My book Arrangements in Blue grew out of – in part – my intimate relationship with the music of Joni Mitchell and more specifically her album Blue. I’d known her music had shaped me, influencing how I thought about love and life, nudging friendships to grow, tastes to develop. But it wasn’t until I began to write an (albeit a one-sided) collaboration with Joni’s art that the depth of her impact was revealed to me. Joni shaped me, and then her album Blue then gave me a shape to explore the parts of my life that pained me most. I’m not sure I would have found the courage to were it not for her.

But there are other artists, musicians, writers who have formed who I am – who I feel I am in conversation with. The writer and critic Hilton Als talks about how the essay is ‘not about the empirical “I” but about the collective—all the voices that made your “I.”’ As a writer of memoir and personal narrative, I am always speaking for myself, always reflecting on my lived experience, but the ‘I’ in my writing has been made from everything and everyone I’ve known, railed against and/or loved. The collective inflects what I know as ‘my’ voice, and this shows up in the cadence of my writing, my point of view and what I pay attention to.

‘There is no sound in vacuum’

In an essay for The Paris Review, Lauren Elkin wrote about the influence of Annie Ernaux’s writing on her work, noting  ‘there is no sound in a vacuum. Influence can be a question not of imitating someone else’s voice, but of hearing the right pitch.’ I love this idea of hearing ‘the right pitch’, which I understand as the way our affinity with a particular piece of art, or artist, feels personal, as though we can hear at a special frequency that deepens our engagement with it. Elkin goes on to write that ‘If I read something by Virginia Woolf, it can centre my work, make it more unified, poised, and fill it with colour…something by Annie Dillard, and it touches the earth and knows the names of weather patterns.’

The writers that Elkin loves gave her a lens through which she is able to look at her own writing, consider the way those writers have contoured it. I used Joni Mitchell’s Blue lens to look at the role romantic love played in my life, but in a parallel world I might have written about how encountering the TV show Twins Peaks when I was a teenager gave me the atmospheric conditions to consider traumatic events in my life, or how the poet Chelsey Minnis made me feel like I could claim the word ‘poet’ for myself.