To Kink, or not to Kink: A Review of Songs of No Provenance by
​Lydi Conklin

 by William Huberdeau





    Many of we late Millennial weirdos know what it’s like to have gotten away scot-free with our 90’s and early-aught antics. We may have broken into a friend’s house to eat their birthday cake before their party or set off those tin-foil-in-plastic-bottle bombs behind the daycare center (on purpose). We came out of these teenage years and early adulthood with just a little shame that we don’t talk about and/or have mostly forgotten. We didn’t cause any much wilder attention than that which we sought. And whether or not we were so lucky, we had to adjust anyway as we grew into employable adulthood.

    Joan, the protagonist of Lydi Conklin’s Songs of No Provenance, goes through this process of growth a little later than some of her late Millennial peers and is famous enough to draw attention. She is a 40-ish year-old folk punk solo musician who indulges in her sexual kink on stage upon an unsuspecting superfan—not that Joan wasn’t already flashing concert halls and tipping her tit into audience members’ drinks. Through this one singular event at the opening of the story, she has doomed herself to cancellation and, subsequently, rage quits her life in New York City, retreating to a teaching position in rural Virginia on a campus with no Internet. She chucks her phone on the way and is no wiser to how the world is reacting. She is reasonably afraid of the fallout as her taboo kink is certainly one at which most people bristle. Conklin’s choice of and embrace of this kink shall reward readers with the weirdest’s admiration. Such is the one Conklin is writing to. After all, Conklin’s biggest, most urgent risk is redefining what constitutes weirdo-dom by encouraging solidarity among all participants within said weird world.

    With or without the call for weirdo unity that Conklin seems to invoke, Songs is foremostly praiseworthy for the wildly entertaining writerly turns and decisions Conklin makes to engage the reader in a mechanical bull ride of a story. The stress-points of the novel make for the best reading experience I’ve enjoyed since Jonathan Escoffery’s If I Survive You. (The next most comparable fun I’ve had goes even further back to Kelly Link’s Get in Trouble.) Conklin fans had already seen such craft decisions in their short story collection Rainbow Rainbow. The fans coming back for more start-weird/get-weirder stories will be undeniably rewarded. All that made Rainbow so dramatically engaging exists in Songs.

    To this point, in Songs, Conklin introduces a couple organizational pacing techniques: a ticking time bomb—when will campus learn about Joan’s most recent antics on stage?—and the setting restraint that traces the edge of the six weeks spent at the Virginian creative writing camp. Therein, Conklin masterfully puts the reader on a path of expectation. In the early rising action, the reader is lulled into Joan’s comfortably numb position on campus where she will be safe to make some funds to fulfill an escape fantasy to Norway. However, the most jaw dropping moment happens soon after by putting characters we never expect to see together in Joan’s music-writing classroom when we least expect to see them. Our expectations are continually—and welcomingly—upended with more drama. The effect is exponential, not linear, and the reader is never left to rest comfortably again.

    And the stakes Conklin sets couldn’t be higher for Joan. We begin the story with Joan acting immediately as a Mr. Happens device—Joan’s mentee and friend Paige doesn’t want to talk about something that Joan pushes for immediate discussion before a significant gig. This conversational conflict, if put off for after Joan’s performance, could avoid the entire disaster Joan’s about to endure and sets the stakes that Paige provides. Paige, Joan’s long-counseled younger mentee-turned-colleague, confesses that she is about to surpass Joan’s musical career’s highest benchmarks. This doesn’t seem to bother Joan in and of itself. What really gets to Joan is that Joan is about to lose Paige as a relational comfort, as a friend or whatever the reader may want to call her. This relationship—blurring lines between coercion/power/influence and desire/love/connection—is the crux of the biggest risk Conklin takes in challenging the reader to empathize with Joan in a meaningful and perspective-changing way. Conklin deals in radical empathy like Escoffery deals in shock and Link in fantasy.

    This radical empathy is what is new about Conklin’s debut novel. This is how Conklin has leveled up their writerly achievement since Rainbow. The heart of the content leaves the reader changed and, if a fellow weirdo, with a clear call to action:  Unite!

    Though Paige enters early in the novel, the real romantic interest of the story is nonbinary Sparrow. Though Joan presents as a cis-woman, she has built her career over rumors of her queerness because of a song she wrote for a man whom she’d fictionalized as a woman. The rumors grow because Joan, throughout her companionship with Paige, has had sex with the younger character from time to time against Joan’s actual desire. Joan doesn’t want to have sex with Paige but does so all the same because she doesn’t want to hurt the poor thing. Many of Joan’s fans believe them to be dating.

    After Sparrow enters the picture, Joan’s initial across-the-room crush grows into a situationship somewhat similar to that which she experienced with Paige—those blurred lines. Paige and Sparrow are both younger than Joan, inordinate fans, and feed Joan a comfort via the mentor role she plays that gives her a sense of power and purpose. Conklin is able to mask the unsavory, quasi-grooming, and coercive characteristics of these relationships by writing in Joan’s perspective and by invoking a positive view of both queerness and subcultural weirdness. The reader is inclined to forgive queer folx and outcasts for what they might not in a more masculine, normy persona. Joan views her kink—which she only performs on men—as a patriarchy-busting act of defiance. When she breaks that boundary with her love interest, she views the act tenderly. Her partner, in that event, even reflects on the act with the assertion, “Anything that turns you on turns me on.” Does Joan’s partner want that kink? Only if Joan does. Are Joan’s intentions sound? She’s never experienced this indulgence so purely. And furthermore, what would others say of her dirty little secret in the first place? Well, nothing more than what they’ve said—and still say—of queerness: It’s unnatural and wrong.

    Our heart strings are weighed by a wave of justice for the marginalized.

    The answers the reader arrives at challenge them to embrace queerness as an act of defiance against bland normy life and asks the reader to consider desire an equally natural occurrence that they should tolerate and accept—just so long as said desiring people are self-aware and work within the framework of enthusiastic consent. 

    To be clear, Joan’s relations with Paige do not fall under such consensual standards of enthusiastic consent. Joan doesn't want to have the sex she had with Paige. Paige and Sparrow are influenced by a power dynamic over which Joan has more of a hand. These are problematic relations to say the least. The close interiority of Joan’s perspective, though, leaves the reader hard pressed to call out these sexual transgressions. There is no clear bad actor because of Conklin’s strong control over our sense of empathy for the characters they’ve created. Conklin’s bravest act is drawing a connection between Joan’s kink and queer identity. Weirdos and queer folx share a role and space within society and ought to have enough shared experience to unite in solidarity against the exclusivity of the mundane world. Not all readers will be willing to embrace this connection, and for this, Conklin deserves readers’ admiration for putting their neck out on the line to imply this.

    It's a message that I suspect many embrace quietly, though. Maybe Gen Z or Gen Alpha won’t feel so uncomfortable drawing the bold message I draw from Conklin’s Songs. Conklin’s and my generation are uncomfortable because we fear our weird past. We either did weirdness wrong or are unsure and afraid of having done so. Conklin overcomes that fear, and we owe them a great debt for saying something that many will benefit from. Not only is it said very well and convincingly, but it’s said to its fullest extent within the thrill of a truly great story. 

​    Weirdos and queer folx of the world unite, for what have we to lose but our chains?


William Huberdeau is an artist, writer and educator. 
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