Paul Lisicky on Joni Mitchell, Anti-Memoirs, and How Songwriting Influences His Nonfiction

What a life-giving joy is a new book from Paul Lisicky! People say that flippantly all the time but in this case it’s really true: life-giving because Lisicky’s work is an aliveness factory, pumping out waves of awakeness and hereness that trace becoming—becoming ourselves, becoming human, becoming in tune with text in ways we had forgotten were possible. Joy because his writing is always composed of bright feeling, precise agony, sex, food, melody, and movement.

Song So Wild and Blue is Lisicky’s anti-biography biography of Joni Mitchell and his anti-memoir memoir of being a person obsessed with the logic of song. I’ve had the great good fortune of getting to hang around in some of the same rooms as Lisicky over the years, and this book is the dazzling culmination of the way he sees, writes, teaches, and lives now.

In the conversation that follows we talked about everything from admiring other artists to MFA program blues to his love story with his current partner and how his years as a songwriter don’t just inform his nonfiction but are its foundation.

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Emma Copley Eisenberg: In your author’s note you say that you didn’t want this book to be “that kind of the book,” (about Joni), rather a book centered on the songs and what they mean to you. Yet flip a few pages and we are inside Joni’s “POV” if you will. Talk to me a bit more about that tension, the tension of wanting to understand the person who made the songs you love without this being a biography.

Paul Lisicky: When I first fell for Joni’s music, I was struck by its intimacy. I don’t so much mean the obvious: the purity, the emotional landscape. I’m talking about the sonic thumbprint of it all. It didn’t sound like anyone else. I was in high school then, in need of mentors, and feeling out of sorts with the social world—I did not know how to do high school.

But here was someone who had the courage to make a signature in sound. I had a sense that she was someone who had been through pain and was surviving. I felt embodied when I listened to her at a time when I thought I was a ghost, too shy to make an impression. I turned my light down so low.

Somewhere Joni has said that she wanted to be known through her songs—as her songs. She had a tortured relationship with the press. She rarely gave interviews. Maybe there was one very slim, dashed-together book about her. A compilation of quotes.

This intensified her mystique. I wanted more—maybe I was less interested in the biographical facts than I was in the sensibility. I wanted more of the sensibility. How could I learn some of that psychic strength—the strength that allows for vulnerability?

I was writing and performing my own songs back then and I had so much wanting. I wanted to be a person. That probably sounds silly now, but I wanted to be alive. Joni was alive.

So the book’s opening sections chart that occasional impulse to get behind the curtain. I attempt to enter her thoughts. Her mother’s, too. The young me studies her album covers—what is she thinking as she stands on a rock, looking out at the ocean?

At a certain point I quietly let all that go. Maybe I realized the songs themselves were enough. And maybe I’d taken something deep from them into my circuitry. They’d taught me how to be an adult.

ECE: You write that “you’d come to see my paragraphs as the sweet ghosts of my songs.” Barry Hannah once wrote of writing short stories, “Mr. Brain, he want a song.” How is writing songs like writing literary prose and not like it at all?

PL: I probably still think like a songwriter, and with each book, I feel myself getting closer to my old life in music. I’m conscious of sound, phrasing, the rise and fall of a sentence, a paragraph, a chapter. I read everything aloud again and again, sometimes as I’m writing the first draft. I want a page to make a shape in the air as well as on the page.

I’ve been aware of an impulse toward aphorism in the last two books. I’ve probably metabolized that from my friend Elizabeth McCracken as well as Sarah Manguso—I teach their work a lot. But aphorism is most at home in song. I mean, I could drink a case of you. Right? It has a life within the song, but also a life apart, on its own.

The difference of course is that a song is short, concentrated. It has borders. More often than not it makes use of repetition. It’s not seventy-thousand or more words. A song is meant to be listened to again and again, over time. It reverberates in the listener’s imagination—it’s welded to an occasion, a place, a person. It gets into one’s neural paths, and sometimes it drives us crazy and we want to mow down its weeds.

And yet I would like to write the kind of prose that would be read over and over, even a paragraph out of context. I want the work to linger and prod.

ECE: How did you think about the act of “imagination” in this book? Is the Joni you conjure in this book the “real” Joni? Who cares?

PL: Here’s a fun assignment. Listen to Ladies of the Canyon followed by The Hissing of the Summer Lawns. 1970 to 1975, five years apart. It’s a cliche at this point to say that some artists reinvent themselves over time, but in Joni’s case it isn’t simply that her voice deepens, or that styles change, or that she’s working with jazz players now. It’s that she’s a totally different person. In my mind there are twenty Jonis. At least.

I hope I’ve written a book that leaves room for the reader’s Joni(s). If that sounds like Joni as queer theory, then so be it. I think a few of the Joni(s) of the book have already morphed in my imagination.

Just the other night I happened to be listening to Chalk Mark in a Rainstorm, an album I’d sort of dismissed as Grammy bait or a bid for the charts after years of diminishing visibility. I’d never listened to it through headphones, and after decades, the whole project jelled.

Once I deemphasized the lead vocals and concentrated on the instrumental tracks, I could hear the layering. Layering seemed central to its meaning, and I was so excited I had to share this news with Jude. I was talking about the twenty-five simultaneous guitar tracks on “My Secret Place.” Babe, are you high? he said.

I don’t know if I’ve answered the imagination part of your question. Imagination to me is fluid, ever revising, clarifying, reaching, getting closer to the truth but never fully there. It isn’t meant to be a book of fixed points, but I want it to be your map.

ECE: There’s a crushing paragraph in this book about your experience at the Iowa Writers workshop and also parsing more broadly of how Joni inflected the years you were becoming a writer. Are Joni Mitchell and the IWW opposites? Foils? Related?

PL: Joni is an autodidact. Self-educated. Never a committed student, she dropped out of art school. But she grew up in a household in which education was valued. Her mother, a former teacher, read Shakespeare’s sonnets to her. (Thus, the Shakespeare references in “A Case of You,” “Talk to Me,” and “Jericho.”)

As a musician she made up her own rules, came up with a system of open guitar tunings that best suited a left hand weakened by post-polio syndrome. Everything about her music is informed by visual art. It’s like she’s transforming one art form into another, through phrasing, lyric—at every moment.

That’s part of the thrill of listening to it. Its ongoing work of transmutation, discovery.

I valued my time at Iowa. Up until then, I’d never felt so much a part of a community, especially one comprised of other creative people. But I think there can be too much community for an artist. It was an experience of intense socialization, not just on the level of the work, but in terms of how one carries oneself as an artist. Socialization was the point, which is different from locating oneself as part of an artistic tradition.

I was writing fairly idiosyncratic stories in my first semester, but I was clueless about all matters technical. By the time of my fourth semester, I was fairly canny, but my work became much more regularized—more coherent, consistent, connected. No juxtapositions, no leaps of tone or shifts in tempo. I’d internalized a system of values on multiple levels.

Maybe someone like me, more Springer Spaniel than human on the social level, needed to first assimilate customs that prized clarity and readerly expectations before he could say “enough.” But that reevaluation took a year—years. I wrote my first novel knowing that it would have bewildered my former classmates—people whom I respected—at every turn. There was something joyously transgressive about that.

ECE: People often talk about braided nonfiction narratives and the mixing of modes—memoiristic, biographical, sociological—has become ever more common. How did you think about assembling this book? Is it braided? Stacked? Listed like an album? Something else?

PL: As I’m writing, I never think “this will be classified as a braided narrative.”—Oh wait, that’s not true. My book The Narrow Door is as much about the braiding than a record of grief; it’s trying to see what discovery can be cultivated through patterns, deliberate repetition.

I wanted the form of Song So Wild and Blue to be straightforward—past tense, relatively linear, but since my origins are in music and poetry, I think in terms of blocks. A block evokes an image. The image makes room for description, the possibility of inquiry.

I knew, for instance, that the opening sections of the book needed to conjure my childhood isolation alongside Joni’s. My early illnesses alongside hers. Our two mothers, how they responded to and interacted with our creativity. That felt foundational to the material, and if I could have written it without braiding I would have, but it was the most satisfactory solution that came to mind.

I don’t think all the chapters do that equally, but what do I know? I feel like I’m just learning the book as I’m tasked to talk about it.

It’s funny, I just finished a short piece that’s relatively straightforward structurally until it ends in collage. The form needed to shake off its wings or else it was just going to—say something I already knew. As the piece found its final structure, I thought, this moves like a Laura Nyro song.

ECE: You write that Joni wrote from the “jet fuel of romantic hurt.” This book is also a love story of you and your partner Jude. Talk to me about Joni and that love story.

PL: Jude came into my life just as the book was taking shape. We met through Instagram as fans of Joni’s work, and within days we were FaceTiming until we’d fully drained the batteries on our phones. We’d been single for years and hadn’t really been looking for anyone.

It felt inevitable early on that our relationship would find a place in the book, but I’d imagined it as a five-page outro. He’d sent me a video in which he was singing and playing “Blue,” and my first reaction was tears—it stunned me, his performance was both so meticulous and full of heart. And my section reaction was, this goes in the book! Then that story became a prelude, and then the prelude became the opening, fully metabolized into the book.

Should I say I found it daunting to write about a relationship so early in its life? I didn’t want to write some candy corn version of romance, but more than that, I didn’t want to concretize an intense, life-changing experience that was in flux. The writing had to be exact—I wanted it to touch his nerves as much as I wanted it to touch the reader’s. Even though he only appears in the first and last sections, the book is as much a love letter to Jude as it is to Joni’s songs.

Here’s something else: I think when you fall in love, you come into a cellular awareness of your romantic hurt, its history. You think all of that stuff is in the past and then it all fountains up at unexpected moments. I wrote a book in which all the doors and windows were open. I was porous in a way I hadn’t been porous in a long time.

There is a lot of light in the book. But that light is nearly always stirred in with heartbreak. Heartbreak is just an aspect of the life force. I think Joni knew that all along.

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Song So Wild and Blue by Paul Lisicky is available via HarperOne.