Beautiful Sentences Matter: Billy-Ray Belcourt and Matt Hooley

Our partner podcast Novel Dialogue invites a novelist and a literary critic to talk about novels from every angle: how we read them, write them, publish them, and remember them. This season’s signature question is: Who was your favorite teacher and why? 

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Can a novel with a singular voice also be a chorus? Can it reject the conventions of the novel and still be a novel? Poet, essayist, and novelist Billy-Ray Belcourt tells critic Matt Hooley how his desire to write a novel that “would sound like something else” led him to produce A Minor Chorus, his experimental debut novel. Together they consider how Billy-Ray’s vulnerable, first-person narrator makes room for other voices, or more precisely, how it becomes “a voice that could focalize the desires of a community.”  Billy-Ray discusses how his influences— queer theory, indigenous novelists, and contemporary autofiction—harmonize in his search for a new form. While author and critic trace the circuits of grief and melancholy that run from Roland Barthes to Billy-Ray, their conversation is joyful, reminding listeners that romance and intimacy sustain us and that beautiful sentences matter. His answer to this season’s signature question attests to the way that even the classroom can be refashioned, like the novel, into a chorus.

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View a transcript of the episode here.

Mentioned in this Episode

By Billy-Ray Belcourt:

• A Minor Chorus
• A History of My Brief Body
• This Wound is a World

Also mentioned: 

• “The Summer Day”
• “Arundhati Roy Sees Delhi as a Novel”
• Rachel Cusk, The Shakespeare and Company Interview
• “The State of the Political Novel: An Interview with Édouard Louis”
• “100 Things About Writing a Novel”
• Mourning Diary
• Ann Cvetkovich
• Joshua Whitehead
• “Mourning and Melancholia”