{"id":65501,"date":"2026-03-27T10:00:00","date_gmt":"2026-03-27T15:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.publicbooks.org\/?p=65501"},"modified":"2026-04-09T23:55:38","modified_gmt":"2026-04-10T04:55:38","slug":"beautiful-sentences-matter-billy-ray-belcourt-and-matt-hooley","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.publicbooks.org\/beautiful-sentences-matter-billy-ray-belcourt-and-matt-hooley\/","title":{"rendered":"Beautiful Sentences Matter: Billy-Ray Belcourt and Matt Hooley"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Our partner podcast <\/em>Novel Dialogue<\/a> 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\u2019s signature question is: Who was your favorite teacher and why?\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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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<\/a> tells critic Matt Hooley<\/a> how his desire to write a novel that \u201cwould sound like something else\u201d led him to produce A Minor Chorus, <\/em>his experimental debut novel. Together they consider how Billy-Ray\u2019s vulnerable, first-person narrator makes room for other voices, or more precisely, how it becomes \u201ca voice that could focalize the desires of a community.\u201d  Billy-Ray discusses how his influences\u2014 queer theory, indigenous novelists, and contemporary autofiction\u2014harmonize 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\u2019s signature question attests to the way that even the classroom can be refashioned, like the novel, into a chorus.<\/p>\n\n\n\n