{"id":4009,"date":"2025-03-19T21:18:09","date_gmt":"2025-03-19T21:18:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/as.vanderbilt.edu\/robert-penn-warren-center\/?p=4009"},"modified":"2025-03-20T16:24:30","modified_gmt":"2025-03-20T16:24:30","slug":"a-novel-about-storytelling-and-technology","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/as.vanderbilt.edu\/robert-penn-warren-center\/2025\/03\/19\/a-novel-about-storytelling-and-technology\/","title":{"rendered":"A Novel About Storytelling and Technology"},"content":{"rendered":"

Lydi Conklin,<\/b> 2024-25 RPW Center Faculty Fellow. This year\u2019s group is exploring the theme of Emerging Technologies in Human Context: Past, Present, and Future<\/em><\/p>\n

\"AOLThe novel I\u2019ll be working on at the Robert Penn Warren Center this year is called \u201cCast of Cowards.\u201d The book follows a group of teenagers attempting to write a devised theater piece based on a hate crime that happened at their high school. The book takes place in the year 2000 and investigates the dawn of two cultural phenomena that now touch practically every aspect of society: the internet and gun violence. The book centers around a shooting that took place at their school the previous October and involved two students, and it details the emotional impact the event had on students, administrators, and the community, long before such an occurrence was commonplace. The book also explores the early days of the internet, especially the communication tool of AIM, and looks into how this early internet app shaped the lives of previously isolated queer people, especially teenagers outside of major metropolitan areas. The book dives into the historic beginnings of the digital realms in which queer people so often operate to this day.<\/p>\n

\u201cCast of Cowards\u201d explores themes of appropriation and responsibility around storytelling that I began to investigate in my first novel, \u201cSongs of No Provenance,\u201d which comes out in June 2025 and deals with issues of queer-baiting and responsible authorship, following a troubled folksinger wrestling with her toxic past. Throughout the course of \u201cCast of Cowards,\u201d the characters struggle with how much raw and real-life material to use in the writing of their communal play. Characters warp and elevate the true experiences of their peers to fit them into narratives, rumors are entered into the play as narrative truths, and people are harmed by the ways their truths have been used in narratives. In one case, a character physically harms another character in the pursuit of truth onstage. The novel also explores who controls what narrative by using a rare point of view: the first-person plural perspective. This point of view is structurally useful because it emphasizes the ensemble nature of the creation of the play. The technique draws on legacies set down by esteemed literary novels such as \u201cThe Virgin Suicides\u201d by Jeffrey Eugenides, \u201cWe the Animals\u201d by Justin Torres, and \u201cThen We Came to the End\u201d by Joshua Ferris.<\/p>\n

\"off-whiteThe way the early technology of the internet shaped and defined communication is crucial to \u201cCast of Cowards,\u201d just the way a potentially viral YouTube clip is vital to \u201cSongs of No Provenance,\u201d which takes place closer to the present day. The evolution of technology and how queerness has evolved alongside it has always been a fascination of mine, and I am thrilled to deepen my exploration at the RPW Center this year.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"Lydi Conklin<\/strong><\/a>\u00a0has received a Stegner Fellowship, four Pushcart Prizes, a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer\u2019s Award, a Creative Writing Fulbright in Poland, a grant from the Elizabeth George Foundation, work-study and tuition scholarships from Bread Loaf, and fellowships from MacDowell, Yaddo, Emory University, Hedgebrook, Djerassi, and elsewhere. Their fiction has appeared in\u00a0The Paris Review<\/em>,\u00a0One Story<\/em>, and\u00a0American Short Fiction<\/em>. They have drawn cartoons for\u00a0The New Yorker<\/em>\u00a0and\u00a0Narrative Magazine<\/em>, and graphic fiction for\u00a0The Believer<\/em>\u00a0and the Steppenwolf Theater in Chicago. Their story collection,\u00a0Rainbow Rainbow<\/em>,<\/a> was longlisted for the PEN\/Robert W. Bingham Award and The Story Prize. Their novel,\u00a0Songs of No Provenance<\/em>, is forthcoming in 2025 from Catapult in the US and Chatto in the UK.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Lydi Conklin, 2024-25 RPW Center Faculty Fellow. This year\u2019s group is exploring the theme of Emerging Technologies in Human Context: Past, Present, and Future The novel I\u2019ll be working on at the Robert Penn Warren Center this year is called \u201cCast of Cowards.\u201d The book follows a group of teenagers attempting to write a devised…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":60,"featured_media":4011,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[16,18],"tags":[12],"acf":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/cdn.vanderbilt.edu\/vu-cas\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/25\/2025\/03\/19211622\/download-1.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/as.vanderbilt.edu\/robert-penn-warren-center\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4009"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/as.vanderbilt.edu\/robert-penn-warren-center\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/as.vanderbilt.edu\/robert-penn-warren-center\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/as.vanderbilt.edu\/robert-penn-warren-center\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/60"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/as.vanderbilt.edu\/robert-penn-warren-center\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4009"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/as.vanderbilt.edu\/robert-penn-warren-center\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4009\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4012,"href":"https:\/\/as.vanderbilt.edu\/robert-penn-warren-center\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4009\/revisions\/4012"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/as.vanderbilt.edu\/robert-penn-warren-center\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4011"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/as.vanderbilt.edu\/robert-penn-warren-center\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4009"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/as.vanderbilt.edu\/robert-penn-warren-center\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4009"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/as.vanderbilt.edu\/robert-penn-warren-center\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4009"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}