Was she really lonely or just singing a song?

I spent a lot of time sitting in my grandparents’ basement when I was a kid—me, drinking a can of grape soda, my grandfather working on some project at his work bench. Sometimes we’d talk; sometimes we’d just listen to records. The artist I remember listening to most often in my grandparents’ house back then is Patsy Cline. My musical taste, at that time, was entirely influenced by my aunt’s and uncle’s taste, which, in the 1970s, skewed to classic rock. (I guess it was just rock back then?) When I started skateboarding, a little while later, I discovered punk rock—which felt very removed from both classic rock and Patsy Cline. And so, for a while there, I forgot all about Patsy Cline.

But then something happened. I heard Change of Heart’s song “Pat’s Decline”, which asks the question: Was she really lonely or just singing a song? The song reads as a tribute to Patsy Cline, and to her music. And that surprised me a little when I first heard it. Here was a song that bridged the gap between the music I listened to with my grandfather as a child and the music I listened to later as a skater-kid interested only in punk rock. The song made me nostalgic for those afternoons and evenings in my grandparents’ basement, so I went back and listened to a Patsy Cline record. And I fell in love. I remember telling my grandparents that I had finally come around to Patsy Cline. They hadn’t realized that I wasn’t already on board all those years earlier.

I had started writing stories and poems around this time, and I was thinking a lot about the separation of a writer’s biography from their written work, especially in poetry where we often assume the poem is somehow autobiographical. In most of the poems in my book Red Bird, I was trying to blur the lines between the autobiographical and the fictional in poetry: very few of those poems are autobiographically true; most could be more accurately described as little fictions. There are emotional truths throughout the book, as well as some other truths, I suppose, but the gist of it is fictional. My interest in trying to do that stemmed in part, I think, from wondering about Patsy Cline and whether or not she was really lonely or just singing a song.

The name Patsy Cline appears almost twenty times in my book of stories, Astrid, Aghast. One story is actually called “Patsy Cline”. Another is named after one of her songs.

In “Have You Ever Been Lonely? (Have You Ever Been Blue?)”, an old man finds a young boy lying in the middle of the road. The boy went out there to escape the chaos of his family life. They chat out there on the road for a little while, and eventually the old man talks the boy onto the sidewalk and then safely back home. The story begins and ends with the old man listening to a Patsy Cline CD in his kitchen. (That story was originally published in The Quarantine Review. You can listen to it below.)

The other story, “Patsy Cline”, is about a young woman, her elderly neighbour, and the neighbour’s pet rabbit, Patsy Cline.

I once found a rabbit in my yard. I thought it had been abandoned, so I brought it into my house. I even bought it a cage and the biggest bag of hay you’ve ever seen. When I announced to my wife and sons “we’re a rabbit family now”, they were unfazed. While it was the first time I’d brought a rabbit into the house, this kind of thing was not out of character for me. We called the rabbit Buddy—which, coincidentally, turned out to be his actual government name. Within a few days of finding the rabbit, I discovered that he belonged to my neighbour and that she’d been looking for him for almost a week. It was nice while it lasted.

I’ve always loved what Tennessee Williams said when asked about the biographical elements found within his work: My work is emotionally autobiographical, he said. It has no relationship to the actual events of my life, but it reflects the emotional currents of my life. Both “Have You Ever Been Lonely? (Have You Ever Been Blue?)” and “Patsy Cline” are a nod to my grandparents, and to growing up in their house; both are about a young person affected by their relationship to a much older person in their life. And while the details of the stories are not biographical (save for the part about the rabbit showing up in my yard), the emotional currents of the stories are true—or as true as can be in a work of fiction.

Astrid, Aghast comes out on March 7 with Gaspereau Press.