‘Tenderness, fragility, an understanding beyond her years’

Once a week I host a writer who uses music as part of their creative environment – perhaps to connect with a character, populate a mysterious place, or hold  a moment still to explore its depths. This week’s guest is Myfanwy Collins @MyfanwyCollins

Soundtrack by Jessica Lea Mayfield

Before she was fully formed on the page, I knew who I wanted Laney to be. She would be 15, tall and gangly, with a face that would not seem immediately beautiful to the young world but an astute adult would know how she would bloom fiercely and beautifully one day. Laney would not be an obvious intellectual, but she would think long and hard in an emotional way. People would often say to her, ‘You think too much’, a sentence she would find curious and staggeringly ridiculous. Yes, she does think a lot but what’s wrong with thinking? It’s safer to live in your head than it is to live out in the world anyway. Laney knows that more than anyone. After all, she has just lost everything. Her home. Her brother. Her mother. And her sense of self.

Laney is lost.

And yet, she carries on and continues to seek connections in all things and to try to not only understand her own miserable situation but that of the human condition at large. In short, I wanted her to be a young woman like Jessica Lea Mayfield. Deep, thoughtful, emotionally advanced, quirkily beautiful. Strong but not in a way that is obvious. Rather, I wanted her to have a quiet, poignant strength born from sadness, from desire, and, ultimately, from her ability to empathise.

Mayfield embodies all of these qualities in her voice and also within the songs she writes. And the more I listened to her music, the more Laney became the sort of young woman Mayfield is. The first time I knew of Mayfield was when I listened to the Avett Brothers cover her song For Today. Like so many of her songs, this is a song of contradiction. A song about a romantic relationship in which the singer pretends she does not love this person. Maybe she feels like she is a relationship fuck-up or that the other person is or that they both are. Maybe she believes she doesn’t deserve love or that her beloved’s love is false. Regardless, she pushes this love away, eventually, because she says it has stifled her. She will accept it, though, in this one moment. She will accept it for this day.

In this song, as in so many of Mayfield’s songs, there is a keen understanding for romantic love—an understanding beyond her years (she recorded her first album, White Lies, when she was 15) and, frankly, beyond the understanding that many middle-aged people (including me) are able to access. She witnesses the world in a way that is both stunningly youthful and staggeringly aged. Like Laney, Mayfield’s eyes are wide open and innocent, but her heart has seen some serious shit and she is on this earth to share her knowledge.

It wasn’t until I saw a video of Mayfield singing an acoustic version of a new song in the kitchen of Seth Avett, that I truly saw Laney. The song, Seein* Starz, is about an overwhelming, impossible love. This is not unlike the love that Laney has for Marshall. There is something about the strength of Mayfield’s voice in the acoustic, kitchen, version and how it is unmarred by the shaky, nearly fragile quality it also possesses. It is that tenderness she exhibits, the raw woundedness of her song and singing that struck me as so akin to who I wanted Laney to be. Like Mayfield, I wanted Laney to send her voice out into the world with vulnerability and strength. Qualities that should be antithetical but which, I believe, are actually able to exist within the same person at once.

Mayfield’s voice and her songs, then, are all about containing and managing contradiction. Just as Laney is all about protecting her heart while at the same time learning how to open up to love and face her fears. Learning that even though she feels entirely weak, she is actually fully undaunted. Like Mayfield pushing back out into the waters of love again and again despite the possibility for pain, Laney pushes forward, paddling her canoe into an uncertain future. Fearless.

Myfanwy Collins is the author of three books—a collection of short fiction, a novel, and her latest, a young adult novel, The Book of Laney, published by Lacewing Books. Her work has been published in The Kenyon Review, AGNI, Cream City Review, Quick Fiction, and Potomac Review. Echolocation, her debut novel,was published by Engine Books in March 2012. A collection of her short fiction, I am Holding Your Hand, was published by PANK Little Books in August 2012. Her website is here, her blog is here, you can connect with her on Facebook, Twitter (@MyfanwyCollins), Tumblr, Instagram, Goodreads and Google+.