10 minutes read time
Assistant Managing Editor Bess Winter: Erika Gallion Velasquez’s essay, “Paradise is Ours,” was the literary nonfiction winner of our 2024 Robert and Adele Schiff Award. In this post, Erika offers us a playlist to fully immerse ourselves in her prize-winning piece. The playlist, and Erika’s notes, are below.
I don’t know the sounds of that September 1AM in 1966. When I imagine it, that bucolic, gold-hued Ohio night, I envision groundhogs chittering to one another their secret plans to break into vegetable gardens, I see heat lightning flashing behind clouds, silent except for the low broiling roll of thunder. I envision my father, six years old, sleep sounds falling out of his open kid mouth. Stillness before the quake of violence, peace before everything was redefined.
These songs, compiled in an hour and thirty-nine minute playlist, give auditory storytelling to the relationship depicted in Paradise Is Ours between my father and me (and, to a lesser extent, his father as well). The playlist begins with childhood sadness and the loneliness that comes from not quite belonging. The first seven songs display how siloed I felt in my family and my hometown: how I wanted answers to my father’s drinking and how that want othered me. From there, the next eight songs show an evolution in my relationship with my father, his addiction, and the violent actions of my grandfather. Curiosity bursts forth from the egg of rage and sadness. These songs are the sounds of discovery and empathy. The final ten songs give voice to what comes after: after the rage, after the empathy, after the research into my grandfather’s crimes against his family, after my brother and I reach adulthood. They are the sounds of rolling down a green hill in the Ohio spring, of the fireflies blinking in the trees when I return home, of the birds my father feeds with supreme tenderness. Acceptance, trust in one another, confidence in my storytelling, and love, love, love.
- BUG LIKE AN ANGEL by MITSKI: The line ‘Sometimes a drink feels like family’ accompanied with the choral vocals and epic crescendo really echoes in my chest every time I hear it. The Busch can is both a comfort and a heartbreak, a sign of home and a symbol of hatred.
- YOUNGER & DUMBER by INDIGO DE SOUZA: As I wrote Paradise Is Ours, I spoke to the me of my girlhood with care. ‘I don’t feel at home in this house anymore, I don’t feel at home in this town.’ Those feelings were deep, dark, and painful. I write from a place of deep belonging, which empowers me to really feel those plainly sad lyrics.
- IMPURITIES by ARLO PARKS: My father noticed things I did, like the way a deer’s ear twitched when eating grass. I wanted to dig myself a cave in that ability of his to wonder, stay there with him. ‘You’re the rainbow in my soap You notice beauty in more forms than most’
- SEVEN by TAYLOR SWIFT: Running through the woods behind my house, thinking it was its own world, seeking escape or understanding– how I wish I could go back. How the me then wished she could go forward. ‘Please picture me in the weeds, Before I learned civility I used to scream ferociously Any time I wanted’
- AMERICAN TEENAGER by ETHEL CAIN: This song drips with small town lore. I wanted to leave, badly; I wanted to hate the town and sometimes did, but never more than I loved it. The line ‘Say it like you mean it’ reminds me of how hard I fought with my father, daring him to say something that would hurt. Pushing on my bruise just to feel the ache.
- WISH YOU WERE HERE by PINK FLOYD: Often my father would blare Pink Floyd in the basement alone, lost in a world I desperately wanted to pull him out of or join him in. Once, on a drive, the song came on the radio and we sang it together: ‘So you think you can tell Heaven from Hell blue skis from pain. We’re just two lost souls swimming in a fishbowl, year after year Running over the same old ground, what have we found? The same old fears, wish you were here’. Sometimes, alone in my Los Angeles apartment, I’ll put Pink Floyd on and think of what this song must mean to him. If I would have had a wedding this would have been my Dad Dance song.
- INCONSOLABLE by KATIE GAVIN: ‘We’re from a long line of people we’d describe as inconsolable, We don’t know how to be held.’ The generational trauma, the fear that it will inevitably sift through, tarnish whomever comes next. ‘But I’ve seen baby lizards running in the river when they open their eyes even though no one taught them how or why so maybe I can let you see me cry,’ how there’s hope and tenderness if you pay attention.
- A LOT’S GONNA CHANGE by WEYES BLOOD: The ethereal vocals here speak to a cosmic truth: no feeling is final. ‘If I could go back to a time before now Before I ever fell down Go back to a time when I was just a girl When I had the whole world gently wrapped around me You’re gonna be just fine But babe, a lot’s gonna change.’ There was no way to prepare for what was to come because each year, month, day is its own unknowable universe.
- SLIDE TACKLE by JAPANESE BREAKFAST: A major part of my research process for Paradise Is Ours involved obsessive researching and pouring over old documents. Rereading the horrific details. At times I felt lost in a haze, not eating or drinking for hours while working. I wanted answers for me and for my father. ‘I want to navigate this hate in my heart. Don’t mind me while I’m tackling this void.’
- THE RIVER by MANCHESTER ORCHESTRA: In high school I’d shut my bedroom door and listen to this song, my father one floor below me, both of us lost in our own sadnesses. ‘I think I know you best when I sleep.’ Moments of connection overshadowed by rage. The guilt for the rage. Cycling. ‘Oh God I was wrong again Take me to the river And make me clean again.’
- HEAT LIGHTNING by MITSKI: Picture an Ohio summer night, humid and buzzing. Me on a blanket in the backyard because my father inside is drunk. Trying to pray some kind of prayer: ‘On the ceiling dancing are the things all come and gone and there’s nothing I can do, not much I can change. Can I give it up to you? Would that be okay? I give it up to you, I surrender.’
- GARDEN SONG by PHOEBE BRIDGERS: ‘The doctor put her hands over my liver She told me my resentment’s getting smaller.’ Resentment does live in my liver, and these guitar chords massage it until it’s small again.
- DON’T LET THE KIDS WIN by JULIA JACKLIN: Instructions on how to let love triumph over hatred in a family: ‘And I’ve got a feeling that this won’t ever change, we’re gonna keep on getting older, it’s gonna keep on feeling strange. Don’t let the time go by without sitting your mother down and asking what life was like for her before you came around’
- HOLY SHIT by FATHER JOHN MISTY: The long Ohs in this song, the yearning to find the answers. This song feels like my moment of really knowing what happened in 1966, and of finally, finally connecting my father’s trauma to his drinking: ‘No one ever really knows you and life is brief So I’ve heard, but what’s that gotta do with this black hole in me?’
- BACK IN TOWN by FLORENCE AND THE MACHINE: Drum beat of the return– the strangeness of driving the roads of my childhood as a different person. As a writer. As a woman I admire. ‘Back in town why don’t we go out to that ninth street diner? And carry on slowly, torturing each other cause it’s always the same. It was always just an empty room’
- ST. CLOUD by WAXAHATCHEE: This is the sound of self-righteousness crumbling. ‘Where do you go when your mind starts to lose its perfected shape? Virtuosic, idealistic, musing a fall from grace I guess the dead just go on living at the darkest edge of space.’ Surrendering to the fact that my rage mirrors my father’s, mirrors his father’s. How my grandfather’s actions still reverberate, even if he’s at the darkest edge of space.
- THUMBS by LUCY DACUS: The first time I read my grandfather’s plea for leniency from the court, I threw up. He called my father by his childhood nickname after being found guilty of trying to kill my father via dynamite. I wanted to cross the line of time and hurt my grandfather: ‘I would kill him if you let me’
- THE WORST IS DONE by WEYES BLOOD: A rhythm that tells me I can exhale. That I can trust the warmth of a summer day outside with my family. ‘It’s a different world and I am a different girl. It’s time to go out. Pick up where we left off from. They say the worst is done And it’s time to find out what we’ve all become.’ What does love look like now? How bright is it?
- SLIP AWAY by PERFUME GENIUS: The crashing sound of letting go. Jumping into a pool with my father, chasing my nephew, sprinting down the hill of my childhood home with my husband behind me.
- NO ONE’S EASY TO LOVE by SHARON VAN ETTEN: I wish I had this song to hold me when I was a girl. To tell me that it’s not my responsibility to fix everything, and that my father is loveable despite not being easy to love at times. That I am too. ‘Acting as if all the pain in the world was my fault.’
- CHANGE by BIG THIEF: ‘Change, like the sky, Like the leaves, like a butterfly. Would you stare forever at the sun Never watch the moon rising? Would you walk forever in the light To never learn the secret of the quiet night?’ I could not accept the not knowing, and the knowing changed me.
- THE BATON by KATIE GAVIN: I think my father thought that if he didn’t talk about what his father did, I would be protected from it. But not talking about it was its own form of generational wounding. How the story becomes my story, too, how it lives in the connective tissue of my bones: ‘Go on girl, it’s out of my hands, I can’t come where you’re going. Time unfurls and you’ll understand, the baton, it will be passed again.’ What will my nephews and my children know about what happened? How will this story live inside of them?
- SADNESS AS A GIFT by ADRIENNE LENKER: ‘You and I could see into the same eternity.’ Perhaps I could think of my writing as a gift to my father. A key out of a locked room.
- NOTHING TO BE SCARED OF by KACEY MUSGRAVES: The sound of hugging my parents after months of not seeing them. The sound of real trust built on this unearthing of what’s been incorrectly buried: ‘Demons in your mirror together we’ll escape them Come to me and drop your bags and I’ll help you unpack them I’ll come to you and drop my bags and you’ll help me unpack them. There’s nothing to be scared of.’ I’m trying not to be scared. I’m trying to stop preparing for the worst. I’m trying to anticipate joy.
Erika Gallion Velasquez (she/her/hers) is a Los Angeles–based writer originally from Canton, Ohio. Her published writing has appeared in Entropy, Angel City Review, Women’s Review of Books, The Racket, and elsewhere. Gallion is the author of the Substack Matches Struck Unexpectedly in The Dark. For more information visit erikagallion.com and @erikagallionvelasquez on Instagram.
