Joan

My earliest reading memoryI was six, walking home from school with a book that had the word “city” in it. I only knew the hard “c” and couldn’t figure out what a kitten had to do with the story.My favourite book growing upLittle Women by Louisa May Alcott. I first read it when I was seven or eight. I was the only girl in a family of boys, and I loved immersing myself in the family of sisters. My family also had a lot of anger and volatility, and the thoughtful, attentive parenting Marmee gave her daughters offered a…

The life of the woman we know today as Joan of Arc is astoundingly well documented. She was born circa 1412 in the village of Domrémy, north-east France, during the hundred years war. She had visions of saints from about age 13. At 17 she presented herself to the Dauphin’s court at Chinon, and, based on her God-sent visions, persuaded him she could save France. Wearing armour, with hair cut short as a man’s, she led the French to several victories over the English and their allies, until she was captured and imprisoned,…

Writing, as Janet Malcolm once declared, ought to be an “invisible, odourless calling”. Now, however, publicists and marketers push artists to be visible, voluble and, if possible, sweet-smelling. Hence the anthologies of chat in the Last Interview series, which extend from the self-elucidation of sages such as Jacques Derrida and Hannah Arendt to the bizarre dicta of Prince and the befogged ramblings of Billie Holiday, one of whose interviews is conducted by the cops after a drug bust.To qualify for inclusion in the…

Joan Shelley is a lot like a salmon. The fish, the folk singer-songwriter explains, “spawn in the place they were born” – and so has she.Having spent most of her adult life touring the world, the 36-year-old spent the pandemic hunkered down in her Kentucky home, just six miles upstream from her mother’s house. A year later, she had a baby with her husband, fellow musician Nathan Salsburg. Their daughter is 11 months old when we speak and is having a well-timed nap while Shelley sits in front of her laptop, apologising for…

Kentucky singer-songwriter Joan Shelley has a dulcet voice and a mellifluous way about her Americana. But her work – informed, not bound, by folk and country – is often more clear-eyed and unsentimental than its prettiness suggests. “I drank their milk and wore their hide,” she observes typically on Amberlit Morning, an understated rural meditation off The Spur, her latest outing. Bill Callahan guests; a magnificent key change unsettles even as it impresses.Everything upended between 2019 and 2021, the arc of Shelley’s…