The Borderlands Between Story and Song

By Brooke Shaffner

---

Listening to “Gracias a la Vida” — Laurie Anderson’s pick for the song she’d take with her if cast away on a desert island — brought back my stepdad, Ben Garza, blasting Spanish love songs in our living room. When I was growing up, he’d sing and sway to mariachi or Luis Miguel ballads, his hands shaping the air. He’d bend toward Mom and adolescent me, listening on the couch, and slowly repeat, then translate, the beautiful, aching lyrics.

We moved to Ben’s small Texas-Mexico border town when I was eleven. I didn’t understand the lyrics then, but I felt their desire and sorrow. I understood that song was the place where feelings spilled beyond borders and breathed a world.

Living with vascular dementia the last six years of his life, Ben became a man of few words. But play a song he loved and he’d rise from passivity and silence to shake a leg with his old swagger and soul.

How does music transcend language? How do we get that subcutaneous song into our writing?

I can’t sing, but watching a high school friend perform drag in our town’s only gay bar in the ’90s, I learned that you could lip sync your way into freedom. The revelation of that experience birthed my novel, Country of Under.

A shy, bookish girl, writing poetry was how I sang, until my desire to tell stories outgrew my poems. I wanted Country of Under to live, like my favorite books, in the borderlands between story and song.

Another thing drag queens taught me: Style is everything, by which I mean not what you buy, but what and how you make. In writing, I mean the tools we use to envelop the reader in the world(s) of our characters: sound, rhythm, repetition, imagery, pacing, perspective, tense, metaphor, concision, expansion.

Ben died in 2021, on my love’s birthday, February 5. “Gracias a la Vida” holds, in its deep lyricism, that collision of births, deaths, and loves. If you listen to it, I think you’ll feel life’s paradox of pain and beauty. Anderson chose the song because it’s “a thank you for everything that life gives you—not just lovely things, but difficult and horrible things… And how do you accept those?”

Illness has whittled down my life recently, making me grateful for sentences that sing beyond the borders of the self. In the final lines of “Gracias a la Vida,” Violeta Parra writes about how the blessings and brokenness from which she forms her songs also form the listener’s songs, and everyone’s songs. Lyricism lets writers sing readers into a shared world.