About

Hi, I’m Jack B. Donovan. I am the musician behind the All New Vol. 1 EP and the author of the forthcoming novel Comet of Occitania.

Within those works, you’ll find song and you’ll find rhythm and you’ll find the song and rhythm of language.

My writing contains the chorus of voices one finds in a family. My music has the liveliness of gatherings around the dinner table.

There are autobiographical elements scattered throughout the lyrics on my EP All New Vol. 1, but they are usually disguised. I did not grow up on the house on the hill, but I did have to take out the garbage. I did not take the bus to school in the winter darkness, but there were small meteorites in our driveway gravel and dragonflies on the blades of grass at the edge of the bog.

I don’t care much about my past though. The best has always been ahead of me. The world is going to change, it has to, and I want it to change and I want to be there when it does.

The time travel experience in my novel Comet of Occitiania is intended to detach the character from coherent narrative while maintaining a coherent narrative for the reader, but it is also inspired by my own sense of discontinuity with the past and future; like the time travelers, freed from reassuring narrative; indeed, sometimes I catch myself feeling like a pure sensing animal without any past or future at all.

About writing more generally, an early love was Samuel Beckett, whose playful voice continues to echo in my mind and guide my decisions. Beckett’s works inhabit a space of the imagination that evokes a world we’ve experienced, but it is not necessarily the world of our consensual reality. I also love the lyrical interiority of Virginia Wolf, the humor of Franz Kafka and the humanity of George Saunders.

Up next for me includes turning part of Comet of Occitania into a play and releasing some music from my alter-ego.