taking up questions about artmaking, friendship, and self-knowledge through the perspective of raucous musician Joan Vole. Joan is an art monster figure whose relationship choices unsettled me, to say the least. Joan’s selfishness and desires and aspirations and artistry are all tangled together, and in the sometimes excruciating untangling, she hurts people. Conklin is, as ever, a master of the relatable character that resists glorification or idealization, especially in a media landscape that often pressures queer narratives to oversimplify for some kind of positive representation. As does so much of Conklin’s work, “Songs of No Provenance” complicates—really complicates—popularized and linear narratives of trans and queer awakening, queer relationships, and trans embodiment.
Conklin and I corresponded via email in the winter of 2025 about friendship and art, nonlinear trans narratives, queer sex scenes, and writing the future into your own life.
Kasey Peters: “Songs of No Provenance” is a book about many things, but a big one is making art. Our protagonist, Joan, is a musician. I’m curious about what drew you to music—since, as far as I know, you do several kinds of art, but music is not one of them.
Lydi Conklin: Yes, you are right, I'm certainly not a musician—though I do play some instruments badly and I like to sing and write very ridiculous songs (an ex once said dating me was like living in a kids' TV show).
I've always thought music is the most visceral and badass kind of art and have always wished I could be a touring musician. The form feels more feral and emotional than novel writing, and I wanted to bring that energy into the book, and into Joan as a character, who embodies the vibe of a kind of artist I'd wish to be. I’ve also been friends with musicians all my life—two of my oldest friends formed my favorite band, called You Won't—and so I have a deep familiarity with the shape of a musician's life. That knowledge gave me somewhere to start writing from. Those friends also generously helped me with research at every stage of the process.
KP: The shape of a musician’s life! I thought about that a lot while reading this book—the long labor toward success that maybe never arrives. It’s a lot like writing. And Joan is so singularly focused on her art that she has lived, until the events of this novel, a life nearly devoid of any other pursuits. Her personal relationships are under-articulated, or under-realized somehow: she holds everything else at a distance, singularly prioritizing her songs. We’re not always our protagonists, but Joan is such a rivetingly (and threateningly) relatable character, so I have to ask: Have you flirted with this yourself? Are you a recovering art monster? (Or, not recovering?)
Yes, the workaholic aspect of Joan is definitely autobiographical, to a degree. I've always gone hard in my writing in a way that is maybe alarming. Like I sometimes just eat broth or some weird sandwich over and over for many days so I don't have to think about anything but what I'm working on. Coming out of writing and back into the world always has me half-there and in a fog like Joan. But I’ve never shut out the world like Joan or tried to mitigate intimacy for the sake of art; I've always tried to have it both ways. And in my life, unlike in hers, intimacy and close friends and partners have always pushed me in my writing and helped me grow, both in stretching my life experience and emotional intelligence but also in more applied ways, like reading and providing feedback. So, I'm like a monster with friends.
KP: “A Monster with Friends” sounds like a comic you might have drawn! I think Joan becomes exactly that in the book. Joan’s ‘monstrosity’—including her feral vibe as an artist—is something she both deeply fears and kinda loves about herself. (Again, threateningly relatable.) But I was startled to encounter an ostensibly straight, cisgender protagonist in your novel. Joan has a complicated relationship with queerness: some people assume she’s gay, other people assume she’s trans, and she navigates those assumptions differently, depending on the situation. Why did the character of Joan come together for you as the central figure working through the novel’s shame, hurt, gender performance, queerness, and sexual discovery?
Yes! I should draw that comic, and Joan totally becomes that, and I think it's through the friends that she gains and/or goes deeper with in the book that she's finally able to unravel some of her damaging behavior and, once having done that, can excavate the queerness in her that's always been there. I don't want to give away too much about how that queerness manifests because it's one of the surprises of the book, but needless to say, it is indeed a complex and twisting path for her.
I've always been interested in nontraditional paths towards queerness and especially trans identity, as my own path was not linear in the way I thought it should be as a young person, and dramatizing an even weirder path than I've ever looked at before with Joan was one of my aims with the book. The initial idea for the character of Joan came to me in a conversation with an old therapist. This was years ago, and I was bemoaning how many of the big queer books that were winning awards and becoming bestsellers at the time were written by ostensibly cishet writers. It felt like cishet people were deciding to make their writing more "interesting" by sprinkling in queerness, which appeared to be one of the rare marginalized identities that felt up for grabs for people to write about who didn't claim that identity. I was frustrated by this pattern, even though I loved some of these books quite a lot, because I knew that the cishet version of queerness would always be more palatable to cishet readers than my sloppy queer, trans version, and so I could never win. My therapist suggested I write about this, and so I did, through Joan, in a way that ended up surprising me a lot and giving me more empathy for the situation that plagued me—which is a gift writing about a topic always gives me.
I have found in my own life that I was able to write about desires and deep feelings in myself before I was able to live those realities, and writing about Joan made me realize I didn’t know what was going on in the lives of those authors who were ostensibly cishet. Joan also is able to write about feelings and desires before she can own them, and this is a trajectory that interests me greatly. I also am interested in how one's sexuality and gender identity can morph over time, the way Joan's does.
KP: This experience of writing about deep feelings and desires before being able to live them makes total sense—I’m sure there’s a famous quote I can’t recall about writing the world into being. And with this novel (and your short fiction), I think you’re one of the writers opening up the possible universe in the real world for queer and trans existence. You reject some well-worn narratives about linear transition and happily-ever-after queer awakenings, even though those narratives are sort of ‘tidy’ for a cishet audience and a publisher, in favor of much messier and more real people. I’m guessing you’ve always experienced this issue of audience and cishet palatability. So I have to ask about writing sex!
I was thinking about the burden of 'representing queer sex' or something for a publisher (or even a reader), much like 'representing transness.' Or maybe even a sense from within a queer writer community that queer sex or kink should be written bombastically, explicitly, or casually, in resistance to the cishet, audience-palatability demand. So, how does a person manage competing impulses or demands, if they experience them that way? How do you know your own impulses inside that matrix? And I'm also just thinking like… sex-writing is hard! The 'bad sex in fiction award' is around to make fun of us when we fail. It's incredibly vulnerable. Our whole society is inflected with this prudish Victorian cultural inheritance and its vicious, shame-based repercussions. And writing queer and trans characters is in some fundamental sense writing against that repressive heteronormative discipline. So, with all that going on, how do you navigate sex in your fiction?
Thank you so much for these kind words—that is my greatest hope that I could do those things you say! That means so much to me.
Yes, writing sex can be super challenging. For a long time, I thought that I could only write bad sex, that good sex was too cringe or too boring for fiction. But now I've written some positive-experience-all-around sex scenes and it's a fun craft challenge. Someone once told me that two things always have to be happening in a sex scene, it can't just be, oh here's the characters having sex. Though that is maybe the case for any scene, period. But that is something I think a lot about in sex writing—like in Joan's main present-day sex scene, she is navigating her gender feelings, her relationship to her "kink" such as it is (not exactly a kink), her emotional blockages, her preconceptions about trans people, and tons of other stuff. And she is also having sex with a person she cares about. Another person also told me you can only have one scene of any given thing happening in a novel that can stand for all the other scenes, so if two characters would be having sex many times in a novel, you can only show it once and that scene has to stand for all the times.
I actually don't feel a lot of pressure about how to write a sex scene. I feel like that is one cool thing about being queer and trans. Other queer and trans people know how broad the range of possibility is, and people who are not queer or trans have no idea what goes on, so they would kind of believe anything.
I generally try to reveal character as much as I can in sex scenes, since it's such a vulnerable moment, and to think about character dynamics. Luckily as queer and trans writers we are free from the stupid cliches that haunt cishet writers of sex scenes, none of which I will name, though it might be funny if I did.
KP: Yes! The stupid cliches. There is so much silliness and joy and generosity to be had—speaking of which, I have to ask about the comic artist in the novel, Sparrow, who is a kind of beguiling figure for Joan and whose joy and generosity animates so much of the book. A reader can’t help but love Sparrow—maybe because we see so much of them through Joan’s eyes. In the back half of the book, during a little art-share evening, Sparrow presents this totally incredible-sounding comic to the gathered audience. The comic recasts some important events in the novel, wresting the narrative from Joan (who’s going around in circles trying to figure out the narrative), and it feels like a revelatory turning point. Did you sketch that comic out in order to write about it? Is your fiction-brain deeply related to your drawing-brain?
Wow, thank you for saying all this! That is exactly what I want people to get from that scene, and you put it so beautifully. I never sketched that comic and in fact it was very fun to describe a comic that is way beyond my drawing abilities. I see Sparrow as having the chops of like an old school animator who painted on cells. But I wish someone else would really draw that comic who is more talented at drawing than I am.
I never storyboard my fiction or do any drawing in conjunction with it! In fact, my comics process is very separate from my prose process, though recently I tried to make my comics process more similar to my fiction writing process by giving up, actually, on storyboarding, which I used to do and which I found over time was completely killing my drive to make comics. In my fiction, I just set off without a plan, and a plan develops as I go, but I always thought I had to plan comics out in advance, and it made the stories more boring for me to unfold.
KP: I feel that way, too, about knowing the whole story before writing it. I’ve quit many projects because I ‘figured them out’ and then it was just a chore to complete. But maybe there is a kind of halfway-knowing, or this series of halfway-knowings at each stage of possibility with a project? A big part of your book is about making art (songs, in this case) and whether it comes out of you, individually, or is instead a kind of collective project. How does that feel related to writing for you? What got you thinking about this process, and how people relate to what they make?
That's such a great question! So, the dilemma Joan has about how to make art for art's sake separated from all the attendant prizes, whether they be having a funded album or, in the case of book writing, winning an award or whatever it is, came from my fears. Especially in the beginning of my career, I felt a lot of professional jealousy and worry that if other people were getting things, it meant I wasn't, that I was too far behind, that I'd never achieve what I wanted. And that anxiety and terror, though it never affected my writing, deeply affected my mental health. I was curious about the idea of a character who would be pushed so far to the edge with her jealousy and then would try to find a more spiritually healthy way to circle back to art-making, trying to divorce it from ego and jealousy. Some of Joan's thoughts about how that can be achieved are misguided, or impossible, but they are ways she has to think to get her through the hardest parts before she can rise to some better place.
Lydi Conklin is an Assistant Professor of Fiction at Vanderbilt University. Previously they were the Helen Zell Visiting Professor in Fiction at the University of Michigan. They’ve received a Stegner Fellowship in Fiction at Stanford University, a Rona Jaffe Writer’s Award, four Pushcart Prizes, a grant from the Elizabeth George Foundation, a Creative & Performing Arts Fulbright to Poland, work-study and tuition scholarships from Bread Loaf, and fellowships from MacDowell, Yaddo, Djerassi, Hedgebrook, the James Merrill House, the Vermont Studio Center, VCCA, Millay, Jentel, Lighthouse Works, Brush Creek, the Santa Fe Art Institute, Caldera, the Sitka Center, and Harvard University, among others. They were the 2015-2017 Creative Writing Fellow in fiction at Emory University. Their fiction has appeared in Tin House, American Short Fiction, The Southern Review, The Gettysburg Review, and elsewhere, and is forthcoming from The Paris Review. They have drawn graphic fiction for Lenny Letter, Drunken Boat, and the Steppenwolf Theater in Chicago and cartoons for The New Yorker and Narrative Magazine. Their first book, Rainbow Rainbow, was published by Catapult in 2022. Their novel, Songs of No Provenance, is out from Catapult in the US and forthcoming from Vintage in the UK.
Kasey Peters is a queer writer from Nebraska. They are a 2025 recipient of an Elizabeth George Foundation grant, the winner of the 2023-2024 Porter House Review Editor's Prize judged by Elisa Gabbert, and a 2022 AWP Intro Journals Award. Peters' creative work is in Pinch, Grist, Hayden's Ferry Review, South Carolina Review, and others. Their work has been supported by the Kenyon Review Writers Workshop and by the Hambidge Center for the Creative Arts and Sciences. Peters works as the editorial assistant for Zero Street Fiction, a series dedicated exclusively to LGBTQ+ literary fiction, and as a fiction editor for Prairie Schooner. Before they started writing in earnest, Peters farmed for a decade.