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I started writing the stories in my new collection Shine of the Ever over a decade ago. I was a student at Reed College, it was 2004, and I was falling in love with Portland for the very first time. Over the next 15 years, the Portland I knew changed dramatically. I wasn’t a newcomer to Oregon. It was the place I’d come every summer since I was born, the place my father’s family had called home since they came out in a covered wagon in 1842. As Portland transformed, so did I. The landscape in my fiction shifted, filling with programmers, microbreweries, and fanciful food. The people I knew grew up; most of them didn’t stay...

Tiny but Mighty is all about saving the lives of the most vulnerable felines, orphaned kittens. This book is so much more than just a collection of fun rescue stories or a peek into my feline-filled world — it’s really an invitation to join me in saving little lives, and to recognize that each of us can make a big difference for animals in our own way! This playlist contains songs that remind me of the heart of animal rescue: the desire to protect the innocent, the hardship of living with a compassionate heart, and the fight to make the world a safer place...

"The Wild One" by Suzi Quatro
This is the song I would say describes how I really feel inside and who I want to be. If I could have written any song in the whole wide world, this would be the one. That riff and the way she is just not having it, the way she is announcing she is the hottest thing ever, well, I am a believer, and I am sick of feeling bad.

"Any Party" by Feist
I only recently got into Feist, really around the same time I got into liking LA, and this record is very much like that city. The love is so vulnerable and touching and unlike anything I put out. I would not have, previously, ever, in a million years, left any party for any guy...

I do not write to music. I find music to be terribly distracting… I’ll end up singing at the top of my lungs or dancing; so I came up with this playlist after the fact. I think I took this task a little too seriously; but it was definitely worth it! I have a My Sister, the Serial Killer playlist/soundtrack on my phone now and I hope you enjoy these songs as much as I do!

"One Kain" by Simi
Let’s start with a local song. This song is about a woman whose feelings towards her friend are becoming romantic. I think it is a nice backdrop to the chapter titled "Scrubs."

"I Wanna Dance With Somebody" by Whitney Houston
In the chapter titled "Dancing," Ayoola is rocking to this song...

I started work on this book of essays right after Trump was elected, so the theme of the book quickly went from “What’s wrong with our culture?” to the much more desperate “How did we land here?” and “How do we navigate this poisonous world?” The music I listened to while writing was often angry and sad, but it also tended to hint at some way to survive in a world gone mad.

"Should Have Known Better" by Sufjan Stevens
I could listen to the outro of this song on an endless loop. The melancholy of the first half of the song segues into a fragile acceptance: Nothing can be changed, so focus on the present moment...

We Sold Our Souls is my heavy metal horror novel, and while I’m not a natural metal head, I learned to love metal while writing it. This is probably the darkest book I’ve written, and it was a huge stretch that took me down a rabbit hole and out the other side. This is a list of the key songs that took me down, and lifted me up, while writing it, and I hope it does the same thing for you.

“Iron Man” by Black Sabbath
Everything starts with Sabbath, the original riffs heard round the world, played by a bunch of lunkheads from Birmingham who by all rights shouldn’t have gone anywhere except to their next shifts at the factory. In We Sold Our Souls, “Iron Man” is the first metal song Kris Pulaski, my main character, teaches herself on the guitar, and it’s probably being woodshedded by kids around the world right this minute, all of them bent over their guitars, fingering out the chords, picking their ways towards freedom, trying to be heard...

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I’m always looking for music I can work to during long days in the studio, music that won’t break my focus, won’t pull me this way and that, won’t grab me by the shirtfront and tell me what to think or feel. This quest has, during work hours, landed me squarely in the camp of the Minimalists, but I am also not immune to having my emotions ripped up by selected works of another nature altogether. Here, I’ve mixed them together. As for explanations, I'm no good at rendering accounts of why I love something or someone, so I won't even try. Suffice it to say, if a composer appears on this list, chances are I own everything recorded by that person that I can find...

The governing principle of my list is expertise. All of these artists have worked long and hard to produce their music at the highest level of accomplishment. They have all studied both academically and in the real world. No one starts out this good. Their knowledge had to be won through sustained effort. 

Some faced and overcame terrible disadvantages and persevered in a world that asked them, Just who do you think you are? Each of these artists has found an original voice. They all tell their stories in unique and unpredictable ways with humor and compassion for the human condition; these are skills perfected over a lifetime. It’s a fitting metaphor for anything of value we may acquire in our lives...

Many of these voices and strange sounds guided me through writing the Vorrh trilogy and gave me the energy to get to The Cloven, its final part. 

I can’t listen to the words while writing, but they work through the filter of my paintings, and whisper into the forest for me to hear.

“Missa Luba” by Les Troubadours du Roi Baudouin
A sublime fervor of the joy in faith. A magnificent clash of cultures that weds grace to power in a celebratory mass of voice and drum. I have this with me all the time. I use it to wake myself up and power up any slumps of doubt. There is possession and piety here, a very rare combination; it also runs an artery directly into The Vorrh...

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Road trips and good tunes go together like rubber and asphalt. Great music not only helps the miles breeze by a little faster, it provides a soundtrack to the adventure. It anchors the experience in our memories, taking us back to a very specific and vivid place and time. 

For every road trip I've taken (and I've taken many over the years), I'll bet I can name at least one song that somehow figured into the journey, and I can see, in my mind's eye, everything around me in that moment: who was with me, where they were sitting, the color and feel of the car's upholstery. I can probably even smell someone's stinky feet. But that's mostly because on every road trip I've ever been on...