Lydi Conklin

Lydi Conklin is an American writer and cartoonist whose work straddles the humorous and the tragic to create rich and complex stories that reflect overlooked queer and trans experiences. Their 2022 short story collection Rainbow Rainbow was long-listed for the Story Prize and the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Short Story Collection. 

Songs of No Provenance is their most recent book, released in June 2025. The novel follows Joan Vole, a musician of Bowery fame, as she runs away to a writing camp for teenagers in Virginia to escape the consequences of a shocking act she committed onstage in New York. The book explores a combo-platter of themes—shame, kink, ambition, liminal gender identities, and queerbaiting—all cut with spunky humor. Conklin approaches transgression and forgiveness in equally playful and somber terms, all while forwarding an argument for art that “[drags] no cult of personality” that is uncorrupted by pride.

In this interview, Conklin discusses how they, and their characters, negotiate ego and ambition, separate the public and the private, and balance the teacher’s life and the artist’s life. Readers can expect to gain deeper insight into the novel’s construction, how Conklin creates such an imagistic and propulsive narrative, and how to let go of control and let a story become its own creature.

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Tanisha Tekriwal: The first thing that really jumped out to me when I was reading is how much the book is concerned with questions of ego and ambition, and how that can corrupt or encroach on the more private sphere of art making. I’m interested in how you started to build that as a central theme or conflict of the book, if it was something that just automatically linked to Joan’s story, or if that was something that you arrived at after.          

Lydi Conklin: I think it was kind of a combo platter. Because first of all those themes are really linked to Joan’s story. I was curious to write about someone who was at this specific level of fame, where everyone knows this one song by her, but probably no one really knows her name, and the kids at the camp don’t know who she is but maybe they’ve heard her song before. She’s always at this place where it feels like tomorrow something could happen and she could get to some kind of stability, which actually you can kind of never really have as an artist, no matter how much fame or whatever you achieve. There’s always a chance that something could happen and you could fall into obscurity. So those questions of striving and how much ambition and ego are getting in the way of your art, those sort of feel naturally tied to that place in someone’s career at that moment.

But I was also conceptually interested in those ideas, and have been for a while. I was glad that they were able to come naturally into Joan’s story, because it’s a question that I have, having written for years without anyone really reading my stuff. And then suddenly, having a book, and then all these other business elements or elements of people’s reactions and responses coming in, was so weird.  

Suddenly, even after that happened, when I’m writing alone, I’m still thinking about people’s mean Goodreads reviews, or people’s rude questions at readings, or whatever gets into your mind that’s unrelated to the actual work of writing. Suddenly it feels like the production of writing isn’t as pure and private or divorced from the world anymore.         

I’m really curious about how this pure private world of creation is muddied by all these external happenings and factors, and what role ambition plays. More specifically, how Joan, in her fear of ambition and her desire for fame, thinks of ambition as having everything to do with the ego, and the artist’s ego. That’s something that it seems she’s trying to shed very desperately, and is also part of what she admires in Sparrow, this being able to almost shut themselves off to that. I’m curious about whether you think Joan’s ambitions, but also any artist’s ambitions, can be divorced from ego.            

It’s really interesting to think about the difference between ego and ambition, because I think sometimes, honestly in my life, I have been able to split those two things. At the beginning of my career, every rejection was so horrible, and so personal. And now, having just gotten one million rejections every year, and also having been on the other side, where I’ve judged contests and picked MFA students, I see that the process of judging is all so subjective and random and doesn’t have to do with anyone. There could be excellent writers that I passed over by accident, or because I was having a bad day, whose work I would love more than someone else in the pile. I think Joan is still at a place where she’s such an ‘art monster,’ where she doesn’t have family, she doesn’t have friends—well, she has one friend, but that friend is deeply related to her art. And that’s why she’s allowed to keep her. But Joan has pushed away everything else. Her ego has become her art. She can’t divorce herself or extricate herself from it. If she’s not going to have success, that is a condemnation of her as a person too.

I’ve been in that place where Joan is at in the book. I totally understand that place. But I think there is definitely a way to be super ambitious, and to do the things you have to do to make sure your work has the best chance to get out there and succeed while also separating it from any emotional feeling you have about yourself and your work.              

That’s really interesting, what you said about her being an art monster. It’s something I feel at the beginning of the book, that it’s a cloak that she wears with a lot of pride, but also with a lot of disgust. It’s somehow both the thing that she loves about herself, and also the thing that is getting in the way of her having a “pure” channel to her work. In fact, at the end, there’s even a line which, when I read it, I felt the book had been building towards – “Maybe the art didn’t always have to come first.” This is specifically with regards to Sparrow. Was that a lesson that you always knew she had to learn through this journey? Or was that developed as you wrote the book? I read somewhere that this is a novel that you’d been working on since before you published Rainbow Rainbow. 

I started this novel in summer of 2018, so I hadn’t finished Rainbow Rainbow yet and had to work on both projects simultaneously. But for the question, I didn’t know that was where Joan was going to land. After she does this horrible thing on stage that she’d been driven to, as she understands it, in part by her jealousy and her toxic relationship to artmaking, she thinks of giving up music, or seeking it only in these ‘songs of no provenance’ that have ego scrubbed from them, as the answer. And as I was first writing the book, I was kind of on the same page with Joan. That these authorless songs actually would be the way forward, that she would strive for and potentially find some kind of way to make music that erased her ego entirely.

But as I wrote forward, those songs felt like an interesting experiment for her, but definitely a dead end to actually getting back to connecting with what was most important for her about art. I had to write her through that not knowing if she would find the answer that way.  

My interpretation of the end is that the last song, “Green Weeks”, which she sings for the kids, is maybe not a great song, maybe it’s not even going to make it into her repertoire, but it is this messy, vulnerable performance that is a little less egomaniacal than the way she performed before.                       

For whatever reason, writing about Joan being vulnerable in that moment, trying out a song that might not work in front of kids who could potentially mock her for it, and the song being earnest, that’s step one in the way back to connecting to her art that she’ll eventually get to through much more time and experimentation. 

I think the central thing that was really interesting to me was the avenues that she seeks to scrub ego from her work. The ‘Songs of No Provenance’ is posited as one solution at the beginning, but it seems that through the book, she arrives at something else–not different, but almost tangential– which is shedding the artist’s persona and really coming into the work as a person, if that makes sense. I’m very curious about what you might think are other solutions or avenues that can help artists divorce ego from their art or at least create that distance? 

Part of the reason this issue interested me in this time of social media is that it’s nearly impossible. You feel like you have to be out there on social media posting a picture of you with your book and 10 years ago this would have felt so humiliating and cheesy. Now it’s so normal that you don’t even feel, at least I don’t even feel, too humiliated by it.

On one hand, in terms of the actual artistic process, what I’m most concerned with is, am I trying to control this narrative? Am I trying to impose plot elements or theme elements or things I want the narrative to be on a book and not letting it breathe and live on its own and become more than me? The way Joan sometimes talks about how a song will get away from her and just become its own thing. I think that is one way of divorcing ego in the actual writing process.

I’ve definitely had times with this book where I wanted it to be a certain thing. I was trying to force Joan to do something she wouldn’t do because it was thematically interesting to me; one example is when I really wanted her to be cishet because I really wanted to explore a cishet character who was queerbaiting, and she just wasn’t. That just revealed itself and I was trying to fight it. I still wanted her to have a romance with Sparrow but I wanted the truth to be that she is actually not queer, she just is attracted to this person who has more of a male gender. But it turned out no, her queerness actually goes way deeper. I didn’t actually want that to happen, but then I’m happy that it did once I released my control over the book. 

How have you managed to let things go and then create that distinction between the public and private self, not only as a person, but also with the work? I mean in terms of what your novel is in the private experience of writing it, versus what it now exists as out in the world. The public versus private self is such a big part of the novel too. 

It comes up in many different ways. The biggest way it affected me was my first book, when there would be this response that ‘it’s so dark’, or ‘why do you have queer characters doing things that are not always good?’, and is that bad representation? And that question was a question that would bother me the most because I had expected there would be critiques coming from people outside of the queer community, but it was within the queer community that I had to take it more seriously.                            

I think of Rainbow Rainbow as not very dark. I feel it’s the least dark book I’ll probably ever write in my life, so that confused me. I see the world in a strange way, or a different way from other people, and it was really jarring to have people give interpretations of things that I didn’t anticipate or agree with. I think I have a strange sense of humor and a lot of people said they find the book funny, but some people didn’t see it as funny at all.

And then, for the first time, the outside world was encroaching on my private process, because I started thinking, ‘Oh no, is this going to be too dark? Are people on Goodreads going to have a problem with this thing that my character is doing?’ It was really hard to scrub that out of my brain. Lynda Barry, a cartoonist I love, said she’s never read a single piece of writing about herself. There’s even been full books published about her, but she’s never read them. That can be one way to go through the world, and I don’t have the self-control to completely do that, but I have finally stopped reading Goodreads.

You have to let in the world. I have to let in the world in order to get a book to the point that it’s even ready, because I really rely on my readers to help shape it. 

There’s a moment when Joan and Sparrow are talking about their respective relationships to performing gender and identity, not only in their selves, but also through their art, and specifically when it comes to Joan’s song “Lakeshore.” Sparrow is questioning how much of the song is bad faith queerbaiting versus how much of it is Joan trying to experiment with something. That was a really interesting conversation because Joan is talking about how valuable it is to be allowed to play, and in response to that, Sparrow says, “It’s not a joke to me.” I was really interested in this friction between play versus joke, what the gap is between those two things, and how artists make the distinction between playing around with an idea or theme versus treating it as a joke and not taking it seriously. How do you make that difference? And do you think it comes down to things like intention? 

I do. I think in that conversation I wanted to get to a place where I was thinking about questions of gender performance and presentation that I didn’t have an answer to, and that are still mysterious to me. On one hand, in the past I’ve had bad feelings if a person is joking around with the idea of gender, performance, or trans identity, and they’re not serious about it. Joan is advocating for this more open atmosphere. Some people might be assigned male at birth, and wear a dress on stage as a 40-year-old and you might think they’re just making fun of drag, or making fun of being trans. But in reality, it’s always possible that this joking phase is a first step towards a transition, and you can’t know when someone’s acting in bad faith. It’s not a great idea to try to police things like that because you just don’t know. Is there harm to it? If they are just doing it frivolously, then it contributes to a world where there’s more permissiveness, and more acceptance in a way. But I also see Sparrow’s perspective, because I see that sometimes when people are joking about gender they’re saying gender doesn’t matter. And it would be great if we lived in a world where gender didn’t matter. But for trans people gender is the most important thing in your life. It’s hard to speak of abstractly.           

Are you treating a subject that you might or might not have experience with the attention and the depth of research it deserves? Am I thinking about it deeply? Am I consulting people that know more than me and that kind of thing? I’m very interested in writing about things that you don’t know the answer to yet or writing into the mystery of a question or a theme.         

Something that was so interesting to me is how Joan and Sparrow mirrored each other. It seemed like a question that one wanted an answer to was in the other. For Joan, Sparrow embodies this pure art-making that is not attached to the ego, whereas Sparrow confesses that they see in Joan a masculinity that they wanted for themselves when they were much younger. I was interested in whether you created these characters with these things in mind, of them taking these magnetic positions with respect to each other, or if that’s just something that occurred naturally in the writing.

It was kind of a combo because I wanted there to be a character at the camp who apparently had an art practice that would be healthy for Joan to see, or that she would admire or project onto. Who knows what’s behind the appearances, because most likely if we got to spend more time with Sparrow we would see that they have a neurotic and difficult relationship to their art too. They do at one point take a detail from Joan’s life and make art about it without permission, which is something that could be considered questionable. But I wanted to have that character appear for Joan because I thought it would affect her and press on her in interesting ways.

Paige interested me as a character. Even at the end, Paige remained a mysterious figure to me in terms of what Joan needed from her. Not that characters only ever exist in those terms of needing something or the other from each other, but the two have such an interesting friendship. I was so devastated at the end when Paige walked away and Joan came to the realization that this was the last time that they would talk to each other. That surprised me, even though it made sense. Did that end surprise you too? What questions were you exploring in that relationship?

Weirdly, I feel like people don’t ask me as much about Paige. I’m glad to talk about her because I think she’s in a way my favorite character. In terms of the end, that wasn’t inevitable, and in fact it took me a long time to get to that part– that moment of realizing that this was going to be an end to their relationship. I felt like Joan needed some kind of deeper consequence and also that Paige deserves a better future – I didn’t want to leave her enthralled to this person who had harmed her in many ways, and so for both of them it made sense to step away. It was a huge moment of growth for Paige to be able to walk away and also important for Joan to realize that she could cause enough harm to someone that they would leave. With the superfan, Carlotta, she had a different reaction to what happens on stage than is expected so Joan doesn’t have to face as dire a consequence in that moment. With Paige the biggest question in the relationship for me was looking at a character like Joan, who is unable to say her needs on a personal level and unable to express what she’s feeling about Paige in an honest way. How this lack of ability to express your needs can ricochet into decades of harm against someone. It seems like a passive action for Joan and the harm she’s fixated on is the harm she did to Carlotta, which is obviously horrible, but the harm she doesn’t realize as quickly is the harm against Paige. That harm is probably why Paige exposes her and why everything that happened snowballs when it wouldn’t necessarily have snowballed– because of this deep implanted harm that Joan has been causing through simply not communicating in her relationship with Paige.

That’s a really cool shape for the narrative. Even though we start off with something that has really long-lasting, wide implications and consequences with Carlotta at the beginning, that encounter is tied to something that is more buried in the narrative and has to surface, not necessarily through internal reflection, but through others poking at it, and through the story poking at it. That is the harm done to Paige, and the relationship to Paige, and this arc mirrors Joan’s confrontation with her own gender identity, and is, again, something that she represses. But through the environment that she’s in, through Sparrow, through all the things that happen in the story, something is picked at, a scab almost. I was really interested in how you created that sense on the page, of something subconscious being chipped away at without direct confrontation, from the very beginning.

Ooh, yeah, I love that question. It was challenging because Paige is off stage for the main action of the book, from chapter two until the end. And I was thinking, how do I keep Paige alive as a character that Joan is thinking about all the time? I found various ways to do so, sometimes the teenagers at the camp remind Joan of Paige and sometimes Sparrow does. I had that moment where she goes to the computer lab and starts writing a letter to Paige.

Then there’s obviously ways Paige presses on the narrative when the video surfaces of her concert where she’s speaking about Joan. But it wasn’t enough. It was actually my editor, Kendall Storey, who suggested having the backstory chapters, because it used to be that the first couple of chapters were jammed with exposition about their relationship and it was slowing down the book and was not a satisfying way to receive that information. I’d also had people say they really want to see what Joan’s life was like when she was a musician before she came to this quiet camp, that it would be cool to see her scrappy, wild life. So that’s when I added those four backstory chapters, because they also allowed me to explore Paige’s character and their relationship in a more nuanced way than just blathering backstory and exposition.

I felt like they gave me a clearer picture of their relationship so when Paige comes to camp it makes sense. There’s a moment that I think about a lot. And to me it’s such a great moment of foreshadowing or hinting at something, or, again, this picking at something at the back of Joan’s mind. It’s when Carlotta first comes to the class, and there’s a disruption. Joan is trying to get her to not reveal what happened. And in that mess, Carlotta says, I know that Joan Vole is trans. And that really hits Joan. I think it’s both perfectly placed and a tangential shot where a reader thinks, Oh, Carlotta is way off because readers aren’t that familiar with Joan yet. So you think Carlotta has no idea what she’s talking about, but of course, that thread comes back in such a different way. I’m just very curious about that moment. What made you put that there? And the figure of Carlotta is just so mysterious. I would love for you to talk about her at that moment. 

I think that is so interesting that you bring up that moment because a lot of times I thought of cutting that moment because that scene was long and, when I first wrote it, that statement by Carlotta seemed kind of like a red herring. But that was before I figured out that Joan did have gender issues, and is somewhere on the trans spectrum. There’s a moment in Meg Wolitzer’s The Interestings that I always love as a writing moment. I don’t want to give it away too much but there’s someone who makes a pronouncement about a question that has been urgently hanging in the book. I think it’s a question of someone having assaulted someone, and he says, no, he’s guilty. It’s so shocking when you read the book, because you’re thinking, Oh my god, we have the answer so directly out of nowhere from this random character. And then you find out actually, this person has some kind of dementia, or doesn’t know what he’s saying exactly and it isn’t true. I thought it was so cool that she put that moment there.

That moment slightly inspired when the superfan just says that Joan is trans. And the reader has to wonder, is it true? Is it not true? I mean it is true, but probably not for the reasons that Carlotta is saying it’s true. I also really liked the idea of the relationship to fans and how sometimes fans think something about you that isn’t true at all and sometimes they know more than you know. I was always freaked out as a kid that people would know I was gay or know I was trans before I came out because people can sense things like that about you.

To loop back to something else you were talking about before, with Paige, the fact that the fans ship Paige and Joan and think they’re secretly in a relationship. They’re not but there is some truth in that. It’s a false proclamation, unlike what Carlotta says about Joan’s gender identity. That was another thing about writing Paige–there were times when I thought the book was leading up to them ending up together in a romance. People would read it and say, Oh, are they going to get together? It just wasn’t the right answer for the book or for either of those characters. But did I know they would part ways? No, sometimes it was on the table to consider: well, what if their friendship was restored? What if they got back together?

Carlotta, as a character, was difficult to write. I wrote that scene many times. There was actually a time when my editor asked me to write a version of the scene where Joan leaves Virginia and drives to find Carlotta and goes to this strange apartment she’s renting by the sea in New Jersey. There’s a whole elaborate scene about Carlotta’s life there and receiving Joan. It didn’t work because it broke the enclosed feel of being in Virginia too much, so we had to scrap it. But I rewrote and rewrote Carlotta’s reaction millions of times because, why did she come all the way to Virginia? What does she think about the encounter? Is what she’s saying about the encounter actually how she feels? Or is it how she would present how she feels to this person who’s been a role model and a figure she’s obsessed with? What would she be able to reveal to Joan? How would she speak with Joan? All those questions were really hard to wrestle with and it took a while before she could form into a full person with her motivations becoming clear to me.

I love the fact that so much of the book happens in Virginia. When you start the book, no way you’re thinking that that’s where Joan will end up. I love that it’s the teaching life that she hurtles towards. At the beginning, she thinks teaching songwriting is going to be so different from performing and from her life as a musician. She views the artist’s life and the teacher’s life as very separate. I’m curious about what you think of the difference or overlap between these two types of lives. 

You know, they do feel separate to me, but they also feel connected. For me personally, it would not be healthy, the way it honestly probably isn’t healthy for Joan either, to just have the artist’s life because I feel I would go into a weird place, eating some weird soup every day, obsessively exercising and working all day until I’m going to pass out. Teaching for me is a way to engage with craft, engage with writing and the idea of fiction and the production of fiction with other people, with other brains who can say things that unlock things for me inspire me and challenge the way I think. I’m really lucky to get to work with amazing MFA students at Vanderbilt who are writers I really admire, who are almost like peers in terms of their level, and also to work with undergrads who are at an amazing point in their journey and so fun and so talented and committed. For me, it wouldn’t have had to be teaching, probably I could have done something else too, but I love teaching and it does directly feed my writing so it’s kind of ideal. But no matter what, I would have needed some other thing to balance my writing and for Joan that is part of the answer too. She’s been in a weird spiral alone.    

Joan was so reluctant and uncomfortable with teaching at the beginning and the way the novel ends feels like coming home to teaching. When I read it almost seemed to create the idea of teaching as ego death. In what ways do you think teaching can do that for an artist and specifically what might be the difference between teaching and mentoring which is a distinction made in the book. 

At the beginning of the book Joan is mentoring. In her collective of musicians mentoring is cool, mentoring is normal. You pick someone random and you help them. Teaching is lame and is selling out and going into a corporate mode. By the end of the book she would probably be a little off mentoring because her mentorship of Paige was so messy and tied into friendship, tied into romance and sex, and caused harm. It’s sloppier and more difficult, but that’s not to say that it’s bad. Obviously, you know I teach and I mentor. They’re different ways of being but they kind of dovetail together. I think teaching is part of the answer for Joan for sure, but I don’t think that means it’s necessarily the answer for everybody. Teaching is a way that she can step outside of herself and give something to someone else. Maybe she could have found other ways to do that, with activism or mutual aid, but in this trajectory of this book that is what’s presented to her, that’s the option she has, and that’s how she finds a way to care about someone else. To see someone else and give to someone else and find this balance with her own art making.

I’m really drawn to the details of the book. It’s a book that is so precise in its images, everything has a color and a shape and a purpose. I remember very clearly that there’s a skyblue pencil that Sparrow’s using and that really stuck with me and made me interested in your process of constructing images. Does it come to you whole and is primarily a transcription of a scene that’s playing out in your mind, or is it something that you build layer by layer?

It’s sort of a combo, some of it is just so clear to me and some of it comes from life. It’s interesting you mentioned the skyblue pencil because I always draw with a skyblue pencil. It’s a kind of pencil that doesn’t show up on reproduction so the skyblue colour is actually indicative of its function. Some other things like this come from real life. I did teach at a camp in Virginia that is different in many ways, but the place is very similar and the kudzu and intense green and humidity and horses and all of that was a world I lived in for many summers and knew so deeply and could easily reprint. There’s a picnic table that’s spongy because it’s kind of rotten and that was a real picnic table that I would sit on a lot, but other times, yes, I have to think into the images, think into the world and make it up. Like the open mic night that Joan goes to was a completely invented club and I had to specifically think, okay what would the club look like, what would the decor be like, what would the tables feel like, would they be wobbly.

One of the things that I was so invested in was how you create a sense of dread and fear of everything that’s happening. Maybe this is strange to say but I thought of it almost like a chase novel. There’s something thriller-like about everything that is happening, especially when she arrives at the seemingly remote place in Virginia, there’s threat after threat. There are also moments when that threat is defanged, but only partially and later reintroduced. All of that is just such careful choreography. Was this naturally part of the narrative or were you trying to draw on those genres even though this is obviously a work of literary fiction?

I’m so glad that came through because I definitely did want it to have that feeling. It was something that I built over time. In the first drafts of the book it was not tense. She leaves her life and then she is in this other place, but what had happened is not pressing on her. I really wanted it to be full of dread, to have what happened with the superfan to be continually shifting and pressing on her. That’s why I wanted Carlotta to come to the camp and the way the video appeared to change over time so that the plot would continue to be propulsive. I also wanted to write into this horror, this ultimate nightmare of the current moment of what happens if you get cancelled or what happens if suddenly you’re blown up on Twitter for, you know, whatever people get cancelled for these days. That’s a constant modern fear especially when you’re slightly in the public eye. I wanted to write into that fear and write my way through it and understand it. It did make me feel calmer about what if that happens to me one day, but writing the dread was hard. It was hard to strike a balance because there were certain drafts where Joan would be obsessively thinking about what she’d done every few sentences and it was getting tedious, so I had to scale it back. 

There’s a quote I’ll read from the book. “Sometimes a song becomes its own creature like uncoiling without you and then it has teeth. Chicken legs, scales, whatever. And it’s ready to defend itself even if you mess with it.” I would love to know in what ways the novel defended itself over the years that you have been working on this project.

Like I mentioned, Joan’s sexuality and gender were things that resisted me trying to shape them, but there were other things too, like her kink and how that developed. I understood it at the beginning as one thing and it ended up being way more complicated and deeper and more difficult to write than I would have expected. There was a whole end that I really wanted to have happen that was this super dramatic, physical scene involving that horse Cobra Face. It was elaborate and weird and messed up. Some people loved that scene so much and said this scene makes the book and other people said this scene is insane and take this scene out and if you put this scene in it’s going to be the only thing people talk about. I, in a way, loved that scene and wanted it to work and kept trying to see if there was a way to make it work. But, despite questions of whether that scene would be bad from a marketing perspective, it just didn’t work in the book narratively and it didn’t make sense however much I wanted to fit it in. It just had to be left on the cutting room floor. The book was refusing that scene and showing it needed to go in a more subtle and sad direction at the end. Ultimately the ending I chose did serve the book way better, but yeah I think in lots of ways the book was fighting with me all throughout and I had to submit to what it wanted to be in order to finish it. 

I’m curious about what the difference is, if there is even a difference, for you in writing a novel versus writing stories. That’s a question you must field pretty often, but I wonder how it applies specifically when it comes to what we’re talking about with trying to wrangle, um, wrestle with difficult scenes.

I think with a story, you can see what it is in a chunk and understand it. Many, many times, I’ve just had to throw out a story– I don’t mean throw in a garbage can, but just put it aside and probably never look at it again if I’ve just realized that there’s something fundamentally wrong. Probably I, or anyone, could fix anything if you spend enough time on it or if you are really dedicated to something, then there’s always a way through. But sometimes I have to make the decision that it would be easier to write a whole new thing than to fix the deeply embedded problems in this thing, and when it happens with a story it’s not that big of a deal, but when it happens with a novel, which has happened to me many times, it’s really sad because so much investment has been put into it. With stories, if there’s a massive problem, as massive as it can be, if it’s still solvable, or still feels worthwhile to solve, it’s not that much work, whereas with a novel, if there’s a big issue, it’s different. One of the big issues with this novel was that Joan didn’t have a clear arc. My agent described it as a heartbeat graph as opposed to an arc and so I had to completely restructure the emotional through-line on several levels, and it was so overwhelming and hard because with a novel you change one thing and a thousand things get changed whereas with a story, even if you have to throw out half of it, it’s ultimately not that big of a deal. But I love the fact that with a novel you can just know what you’re going to work on every day for years and not be constantly searching for a new idea to start again.

Tanisha Tekriwal is a writer and filmmaker from Ahmedabad and Mumbai. Their fiction has been supported by a Tin House residency, as well as scholarships from Bread Loaf, Granta, and Clarion West. They were the Jeanne Córdova Scholar for the 2025 Lambda Literary Retreat. In their free time, they like to doodle. You can subscribe to their Substack here.