10.2 Beautiful Sentences Matter: Billy-Ray Belcourt and Matt Hooley (SW)

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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 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.

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

Listen and Read:

Audio: Beautiful Sentences Matter: Billy-Ray Belcourt and Matt Hooley (SW)

Transcript: 10.2 Beautiful Sentences Matter: Billy-Ray Belcourt and Matt Hooley (SW)

10.3 Just Slightly Outside the Circle: Peter Orner and Sarah Wasserman (EH) – Novel Dialogue

Chicago is the main character, the setting, the obsession, and the historical grist for the mill of Peter Orner’s most recent novel, The Gossip Columnist’s Daughter (Little Brown and Company, 2025). In conversation about his hometown with Novel Dialogue host Sarah Wasserman, Peter brings us into a lost pocket of time. It is the early 1960s, when Chicagoans partied in a kind of “Midwestern Weimar” and the gossip columnist Irv Kupcinet, holding forth as many as six times a week for 60 years, wrote a garrulous, glamorous story of the city. While the increasingly unhinged narrator of his novel investigates the mysterious death of Kupcinet’s daughter in 1963, Peter delves into his own family’s history, anxiously asking “we can’t hurt our dead, can we?” The novel swerves between fact and fiction, including photographs that are both real artifacts from the historical record and staged photos that participate in the fictional world of the novel. Peter laughs off this contradiction, remarking “the closer I get to real things, the more fictional it becomes.” How to describe such a complicated novel? Sarah offers this gem: “It’s as if Philip Roth were less cancellable and wrote a murder mystery,” a line that results in a poignant conversation about what it means to be Jewish and socially striving in Chicago in middle of the 20th century and what it means to be a cultural outsider, “just slightly outside of the circle.” Peter brings the conversation to a close with a memory of going to the University of Tish.Mentions: Reverend Hightower appears in William Faulkner’s Light in August Irv “Kup” and Essie Kupcinet were Karyn “Cookie” Kupcinet’s parents An Edna O’Brien story appears in Andre Dubus’s Dancing After Hours Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano Phyllis Diller at the Palmer House Bette Howland’s line about Chicago being “the raw materials for a city” appears in Blue in Chicago Alberto Paniagua Philip Roth Tish O’Dowd Ezekiel’s Floaters Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
  1. 10.3 Just Slightly Outside the Circle: Peter Orner and Sarah Wasserman (EH)
  2. 10.2 Beautiful Sentences Matter. Billy-Ray Belcourt and Matt Hooley (SW)
  3. 10.1 "Extreme Circumstances, Extreme Reactions:” Aaron Gwyn and Sean McCann (JP)
  4. We Better Laugh About It: A Discussion with Álvaro Enrigue and Maia Gil’Adí
  5. 9.5 Who Owns These Tools? Vauhini Vara and Aarthi Vadde (SW)
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Cover design. Mourning Diary, Roland Barthes, Hill and Wang, 2012. Front cover.