On Astronauts and Music: An Interview with Rebecca Orchard by Tina Zhu

This month’s Split Lip FAM interview is with contributor Rebecca Orchard. Rebecca has many creative talents! She studied classical music at the Peabody Conservatory and also baked professionally for seven years. She has an MFA in Fiction from Bowling Green State University and a PhD in Creative Writing from Florida State University. Her fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Story, Passages North, The South Carolina Review, and elsewhere. Her work on the Voyager Golden Record has been profiled in The Guardian, BBC World Service NewsHour, and Atlas Obscura. Find her writing at rebeccaorchardfiction.com.

Rebecca’s story, “The Astronaut Is Rescued after Three Days Floating Alone in Space,” was published in 2021 in Split Lip. I fell in love with this story and its subdued grief, and I had to talk to Rebecca about this piece and her writing. We chatted over Zoom, and the interview was edited for clarity and length.

Tina Zhu: I loved “The Astronaut Is Rescued after Three Days Floating Alone in Space.” There’s such a sense of melancholy even after the astronaut is safe and sound in Houston. What was your inspiration for this story?

Rebecca Orchard: A lot of different things. This is slightly embarrassing, but you know the film The Martian? Matt Damon is alone on Mars, and there’s this scene where, after they figure everything out and they have this rescue plan, we jump ahead like a year. This man’s been alone for years. Then there’s a moment where they rescue him, and it’s very clear, like they’re reacting to how he smells bad. He said, “Yeah, I’m sorry, I haven’t showered in ages.” The setting is science fiction, right? It’s so futuristic. It’s so technology-heavy, but there still are the realities of the human body. And so just thinking about that contrast between the wonders of space and space exploration and the reality of how, even in this miraculous future, we will be inside these human bodies that have needs and that will never escape that biological reality. I think that’s where it started, for sure.

TZ: Is sci-fi a big inspiration for you and your writing, or was this just a one-time thing?

RO: Not necessarily sci-fi as a genre, but I think that some sort of cosmological wonder has certainly become a part of things that I end up either writing about or is a touchstone. There are definitely characters who might feel an intense alienation or loneliness in their reality or their day-to-day life. But then there are these moments of transcendence where you do feel connected to a cosmic whole. Yes, I did grow up reading a lot of and watching a lot of sci-fi and stuff like that. So there are definitely elements of that. Even if it’s just a detail of a book of characters reading or something, they do tend to show up for sure. My novel has a character who can’t stop watching major blockbusters. And they’re always films with aliens. They’re great. I love them, so I can’t not put them in stuff.

TZ: You mentioned a novel. Would you mind sharing more with us?

RO: Absolutely. I’m still revising and sending it out to agents, but it’s called The Alma Problem, and it is about a contemporary classical composer who stumbled upon a previously unpublished manuscript written by an Austrian woman in the 1840s. This composer’s going through it, like she’s really having a tough time. She’s really inspired by this music, and she decides to write it into a piece of her own. She didn’t tell anybody, which is the big problem. This piece starts gaining traction, and she gives an interview to a pretty well-known podcast. People start paying attention to the fact that she has essentially plagiarized this music but kind of hasn’t. It boils down to like, she hasn’t done anything legally wrong, but she’s certainly done something ethically wrong.

She tries to justify her actions, and it causes a big storm on social media and eventually costs her career. She has to go on this journey of redemption.

TZ: Speaking of music, I noticed in your bio that you were a musician for a long time before pursuing writing. Why did you pick up writing?

RO: I always was a writer. I wrote a lot when I was young. In middle school and high school, I got distracted by music almost—I always kind of assumed I would do something related to writing. I’ve always been an obsessive reader, almost to a fault. I was a writer, and I was pretty good at music. I played the French horn. I went to music school for my first degree. You can be pretty good at something but not to the level where you want to lock yourself in a room and practice constantly until you get a job. I reached this point where my ability was there, but my discipline was not. At the time, you know, I was twenty-one or twenty-two, and I was realizing that I couldn’t cut it in this thing that I thought I was going to devote my life to.

I was very upset and lonely and depressed for a long time. But I was still writing, and I was always reading. I thought I would maybe write essays, like maybe I would write about music. As time went by, I just couldn’t stop writing fiction. I would make plans to write essays, but when I sat down, the only thing I would work on was fiction. So I made the move to New York, to be a writer in New York. That did not work out, but I did write, you know, the first draft of a very bad novel that will never see the light of day and lives in a drawer. I got published a little, and I looked around and saw I kept writing the same eight-page character study story. I could not get a character to leave a room or get a character to have a conversation with a character. I liked to make them sit in a room and think, and I was like, I think I need a teacher.

I didn’t think I could go to graduate school. I decided to do a Do It Yourself MFA. I bought every craft book I could find and started reading everything I could. I started going to writers’ groups, and then I ended up meeting up with a friend of mine who did have her MFA. She took me out to dinner, and she told me about her experience and what it was like to have a mentor and to have a community. I was like, alright, it’s time. It was a lot of work. I still cannot believe I got in anywhere, looking back. I had no one to write my letters of recommendations. My first English or writing class was in graduate school.

TZ: Do you think that your experiences in the music world have informed your fiction?

RO: For sure. It comes in a couple of different ways. I do write about music and professional artists and musicians. Not exclusively, but they definitely show up a lot. And I do understand that world in a way that I like to think is interesting and that I don’t necessarily always see represented in fiction in a way that I find to be particularly true in my experience and the experiences of my friends.

I definitely think music affects my ear. There’s something about how prose sounds that is very important to me. And even if it’s not the most lyrical thing I’ve ever written, the rhythm matters. But also, there is a sense of having trained as a musician, there is a willingness to apprentice yourself to the building blocks or the past in a way that I think is really useful. Like, I need to learn how to play my scales before I can do this, or I need to understand music history in order to understand how to interpret a piece. That sort of training has served me very well as I have gotten better at writing. I think the willingness to apprentice yourself to a craft has definitely helped me.

TZ: I also went down the music route. I play piano, and I hit a point in my early teens where I had to decide whether I wanted to go for it seriously or go down a more conventional route. I was in the same boat—I liked it, but I couldn’t see myself practicing for hours on end. I definitely agree a music background gives you an ear for prose, though.

RO: Yeah. There are a lot of reasons why I never had any attention to detail as a performer. I wanted to get good enough to be fine. That’s not how I feel about writing. There is an extra level of like, this is the thing that I nerd out about and get obsessed with.

TZ: Who are your favorite musicians?

RO: Oh my gosh, musicians and writers. I actually spoke about this in an interview when my story was originally published in Split Lip. I was asked, “What are you listening to?” It was the new album by Will Oldham and Matt Sweeney. Will Oldham plays music under the name Bonnie Prince Billy, and I have been a massive, massive Bonnie Prince Billy fan since about 2008. I love everything he does. There is a marriage of beautiful writing with such an expressive voice that is so powerful to me. It’s not always a powerful voice, he lets it break sometimes. When Split Lip interviewed me last time, Superwolves had just come out, and that was a really great album that I enjoyed.

I also grew up listening to Joni Mitchell, and I think she is one of the first writers I ever loved. My dad is also a musician who writes songs, and he would point out to me these beautiful moments in her songwriting when I was really young. She was waiting for a streetlight to turn green, and in her song, she called it “waiting for the walking green.” No one knows what that means, and yet it has such life to it. I love the way she can turn a phrase, so I love her today, tomorrow, and forever. Her album Blue just had a 50th anniversary and they published a piece about it in Rolling Stones where they had people talk about every song on the album. I was so surprised because they talked to musicians and music journalists, but they didn’t interview a single writer. Man, you missed an opportunity—I know so many writers who just love her and her writing. It’s gorgeous. So those are the two musicians that I will always love.

TZ: My final question for you is what are you currently reading?

RO: I have a list of every book I’ve read since 2015, because otherwise I wouldn’t be able to keep track of them. Right now, I’m actually reading my friend Erin Slaughter’s new collection of short stories, A Manual for How to Love Us. It just came out last Tuesday, and it’s amazing. She has two books of poetry out. This is her first book of fiction. [Fun Fact: Erin Slaughter is also a Split Lip contributor!]

I just finished Checkout 19, Claire-Louise Bennett’s new novel. She released a book called Pond six or seven years ago, and it’s basically just a woman in an old house in England. I could be mistaken, but I don't think it was even marketed as a novel. But it was phenomenal. So when Checkout 19 came out, I got it. It is just the coolest. The whole novel is this woman’s development as a reader and, by extension, as a writer. Each section is kind of tackled stylistically differently. The first chapter is in first person plural, and it has this repetitive, incantatory sort of reading, like, Yes, yes, we did. Yes, we are. Yes, we did. It’s like very cool. Then we move forward in time. A huge chunk is just her telling about a short story she used to write when she was young. It’s kind of a love letter to reading or a love letter to books and writing, which makes it sound super corny. And it’s not. It’s very intense, and it’s a cool reading experience. So those are two things that have been really getting me lately.

Tina Zhu (@tinaszhu) writes from her dining table in NYC and is a Fiction Reader for Split Lip. Her work has appeared in Tor.com, Pidgeonholes, X-R-A-Y, and elsewhere. Find her on at tinaszhu.com.

SLMMay 2, 2023blog, fam interview