Megan Milks
Lydi Conklin conjures an insightful character study of a musician who evades looming cancellation by teaching at a rural
songwriting camp for teens.
Songs of No Provenance, by Lydi Conklin,
Catapult, 358 pages, $28
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Joan Vole loves to pee. The protagonist of Lydi Conklin’s debut novel, Songs of No Provenance, gets off on it, whether it’s pissing on some rando she’s hooking up with in a bar or peeing outside, by herself, in nature. There’s something about holding it in, cultivating the fullness, the “sexy weight,” and then letting it go in a hot gush. Yes, she’s aware that there are others like her—urophiles, “golden shower enthusiasts”—but she’s too into private abjection for community to appeal. For her, this zeal for pissing is vile and degrading; it’s also holy, “an offering to whatever awes me.”
To Joan, a late–Gen X indie-folk singer-songwriter, music is holy, too. She’s devoted, eschewing most intimacy in favor of spending hours with her guitar. Underground-famous, she’s known for her “Mad Stories, meaning both angry and crazy, a realist subset of anti-folk [defined by] her quick, raw voice and her vivid narratives hissed over skeletal chords.” On stage, Joan is a force: feral, mesmerizing, and prone to lightly indecent acts. She might flash her breasts at the audience; if a fan’s lucky, she might dip a nipple into their drink. But this is one version of Joan—mythic Joan Vole, the fearless (seemingly) lesbian warrior wielding an old-timey guitar. Behind her, another Joan is hiding: the fearful, self-lacerating pisser-in-secret who has, and maybe is (she fears), fucked up. This is the Joan we—her rapt, private audience—get to witness within the pages of this exuberant character study.
Songs of No Provenance follows the author’s superb short-story collection, Rainbow Rainbow (2022). Conklin excels at serving up characters whose questionable choices get them in trouble, and Joan tops them all. We meet her shortly after she’s taken her onstage antics a step too far. While performing at a punk venue on the Lower East Side, she executed a lewd and nonconsensual act involving one of her fans. Fine, I’ll tell you: she peed on someone. Though she was in a performance-high haze when she did this, Joan understood immediately that she had crossed a line. She ended the show early, she’s left her beloved parlor guitar on the doorstep of her best friend, Paige (more on her later), and now she’s fleeing New York in a mortified panic.
What will become of Joan as the dreaded death-angel Cancellation envelops her, siphoning the air from her lungs and relegating her to the silent afterlife of public shame? Driving aimlessly away from her city, her home, her life, Joan resolves to give up music—“even the idea of touching a guitar made her ill.” But who is she without her guitar? Will she degenerate into one of those pitiable ex-touring husks known as . . . teachers? She shudders at the thought, then remembers a teaching job she’d kept open in the event her gigs dried up. She’d be instructing high-school students in songwriting at a summer camp in rural Virginia—a camp with a no-phones policy. What luck! In this blessed “land free of internet,” she might escape her disgrace. She aims her vehicle southward and rolls up to Merry Writers hours before the first class meeting.
Her goal here is to evade exposure while giving “the least of herself possible to teaching.” After that notorious show and her decision to give up music, she reflects that “art was an ego-feeding scam”—how in good faith can she now initiate others into the craft of songwriting? And Joan, who is largely self-taught, harbors some resentment of her students’ privilege, and all the support and training they’re receiving that she never had. This soreness echoes her dynamic with Paige, a younger singer-songwriter whom Joan took under her wing years ago as unofficial mentee. Though Paige is now Joan’s closest friend, her success has overtaken Joan’s, and Joan is stewing in professional jealousy—a situation that serves as the backdrop to the story. The novel roves back and forth in time to fill in the history of their complex relationship.
Joan decides her three students will focus on writing songs without provenance: that is, songs without known origin, songs that “transcended the fallibility of individuals” (individuals such as Joan), songs that “belonged to the world.” (There’s some slippage here between songs with no provenance as an inherited folk genre and songs explicitly designed to abdicate authorship. That Conklin dedicates only glancing attention to songs whose authors have been scrubbed from the record, or supplanted via cultural theft, will frustrate some readers.) She gives her (initially dubious) students exercises in collaborative and process-based writing: they craft compositions built like exquisite corpses or inspired by found language and magazine images. Joan’s favorite song with no provenance, “Rail Rat Done Wrong Tonight,” the saga of an enviably (to Joan) no-good scamp, is, as far as I can tell, invented: Conklin’s own attempt at authoring an “authorless” song.
Though Wi-Fi isn’t, as it turns out, completely absent at the camp, Joan has so far managed to evade her inevitable cancellation. But there’s another anvil, we learn, that’s been hovering above Joan’s head for years—the matter of her sexuality. Although her mostly lesbian audience speculates that she’s bedded hundreds if not thousands of women, Joan sees herself as . . . um . . . straight, though that’s “straight” with asterisks attached. She’s another kind of queer, one who came up in a scene that celebrated cross-dressing on stage without imposing anything so crude as Identity. “In my world, you could do whatever with gender,” she explains to Sparrow, a much younger colleague at camp. “It’s kind of wonderful, if you can take it all as play.” Sparrow flinches—they don’t exactly see their own nonbinary identity as “play.” But if Joan is decidedly not the lesbian icon she has let her fan base think she is, her time at Merry Writers, and especially with Sparrow, leads her to wonder if she’s some manner of trans, maybe nonbinary, maybe trans in a nonbinary register—she’s figuring it out with Sparrow’s help, meanwhile teaching them how to pee standing up. A gratifyingly cross-generational novel, Songs is here for exchange.
For all the very real seriousness of their themes (accountability, queerbaiting, authorship, identity, aging and age-gap relationships, gender envy, teaching and mentorship, fandom—and kink), Conklin is also a comics artist (as is Sparrow), and they bring a touch of the cartoonish to their storytelling without losing dimension. Their prose is funny, sly, frank; it bubbles over with mirth. When characters are ribbed, they’re ribbed with affection. One of Joan’s colleagues is “longer and narrower [than Joan], like a worm that fed off the human brain.” When Joan thinks of “craft,” she imagines “poking [a song’s] flanks until the magic puffed out in farts.” I read this book with a rolling chuckle and not a few appreciative howls. Songs is by no means an authorless project, but in bringing this character to indelible life, Conklin has combined the full force of their fictive imagination with the ribald, communal spirit of folk. Joan, wonderful Joan! Prickly, cantankerous, lovable Joan! A “Rail Rat” for the ages, a song I can’t shake from my head.
Megan Milks is the author of the novel Margaret and the Mystery of the Missing Body, finalist for a 2022 Lambda Literary Award, and Slug and Other Stories, both published by Feminist Press.