The ribbon inside a cassette, red dust on a Little League field, a girl who never came home—Matthew Fiander’s debut novel, Ringing in Your Ears (Main Street Rag, 2023), situates an urgent mystery against the nostalgic backdrop of a 90s town. The novel follows sixteen-year-old Blue as she searches for answers in the aftermath of her sister’s disappearance. Her memories come into sharp focus, grief connecting the past to the present. While the story centers a criminal investigation, it examines the complex realities and relationships of adolescence through music, memory, and loss.
Fiander is an alumnus of the UNC Greensboro MFA program and the recipient of the 2019 Zone 3 Literary Prize in Literary Fiction. He currently lives and works in Winston Salem, NC. I had the pleasure of interviewing him over email, following his reading at Scuppernong books.
Gabrielle Girard: Over the years, you’ve worked as a music critic for PopMatters and Prefix Magazine. Did you have a playlist or any artists you listened to during your writing process? What do you think of Christine’s music taste?
Matthew Fiander: I prefer big, open-ended instrumental stuff when I write. While working on this book, I spent a lot of time listening to Alice Coltrane, Mary Lattimore, William Tyler, and Stars of the Lid. I was also introduced to a new band, SUSS, that came along at the perfect time while I was writing this, sort of ambient but with definite shapes emerging, seemingly threadbare but then all of the sudden astral. Beautiful stuff.
When I’m away from my writing desk, people like John Darnielle (of the Mountain Goats), Aesop Rock, and Sarah Dougher still ping around my head. I’m not sure there’s a writer–lyricist, poet, novelist, anyone–who can pick an image like Aesop Rock and just let it work. Darnielle is well celebrated for his ability to tell a story and for his sharp lyrics, but I don’t think he gets enough credit for his musicality, for his sense of the right rhythm, the right instrumentation to make those stories work. And Dougher is just criminally underrated, a deeply incisive lyricist and nuanced performer.
As for Christine’s taste, I think it stands out from the rest of the people in the book. She’s got knowledge and interests they don’t. But I was also wary of making her taste too obscure, too hip. I would have been a few years younger than Christine, and lucky to have older siblings who let me raid their collections, so I got into stuff like Sebadoh and Dinosaur Jr., but I also loved Pearl Jam and Nirvana and stuff that probably hasn’t aged quite as well. For Christine, I think, musical taste was a kind of iceberg. She shared some with those around her, had friends with common interests, but there was a lot under the surface she kept to herself.
GG: Christine’s tapes were such a strong central thread throughout the narrative. How did you choose these songs and how did they impact the formation of the story?
MF: “Taillights Fade,” the Buffalo Tom song I pulled the title from, is first and foremost a song that just stuck with me all these years. If it comes up on the shuffle or CD or whatever, it never gets skipped. I think it popped up in one scene in an early version of this novel and as I revised the thematic possibilities for it, the other spaces it could occupy sort of came to the surface.
But I also think writing about music is tough, especially in fiction. I’ve spent most of my writing life trying to figure it out and I’m still not sure how it works. What I do feel is that popping a song in there just to represent a character’s state of mind is hard to pull off. I’m sure I do it somewhere in the novel, but I was hoping to avoid it. Instead, I find the way people talk about things they love, in this case music, can be revealing, sometimes because they tell you something about the speaker, but just as often because they are evasive. So I spent a lot of time wondering what music would be around these people, what would they love or respond to, what would they think of it?
For Blue, music is a way to think about Christine. At least that’s how she frames it for herself, but I wonder if it isn’t a troubling elision or even substitution sometimes. When we’re young, we tend to mistake what we like for who we are, and in some ways these characters—in the wake of what happens to Christine—are grappling with the gap in between those things where the tougher questions sit.
GG: The novel is bookended by emotional letters from the narrator Blue to her sister Christine. What led you to frame the narrative in this way?
MF: Earlier versions of the book had more letters, but they didn’t do much except explain what didn’t need explaining. I kept these as the frame because I hoped to show the long shadow of the past in the book, of all that had happened, as well as the idea that there’s a different kind of investigation going on here, one that has never quite stopped.
Beyond that, there’s more than a little one-way communication, which I guess is another way to say lack of communication, in the novel. Blue is very forthcoming in both letters, but they are also—in terms of changing anything that has happened or will happen—ineffectual. So in some ways I’ve left them because I have yet to pin down the one reason she’s writing them. Which is the kind of question I like to consider, especially with a first-person narrator. Why are they telling this story? Why now? What are they getting wrong? What are they blind to? I hope, weirdly, that rather than clarify anything, the frame raises some of these questions that can linger around the edges.
GG: Blue’s family lives in the fictional town of Dorset, located in the Boston suburbs, similar to the place you grew up. To me, the events of the story felt deeply intertwined with its strong sense of place. How did you land on this setting? Has this novel changed your relationship to Boston?
MF: Since there’s baseball in the novel, I’ll start with a sports metaphor (apologies). The basic and not-very-good reason the book started in this place was to give me a home game, a place I knew that made it easier to get the narrative going. I didn’t have to imagine where it took place, I knew. It was an interesting shift from my short fiction, where I almost never write about where I came from.
It ended up freeing me up, though, and part of the reason I changed the town name was because, through some small changes and through the rhythm of the book, it turned into somewhere new for me. It still reminds me of my childhood, but it has also become a fresh space, a space to figure out. It’s also a version of my hometown–and a friend from home pointed this out to me after the book came out—that doesn’t really exist anymore. Youth sports are largely privatized and more expensive than the small community Little League here. Like so many towns, where I grew up has expanded, built more condos and apartment buildings. It’s just different. So I’ve accidentally, and probably inconsistently, cataloged an older version of the town, which is maybe just a way to say I remembered it as best I could and made up the rest.
GG: Blue is a Little League umpire. When did you know baseball would be her sport and how was it important to you? Also, can you tell us who your team is?
MF: I grew up loving baseball, so I followed a lot of woeful Red Sox seasons and then some incredible ones. As for Blue, I don’t know that I decided she’d be into baseball, this is just who she was. There may have even been a short story about Blue first, a long time ago, but I’m honestly not sure.
But, despite knowing quite a bit about who she’d be and her affinity for baseball, I was still surprised, and happy, to find some wrinkles in who she is and what she does. That baseball is both a love and a symbol of some limitations set on her. That it is her area of expertise, which is both a comfort—surrounding herself with what she knows, with what is knowable—and maybe an avoidance of the mystery around her, not just what happened to her sister, but who her sister was and why Blue didn’t know more about her. Baseball is a place Blue can both know and enforce rules, which was interesting to work with throughout revision.
GG: The teenage characters in this story are navigating high school firsts alongside violent and dangerous experiences. Was there a balance to find there—characters coming of age and more sinister themes?
MF: I have a young daughter who enjoys My Friend Totoro, the film by Hayao Miyazaki. She likes it because it’s about two sisters, and Totoro is strange and funny, and it’s a relatively calm story. To me, having watched this one a bunch and seen some of Miyazaki’s other films, I’m struck by how he tells stories of children without really telling stories exclusively of innocence. Yes, they grow up and mature and are asked to face first-time joy and loss and all that, but they’re fully realized, complex people before the conflict starts. They’re not blank slates of youth until something bad (or good) happens to them. They’re already compelling.
I wanted something similar. I wanted them to be fleshed-out people that just happened to be young. So, yes, there are plenty of mistakes of youth, but Blue and others (Tara especially) can be savvy and knowing. They’re not clueless or self-absorbed or whatever other teenage stereotype. They’re people, flawed people, and I always wanted to remember that. That was how I tried to strike the balance.
Blue is flung into a number of new roles as the book goes on. Those changes are surprising and jarring, and so are the moments she’s exposed to violence and danger. But under that, she’s still Blue, so which parts of her change as the book goes along, and which of those changes stick? There is the sense of coming of age, but it’s not a straight line. There’s some backtracking, some things she shouldn’t do; it’s not all growth. Under what happens, I think it’s that balance, more of effect than action, that I was after.
GG: What was it like building and revealing a mystery? Did you have it solved from the beginning or were there surprises for you along the way in Blue’s investigation?
MF: I read somewhere once that a lot of mystery writers reverse-engineer their plots, starting with who did it and working backwards from there. I do not have that kind of organization. I realized there would be this whodunit angle to the book early in drafting, so I kept writing without considering who actually dunit until I stumbled on it myself. Once I did it was a matter of how clues and tells would work and how to balance them. I got a lot of help from readers on that—just one of so many reasons outside voices are key. My wife solves pretty much any mystery before I do, so she was, as usual, invaluable.
But really, in the end, I tried not to put too much pressure on the mystery. I didn’t want an undercooked one to distract the reader, but I also didn’t want everything to hinge on it. I was thinking about Deadwood. Deadwood was a great show that HBO canceled early. I remember watching an interview with David Milch, the show’s creator. He was wandering through this empty set, talking about the show and he insisted it didn’t matter that the show didn’t get a “proper end.” He talked about how we put too much emphasis on endings to create meaning. My hope is that the ending here doesn’t have to do more than its share of the work. And, by the way, the last episode of Deadwood—its incidental finale—is actually perfect.
GG: The story centers around the disappearance of the narrator’s sister. What was it like creating characters and relationships inside so much grief and how did it shape the story?
MF: A lot of the things I write–and I don’t know that this is a good thing–end up darker than I intended. That darkness does not usually stick with me. I don’t carry it around in my day-to-day. Because who could function like that? Why would I do that to myself?
I think part of the reason things turn dark—and why I read dark novels and watch horror movies and so on–is because, for me, it’s a place to put the heavy. I can set it in the pages of a book, or in the word doc I’m typing away in, or that notebook I’m scribbling in, or on a screen, and walk away.
That’s usually how it goes. These characters, this grief, stuck with me more. I wouldn’t say it clouded my daily life, but I thought about Blue and her family. Because—this is what I kept asking—what do you do? What do you do when you are in the middle of so much grief? Some sort of this-too-shall-pass thinking only really works in retrospect. While you’re in the middle of it, that probably doesn’t do much good.
So, for me, the real challenge was how to get these people going, doing something, trying to continue forward in the face of the worst things that have ever happened to them. It gave me a set of questions about these characters, how they’d react, what kind of action they’d take, and what would investigation—because I think there are a lot of different searches happening in the book—do for them. Could it help? Could it heal? Could it be harmful?
GG: If you could give teenage Blue any advice, what would it be?
MF: I wonder if I’ll ever be of an age where I feel qualified to offer advice to anyone. But hell, I’ll give it a go. I think I’d tell her to talk more, to ask for help. It’s occurred to me in the past few years that I write because it lets me play with the words until I get them right, whatever that means. Until I feel they are what they ought to be. I have spent a lot of my life second-guessing what I’ve said, or feeling I hadn’t said enough or said what I should. The words come out of my mouth and there they are, for better or worse. For a long time, I was pretty good at convincing myself it was usually for worse.
It takes a bit of trust to talk to others, and I wonder if Blue has that, either because she’s young or because of the situation, or for some other unclear reason. But for all the words she flings around, it takes a while for her to have some actual conversations in this book, to inch toward asking for help, to step away from the comfort of baseball and memory and the insular world of her headphones and reach out. I wonder how much she keeps that up as time passes, but for a moment there she tries.
MATTHEW FIANDER was born and raised in Weymouth, Massachusetts. His fiction has appeared in Story Magazine, Zone 3, Willow Springs, The Massachusetts Review, South Carolina Review, South Dakota Review, Reckon Review, and elsewhere. He has also published articles in The New York Times and Our State Magazine, and was a long-time music writer and editor for the online magazine, PopMatters. He currently lives and works in Winston Salem, North Carolina. Ringing in Your Ears is his first novel.