second round
(13) Kate Bush, “Running Up That Hill”
outpaced
(5) Edie Brickell & New Bohemians, “What I Am”
251-221
and will play in the sweet 16
Read the essays, listen to the songs, and vote. Winner is the aggregate of the poll below and the @marchxness twitter poll. Polls close @ 9am Arizona time on 3/15/23.
Don’t Let Me Get Too Deep: Amy M. Miller on “what i am”
Kris sat across from me on the sofa telling me about this new band, Edie Brickell and the New Bohemians. I’m pretty sure she brought the album to my house, we played it on the big stereo in the downstairs den, I found a spare Maxwell cassette and recorded it after one spin of their single, “What I Am.”
In 1989, I was careening towards senior year with no idea what would come next. Kris, herself, had changed majors from architecture to fine art to philosophy and religion. It’s no wonder a song about philosophy and religion spoke to her! Who knew she’d end up a nurse practitioner in a matter of years? Did she know what she was or what? On the other hand, I was an English major without direction. Were my parents right that it’s great to have creative hobbies, but my acumen for uncovering themes in Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass might not land me a job post-college? I choked down these worries, cut my long, curly Edie Brickell hair to my chin, and walked into the fog.
As far as 80’s videos go, this one is understated. No fog machines. No mirrors dramatically smashing. No gauzy curtains blowing through stage windows. No Russell Mulcahy symbolism that felt profound at the time only to end up cliché in retrospect. Maybe it’s because the video was an unbudgeted afterthought so they broke into an old fun house, set up bare bulb lamps, and played music surrounded by creepy mechanical dolls. Edie sways sideways, poses in an awkward air akimbo. She dusts her long wavy hair on the floor, then stares apple-cheeked into the camera. Look closely and you can almost see her wink.
My daughter heads out in a belly shirt she cut short herself, a long corduroy overshirt, and ripped jeans. She lowers the roof of her VW Bug and cranks the music. Her aquamarine hair blows back as she drives off to meet friends. She doesn’t care what you think of her, her music, her dressed down hipster look, her toadstool earrings. She’s 18. Not some sad Alice Cooper anthem. Something better: feminist, kooky, and full of eye rolls. How is she so confident? So cool and self-assured? This is what I wanted for her and yet I’m baffled by how she achieved it. She is what she is.
“What I Am” is a wink. The way that iconic guitar riff moves from a low B to high D parallels the interrogatory phrasing of Edie’s big questions: “What I am is what I am. You what you are, or what?” What am I? What are you? Go ahead, she seems to be saying, consult philosophy and religion to figure yourself out. I’ll be over here having a laugh. Online commenters at songmeaning.com dissect the lyrics like they’re highlighting the bible. They find “What I Am” dismissive, offensive, flippant. But guys, she’s not besmirching your belief system. Stop being so damn defensive! That’s not the way of Edie. She’s not aware of too many things, remember. She knows what she knows. You know what I mean?
D-do ya?
Her bags appear in the hallway in early August. We aren’t due East for a good month, but my daughter is a consummate planner, the only one in our family. She fills knock-off IKEA bags with blankets and clothes. Her best friends arrive, shut the bedroom door, listen to Phoebe Bridgers, and pack up her room. She returns the favor at each of their houses, keeping them company, taking pictures, playing music. It all led up to this moment, I think: preschool, ballet lessons, sleepovers, magnet schools, and art classes. In one of her first photos, I’m propping up one-week-old Fi in my lap. My expression reads, “I can’t handle how cute she is.” Fuzzy black hair sticks straight up, eyes wide and unfocused, she wears a onesie decorated with a paint palette. Above it reads “Future Artist.”
Senior year, three friends and I rented an apartment like grown-ups. I prepped for comprehensive exams. I dated a first-year student. I deejayed my first radio show at the campus station. Things were heady. Every moment was now, now, now. Twist the kaleidoscope one click and what seemed eternal shifted just enough for all the colored glass to fall. First, one friend moved out. Another, followed. And the two of us remaining did our best to keep moving forward, paying double the rent. The balance of my romantic relationship shifted, too. It felt light and airy at first, but soon I was grasping at my boyfriend like he was my lifeline to happiness. “You scared that poor boy to death,” my husband scolds me when I tell him these stories.
Parents do the best they know how. I’m convinced of that everytime I hear a friend explain why their kid will be attending the local or state university. If that’s what makes sense to their family, you don’t need to rationalize it to me. I’m not here to judge. Knowing the high cost of college, knowing several of her peers were taking gap years, we still insisted Fi apply to whatever schools made sense to her. I suggested she consider art schools when the big universities felt overwhelming. We toured the old brick libraries and sculpture gardens and I tried to read the expression on her face. Is this where she’ll find her people? One night last spring, my daughter asked, “Is it okay just to choose?” I had three months to find a full-time job before tuition was due.
There is much said online about Edie’s take on philosophy and religion. Her lyrics are indiscernible on first listen. In summary,
Philosophy is . . . talk on a cereal box, a walk on the slippery rocks.
Religion is . . . a smile on a dog, a light in the fog.
Some call these lyrics Zen puzzles. An October 1988 Cash Box hot take called “What I Am” one of the “catchiest, anti-philosophical, tongue-in-cheek ditties since Peggy Lee’s ‘Is That All There Is?’” Catchy? Yes, very percussive and quirky. Tongue-in-cheek? 100%! But the song’s cheekiness isn’t challenging philosophy or religion—yours, mine, or anyone else’s—because Edie isn’t searching for meaning. And she definitely doesn’t have answers. Put simply, “What I Am” is more, “Hey, let’s take it down a notch,” than “I’m speaking in riddles to ridicule you.” This is a message I celebrate. I see my daughter in this message. Cut the drama, mama. Chill out. Just be real.
Fi and her friends love BeReal, the photo-sharing app that randomly alerts you when it’s time to, well, be real. Users get a two-minute notification to take an unfiltered selfie with their camera’s front camera whether they’re ready or not while the app simultaneously uses the back camera to shoot whatever the user is looking at. Then bingo! It shares both images with your friends for their reactions. It’s less about collecting likes for perfectly curated duck lips, peace sign photos, and more, “Hey friends, look how dorky I am.” My daughter shows me her friends’ BeReals and they’re charmingly narrative: shopping for dorm rooms at Target, packing for college, eating family dinner. When she last visited I didn’t expect her to ask, “You wanna be in a BeReal with me?” but she did. I leaned in, smiling ear-to-ear, side-by-side in selfie mode. Her brother grinned on the forward end of the camera. And there we were, all of us with our messy hair—happy.
My parents gifted me my first car as a graduation present. They bought my brother Craig’s Subaru station wagon, which he drove to campus. After the ceremony and dinner out with my siblings and parents, I received one lesson on how to drive stick before they all turned around and drove home. I stayed with a friend who was house-sitting that night, packed the cargo area to the ceiling, and set my boombox in the seat beside me. The next morning, I turned the ignition and grinded the gears for a good ten minutes. A neighbor I hadn’t noticed on the porch across the street must have tired of the noise. He yelled, “Push in the clutch!” Thank you, irritated citizen! I headed towards the interstate blaring Joni Mitchell, weeping uncontrollably. “I am on a lonely road and I am traveling, traveling, traveling. Looking for something. What can it be?” I needed to figure out my shit, but at least I was in the driver’s seat, the unairconditioned driver’s seat in a car I was learning to operate as I drove it four hours home.
Edie told us right up front that she wasn’t aware of much. Maybe her humility and self-deprecating humor grew from sudden life changes. When Edie met the band, she dropped out of art school. I had wanted to study art, but my parents didn't support that choice. And music? Edie didn’t plan a rock and roll fantasy career. She wanted to sing, but put that dream aside to pursue art. Legend has it, she saw a band, stayed after the show, downed a shot of whiskey, and asked if she could sing with them while they jammed. And that’s how it began. Liquid courage and luck. It’s possible Edie and the band never thought they’d strike gold with their first single. (Spoiler alert: It was a Top 10 hit and the album went double platinum!) She was as surprised as anyone to land guest artist on Saturday Night Live. Edie wasn’t proselytizing humanism and speaking snarky about your beliefs, your personal philosophy. On the contrary, Internet, she humbly admitted she didn’t know shit. Maybe, you don’t either.
≈
A week before my daughter leaves for college she and my son greet me as I walk through the door. I’m tired. Full-time work is no joke after so many years of working part-time, raising kids. I am bone tired. “The National has a new song out and I can’t stop listening to it. Wanna hear it?” Her favorite band. Matt Berninger is basically the same age as me and my husband. This comforts me. She also loves Radiohead and The Decemberists. We did good, Pa.
Of course I want to hear the song, exhaustion be damned. I only have days remaining with my girl. She could ask me to do a back handspring and I would give it the ol’ college try. She streams Spotify from her phone to the tv, finds the lyric video, presses play. It’s a driving song. A song about “weird goodbyes.” It’s about distances and heartbreak and leaving. The emotion in Berninger and Bon Iver’s harmonies set my tired bones in motion. I’m dancing. We’re all dancing. Three bodies floating, arms waving, heads rolling, eyes closed. We dance together until the song ends, pausing long enough to say how beautiful it is. She presses play again and we slide into the bench seat beside Berninger. We glide.
≈
A friend of Edie’s recalled driving with her as a teenager in the March, 1989 issue of Spin Magazine. The friend, Amy Kuhn, painted a familiar scene. She and Edie were high school friends. They both drove VW Bugs, their first cars, and took turns driving one another. They blasted XTC, The Psychedelic Furs, and David Bowie while singing, but “every once in a while Edie would ask me, ‘Do you think I have a good voice?’”
≈
Sixteen-year-old me couldn’t wait to drive. My dad took me driving on the weekends. I still tease him about hitting the “brakes” on the passenger side while his voice inclined from a B to a D, not as a question, but an exclamation, “Brake it. Brake it hard!” On more than one occasion I would borrow Mom or Dad’s car and head to the park to get lost. I’d turn into Seneca Park, down the long parkway that lined the hilly golf course, make a left and another left to reach Cherokee Park. From there, I found as many hidden roads and backways as I could. Windows down. Stereo up. I blared Tears For Fears and Bruce Springsteen’s The River, feeling like a character in those songs: shy, lonely, trapped. Getting lost in the park gave me agency. Whether the roads dead-ended or circled in loops, I always found my way back to familiar landmarks.
≈
Despite my daughter’s superior planning skills, I’m in charge of the trip to Rhode Island. I request time off, write a note to my son’s school, remind my husband to reschedule clients, hire a pet-sitter for Charlie. I take my Subaru (a newer model, not the graduation present) to the dealership so it will be travel-ready, order a storage bag to strap to its roof. If I focus on the details—I definitely never said to myself—I won’t need to acknowledge the purpose of this trip. Hey Everybody! I Googled a cute bakery where we can eat downtown!
≈
Thinking back, I wonder if I scheduled one too many days for the college move. Each day as we walked to our car through the hotel courtyard full of smokers, I heard a voice inside me counting down the minutes, quiet-screaming, This is my daughter two days before she starts college . . . This is my daughter one day before she starts college . . . This is my daughter three hours before we leave her at college. I scheduled plenty of time to arrive, wander the campus, and explore town. I accounted for the amount of rest my husband and I would need between two days travel there and two days back. But I was also buying time. We’d have two whole days without her friends distracting her, two days before all of the chaos of first year orientation began. Two days to wander into H. P. Lovecraft-inspired bookstores. Two days to hold onto my whole family.
≈
Breezing through the ‘89 Spin Magazine, I discover Edie laying it all out for listeners, despite the pages and pages of online debate at songmeanings.com:
I’d rather die than be thrown into some heavy conversation. I don’t like heavy conversations where everybody’s so deep all the time. Spirituality, beliefs, the whole big picture—I don’t think you can make anybody see things the way you see them. It’s just so weird. That’s what “What I Am” is about.
She was 22 when she said that. In 1989, I turned 21. Like Edie, I was introverted and preferred deep thoughts as an appetizer on the conversation menu with plenty of self-deprecating humor to give the meal flavor. Sure, I had my doubts about philosophy and religion—still do, and so do my kids—but like Edie says, I know I’m not going to change anyone’s mind, so be who you are and let the rest go, man.
≈
How did I keep it together all of those months leading up to this moment? I snap a photo of my kids, arms around each other for the last time until Thanksgiving. It happened so fast. Senior photos, college essays, senior art show, a haircut and green dye, prom, first love, college acceptances and scholarships, dorm shopping, and then, the sixteen-hour drive to Rhode Island, the quick unloading at the dorms, the suffocating heat inside the colonial Baptist church where the college president gave parents instructions: enjoy the buffet on the lawn, then say goodbye to your child and hit the road.
How did I keep it together on the long drive home? Through New York, Pennsylvania, and Ohio with The National playing in my head on repeat:
It finally hits me, a mile's drive
The sky is leaking, the windshield's crying
I'm feeling sacred, my soul is stripped
Radio's painful, the words are clippedThe grief it gets me, the weird goodbyes
My car is creeping, I think it's dying
I'm pulling over until it heals
I'm on a shoulder of lemon fields
The grief it got me. A nine hundred, forty-six mile drive. My soul was stripped. Spotify’s painful. And if the windshield cried, I don’t remember. On the way up, I caught Rick shaking next to me, silently mourning when he thought no one noticed. On the way back, he was calm and I was running on fumes. Halfway home she sent a smiling selfie, seated on the bed we put together with new sheets, blankets, and pillows only hours ago. Behind her, the posters of David Bowie, Dodie, Phoebe Bridgers, and The National collaged and overlapped photos of her friends and her love. She was going to be fine. Was I?
We pull in front of our house late afternoon the next day. Charlie greets our weary faces. I let her lick me as Rick and Toby bring in the luggage. I’m not hungry, but I walk into the kitchen, and open the refrigerator. On the top shelf I spy Fi’s unfinished chocolate milkshake from last weekend, straw still sticking out from the lid. I clutch the cold container like it’s her, my girl who brilliantly bloomed into her best self. Rick finds me sobbing a minute later and curls me into his chest.
≈
After the New Bohemians’s second album, Ghost of a Dog, released, Edie stepped away from recording and touring. Her focus shifted after she married Paul Simon. She wanted to be home to raise their three kids, but she remained friends with her bandmates and they left a door open for her to return. In 2018, when Edie’s kids were grown, she recommitted to the New Bohemians. Two critically acclaimed albums later, Edie and the boys have finally built the practice studio of their dreams, a barn back home in central Texas. While this wasn’t necessarily Edie’s plan, I discovered a wistful Edie looking towards the future in a 2011 Texas Monthly interview:
I’m hoping that if I make really good records or records that I love, one day, when my kids are in college and I’m suffering desperately from empty-nest syndrome, I can slip back into a creative life and occupy my time with a healthy career. So I’m trying to figure out a way to move gracefully into the next phase of my life.
≈
I dry my eyes, wipe my nose on my t-shirt, and take my bags upstairs, passing Fi’s closed bedroom door on the way. I flop on the bed and dig through stacks of books on the floor to find a notebook. Knowing I have this essay to write, I jot down who I think I am at this moment. Adjectives anchor the noun “mother” so it doesn’t dematerialize.
What I am: mother, heartbroken, shattered, hopeful, proud, gutted, excited, nostalgic, wistful.
I put the list away and walk back to my daughter’s room. I turn the handle and enter, noticing what she left behind: books, awards, the electric guitar we bought her last year, photos above her ink-stained desk. I pull a pillow off her bed and breathe it in. The door stays open, I tell my husband.
Months later our family falls into a pattern of weekly FaceTimes. My girl is happy! She’s reading good books and essays, watching films, dancing, sewing and felting projects, laughing with names that are new to me. She also returns home several times. As I write this, I’m anticipating the pizza nights and dance parties of her upcoming visit. I’ll send a YouTube video from my phone to the tv. In it, a young woman with waist-long, wavy, brown hair leans to the side in awkward akimbo. Her glossy lips shine in the close-ups. The guitar slides from B to D in parallel to the singer’s question. My kids and I will drag my husband to the family room dance floor. Our arms will undulate in time with the quirky percussion. When the song ends, my girl will pick up her tote bag and key ring—the one with the Ruth Bader Ginsberg amigurumi—and head to her VW Bug. I’ll glimpse her blue-green hair from the living room window as she cranks up the music and speeds away.
≈
After graduation, after that grueling four-hour drive with the windows down and my boom box at top volume, after almost sliding backwards on an incline into the car behind me, I made it home. Returning home had never been my post-college plan, but I needed somewhere to sleep. And despite coming home never being my plan, and despite never having a solid plan in the first place, I lived. “What’s your five-year plan?” my brother Craig asked me soon after I got back. More like what’s my plan for later today! I did hope and dream. I did find a job and a job and a job. I did earn two master degrees along the way. I never expected my mother to die before I turned 30 or for my dad to keep on keeping on at age 93. I never planned to get married and have babies, but I’m so glad I did. And now, midway through my road trip, as my kids blossom into adults before my eyes, I’m letting myself wander again. (I’m drawing almost daily!). All those years ago when I drove through Cherokee Park trying to get lost, I always navigated my way back home. Maybe not having a plan is one way of putting it. Maybe another way is saying, let’s take it down a notch and wander for a while, gracefully—like Edie—into the next phase of our lives.
You know what I mean?
Amy M. Miller’s essays have appeared in Brevity, Salon, Hippocampus Magazine, [PANK], The Louisville Review, Under the Gum Tree, and more. She received the 2017 Harpur Palate Creative Nonfiction Prize and contributed to Air: A Radio Anthology, published by Books by Hippocampus. Formerly the Executive Director of Louisville Literary Arts, she now teaches literacy skills to children with dyslexia. Amy lives in Louisville, Kentucky with her husband and two children, their dog Charlie, and her scraped-up Subaru wagon. She still loves Edie Brickell and the New Bohemians and remembers her daughter looking happier in this photo.
IF I ONLY COULD: ALISON STINE ON “RUNNING UP THAT HILL (A DEAL WITH GOD”
I was twelve or thirteen when I auditioned for the children’s choir. The director sat my mother down in his office and said very seriously, as if he had been waiting for just this moment, just this child to walk into his mildewy, Midwestern church basement: Everything about your daughter is perfect vocally.
Except there was this one thing. I couldn’t hear.
The moment recalled an earlier time when I had been banished outside to wait as an audiologist explained patiently to my mother, She can’t hear herself. People were always telling my parents things about my body as if I wasn’t living right there in it. Her kidneys will need to be tested, as ears develop the same time as the kidneys. She may have trouble with balance. I was born with no hearing on one side, my left. Due to a congenital issue, the mechanism simply wasn’t there inside my head. At least, that was the way it was always explained. It was called a fluke. I was called abnormal.
With the limited hearing I did have, I did okay. I had to; I was instructed to pass and pretend. No one else in my family is deaf, and I met no other kids or adults like me. I had no access to sign language. I read lips, never disclosing to most people my disability, never even knowing—for a long time—words like disclosure. There was a problem, though. I loved music.
Do you want to feel how it feels?
I was two or three when my father gave my mother a player piano for her birthday. It was a big deal, a surprise. I came in the door with her, having been sent off on some pretend errand. Upon our return, there was a party, people gathered in our house around the cumbersome, glossy wooden instrument, as high-backed as a whale. My babysitter sat on the piano bench. A wicker basket held the key fronts that had fallen off. It was an old piano, bought as much for its value as a historic piece of furniture as for its musical ability. It would have a hard time staying in tune. I would learn some notes because of the dried gray glue stuck to the keys, making patterns like raised scars.
Everyone screamed in delight, my mother cried. She had always wanted to learn to play. But she didn’t, not then. Her practicing would wake my baby sibling up from naps. She couldn’t get through her lessons because I would insist on sitting on her lap and banging on the keys. At least, that was the way it was always explained. No one thought or had the money at the time to get me lessons. Not the deaf girl.
My father says he used to carry me around on his shoulders and I would make up songs about everything we passed, my treehouse which would be crushed by a tornado, the creek below the highway bridge, the dog snuffling at the tulips. We lived in remote Indiana, our white house an island in an ocean of corn fields, but I would sing in the front yard, performing for no one. Every rise of the dirt road gave me hope. Maybe someone was coming, maybe a car from the city would stop. I would sing when we went to fast food restaurants, sing as we waited in line.
My father interested me in female musicians like Laura Nyro and The Bangles. I went to sleep every night listening to my Mickey Mouse suitcase record player. Once I found Tori Amos, it was all over. I started recording the songs I wrote onto cassette tapes via a handheld player, tapes which I gave to my best friends. They traded them like cards.
In college, I sang at open mic nights, but quickly dropped my performance major, switching to English. It seemed safer, better suited to what I believed I was, what I had been told. Half in silence, I dipped my toe into a river of sound but I couldn’t swim it. I didn’t know it or understand it. You write things most music majors wouldn’t think of, my piano professor said, in the same breath childing me again for failing to count, for being so sloppy. Someone so musical should be better, he told me. I couldn’t bring myself to tell him: I heard differently. I heard less. I heard as if I was buried underground, shouting for the living to come find me.
After college, I dated a drummer who had a Fender Rhodes set up in his basement practice space. While he cooked dinner upstairs, I would perform to the darkness. In the shadows, I imagined an audience who didn’t know about my deafness, who couldn’t hear it in my voice, or who didn’t care.
The drummer said my disability interfered with my confidence, and he was right, though it wasn’t disability so much as it was ableism, how I was described by others as everything from stuck-up to flighty when I didn’t answer them. I lived in fear of my name being called. When I couldn’t follow conversations, which was often, I dropped out. You need a life not in your head was another wise thing he said. But only in my head could I hear music perfectly and be received by the world as if I belonged there.
Tell me we both matter, don’t we
Being drawn to a thing that will never love me back—it’s like a bad relationship, which Kate Bush lays open in “Running Up That Hill (A Deal with God).” It’s the bargaining stage in that song, which is a stage of grief. I will reach God, I will deal with him alone. And it’s the definition of empathy. If only you lived in my body, then you would understand. You would not treat me this way.
I moved backward through Kate Bush’s discography, discovering 1996’s The Red Shoes first, the year of its release. I went to the record store specifically to buy that album. A teen, I had read about it in a newspaper review. I have a vivid memory of plucking out the CD, can see its cover of red pointe shoes even now. It rested in the front of the new releases and I drew it from the bin like it was meant for me.
Here was a girl who had started by playing an organ she found in a barn. Here was a woman giving everything, giving her all every time, who didn’t care how she sounded—and who sometimes sounded rough, coarse, ugly. She barks in “Hounds of Love,” snarls (with sword) in “Babooshka.”
And in “Running Up That Hill,” she pleads. It’s vulnerability that comes through. It’s also loss. “If I only could” implies that you can’t. You can’t ever. You tried and didn’t work. You tried and tried and are so tired of trying. You will not make it up that hill without divine assistance—and that kind of help isn’t coming. Not anymore, not for you. You are your first and only help.
There is thunder in our hearts
You talk yourself out of things, but the world talks you out of them too. The older I got, the less it seemed feasible, this music thing, even as an amateur. I had a kid. Parents don’t go to open mic nights, sing in beer-soaked bars. Single mothers definitely don’t. I wasn’t going to waste babysitter money to embarrass myself. I lived in New York and my then-husband thought I was being too loud with my keyboard, so I stopped playing it. We lived in the same building as a professional guitarist and I would sometimes find his guitar picks in my laundry. I collected them like stones. If I could have made a path with them. If I could have picked a quieter instrument. If I only could.
Last December, I got sick. Not with COVID, with another respiratory infection, the kind I’m prone to. But this one settled itself in my ear. I felt the world switch off as the hearing I do have diminished. I lived life underwater, waiting for the steroids and antibiotics to work, and the whole time, I kept thinking, music.
The worst part about getting older is that it feels too late to switch lives. In many ways, becoming a writer was the path of least resistance. You write alone in your room. No one has to see you. No one has to hear you. Many people don’t know about my deafness unless I tell them, and sometimes even still, they don’t believe me, the curse of those whose disability is often hidden. If I only could switch places, not with someone who could hear, but with someone brave. Brave enough to go on stage, not knowing for sure if their name has been called, not able to hear any comments from the crowd, any feedback. Swimming without being able to sense the depth of the water, feeling only its darkness and its pull.
I think of Kate Bush as the bravest artist I know. Going for it with the costumes, the dancing (the miming!) and the openness. To be so raw. To give so much—and then to go away. Fans of her know what it’s like to love someone you probably won’t experience in performance. In a way, that makes the music even more precious. It exists in this form in your hand alone. To sing like a secret. To have the courage to go for it, then to go away back into yourself and the private mystery of your song. I understand it. I do.
I have never heard and likely never will hear “Running Up That Hill (A Deal with God)” in stereo. But still in mono, it shines. It gives me a bright flare of hope every time: maybe I can change. Maybe there is still time. Maybe I can run up that hill, over that building, get on that stage, and sing with no problems.
Alison Stine’s most recent novel Trashlands was longlisted for the Mark Twain American Voice in Literature Award. Her first novel Road Out of Winter won the Philip K Dick Award. Also the author of three books of poetry, her next novel Dust, about a partially deaf girl who must convince her remote community a second Dust Bowl is coming, will be published by Wednesday Books/Macmillan in 2024. You can find her on Instagram or playing the keyboard and singing as long as no one is home.