fernmaddie

[fernmaddie]

adult children intro post

so i think i started writing a musical? currently, it's not a stage musical, but a novel with a connected rock opera concept album. i'm pretty excited about the idea! i've always linked stories very deeply with music (the hazards of growing up in a musical theater family) and have always wanted to write a rock opera, but the right idea never really landed.

but recently, i started drafting a contemporary novel about a group of adult siblings, their dying father, their failing farm, and the new arrival who threatens their co-dependent bond. it draws on my experiences of living in rural vermont and features many of the strange sorts of characters and communities you can find in this corner of the world. it also explores generational trauma, queerness, kink, and the experience of finally coming of age in your thirties. the current working title is adult children.

as i started deepening into the characters, exploring their psychology, and connecting their experiences to my own formative traumas, i started hearing the (friendly) voice of my dad dead's ghost whispering in my ear: "this could be a great musical." you see, he was a playwright, pianist and composer who wrote several musicals in his life, and he was also my first musical mentor. i think my hallucinated projection of his ghostly advice was pretty spot on. i've already started writing songs in the voices of the characters, and this has opened up new avenues for my prose writing. it's a really fun new creative process for me, and i'm excited to share more of it here (literally speaking to the void, which is exactly what i want!)

i'll probably be reblogging some inspiration posts for themes and characters, as well as logging my progress learning the scoring software MuseScore. scoring is a totally new frontier for me in my musical career (i'm a hack) but i'm excited for the challenge. mostly, i'm just really excited to have a place to log my musical process that's not instagram. :P if you're here, thanks for reading and following along!

#adult children #my wips

[fernmaddie]

[Image ID: The poem “One Source of Bad Information”, by Robert Bly.  There’s a boy in you about three years old who hasn’t learned a thing for thirty Thousand Years. Sometime it’s a girl.  The child had to make up its mind How to save you from death. He said things like:  “Stay home. Avoid elevators. Eat only elk.”  You live with this child, but you don’t know it.  You’re in the office, yes, but live with this boy  At night. He’s uninformed, but he does want To save your life. And he has. Because of this boy  You survived a lot. He’s got six big ideas.  Five don’t work. Right now he’s repeating them to you. 

/end id]

#poetry #insp: adult children

[fernmaddie]

introduction

hey folks! i wanted to give a little introduction to myself and my work, as this is my first time presenting myself publicly on tumblr. this is going to make me sound rather professional, but i promise i'm just here to do the regular ol' tumblr things: be silly, gush about things i care about, and not take myself too seriously. i hope you'll join me. :)

i'm fern maddie (she/her), a queer experimental folk artist, multi-instrumentalist, and balladeer based on abenaki land. through folk balladry and original writing, i perform songs and stories exploring themes of grief, trauma, and renewal.

***please note: my approach to folk music is adaptive, interpretive, critical, queer-feminist, and inclusive. white supremacists, "folkish" nationalists, terfs, or anyone who engages with english-language folk literature as a tool of western cultural "purity" will be blocked***

buy my music on bandcamp

listen on spotify

watch some performance on youtube

more about my work below the cut....

past projects

ghost story - my debut album, released in 2022. ghost story was named the #2 best folk album of 2022 by the guardian, and one of the top roots albums of the year from npr music. across 10 tracks, it explores the stories we inherit from the dead -- both our personal dead and cultural dead -- through a queer-feminist lens. includes a critically-acclaimed interpretation of the ballad "hares on the mountain" (roud 329), as well as the ballads "the maid on the shore" (roud 181), "northlands" (roud 21) and a queer re-framing of the scottish shepherding song "ca' the yowes."

north branch river - my debut EP, released in 2020. across 6 sparse tracks and spry banjo-playing, it explores the intimacy and pain of our tenuous relationship with the natural world. includes a re-interpretation of the ballad "the elfin knight" (roud 12), and the original song "two women," inspired by selkie folklore.

of song and bone - of song and bone is a short-lived podcast i produced a few years ago. there are only 3 episodes out, but they illustrate some of my scholarship about folk balladry and my own relationship to balladry as a literary tradition. FYI: i would probably frame a few things differently if i were re-recording the podcast today (ideas and language evolve!). perennially thinking about making more, but we'll see.

currently in development

way to live - way to live is my second studio album, currently in production. as of this writing, way to live includes 8 tracks, and similar to my previous work, combines original songs with folk ballads, though with a greater share of personal storytelling than my earlier records.

said the false nurse - this is a piece of adaptive short fiction i'm currently developing. it's a deeply sinister queer re-telling of the horror ballad long lankin (roud 6), set in the 1620s in the north of England. stay tuned for process updates!

adult children - this is a full-length original novel and associated concept album i'm developing. it's set in contemporary rural vermont, and focuses on a group of adult siblings, their dying father, their failing farm, and the new arrival who threatens their co-dependent bond. the associated rock opera will be written in a folk-rock style with digressions into folktronica and country.

#folk music #traditional folk music #folk balladry #dark folk #folk noir #folk horror #historical fiction #ballads #child ballads #roud index #fern maddie #singer songwriter #folk lore