Podcast Preview: Ben Arthur’s SongWriter Season 5 Continues with Dolan Morgan + Self Help

SongWriter is a podcast that turns stories into songs, featuring Questlove, David Gilmour, Joyce Carol Oates, Steve Earle, Amanda Shires, Susan Orlean, and Neil Gaiman. You can hear an exclusive preview of next week’s episode featuring Dolan Morgan and Self Help only at Paste.

Author and illustrator Dolan Morgan was stuck. He had two short stories that he didn’t know what to do with—one about a world in which the government starts housing convicts in people’s homes to deal with overcrowded prisons, and another about people who create a shadow self that they abuse and torture.

“I had this little epiphany of, ‘What if I try to connect these two?’” Dolan says. “So that gave me the basic, surface-level architecture of how the story would play out.”

The resulting piece, “The Quartering Act,” is upsetting, dark, and sweet, like a lot of Dolan’s work. And like a lot of his work, the story defies easy interpretation. The intent, Dolan explains, is to reflect within the narrative some of the queasy uncertainty that can result from certain traumatic experiences.

Dolan says he wrote the story, “for folks who have experience with trauma, especially when they were young, and have experienced the conflicted feelings that can go with that.”