Musician’s life provides fertile ground for prose

When you’re a touring musician, meeting unusual people in unexpected places on the road, you’re probably going to be inspired to document your travels. Korby Lenker does that, but not always through his music.

The singer-songwriter, raised in Idaho and currently based in Nashville, is traveling to promote his debut short story collection “Medium Hero.” His upcoming appearance at Auntie’s Bookstore will be both a reading and an acoustic musical performance.

“Some of the stories are about an indie folk musician who travels around the country by himself meeting interesting people,” Lenker said. “Some of the stories are about insects. Some of them are love stories. … My hope is that people will find it funny but that there will be something that lingers long after they’re done reading the book.”

He’s also working on an album titled “Thousand Springs,” and recently raised more than $20,000 for it through a Kickstarter campaign. (The release of his previous self-titled record was also successfully crowdfunded.) Lenker plans to record the album in his hometown of Twin Falls, Idaho, and to release it in the fall, and he said it’s going to follow a more stripped-down approach than his recent releases.

“It’s going to be a return to what I came from,” Lenker said, citing Neil Young and Gillian Welch as stylistic influences. “They record live, and I really like the sound of those records, the rawness and the weirdness. It’s not perfect, but it feels true. It’s kind of what I keep coming back to when I listen to music. I want to hear that; I don’t want to hear production.”

The stories in “Medium Hero” are similarly sparse, brief but perceptive snapshots of wayward souls (one of the book’s recurring characters is, not coincidentally, a traveling musician named Korby). Lenker said he’s always been a voracious reader and a fledgling writer, and the material in his book first materialized as sporadic posts on social media.

“I would just write these short stories and put them on Facebook,” Lenker said. “Sometimes they’d get shared, sometimes a lot of people would comment on them. Two years ago I realized I have about 60 stories, and I thought maybe 20 or so of them were good.”

Those stories were eventually compiled into “Medium Hero,” which Lenker said was initially self-published to sell at live shows and has since been reprinted by Turner Publishing.

But Lenker hasn’t abandoned music in favor of literature: He’s currently chipping away at a novel and still frequently turns out songs.

“The prose thing is much different for me,” he said. “I’ll write a thousand words in one sitting, knowing it’s probably not very good. And usually it’s not. Then I’ll go back through and revise it 10, 15 times, and sometimes the finished product is very different from when I started.

“The formal structure of (songwriting) makes the approach much different. It’s like you’re building a ship in a bottle, where you’re putting lines and ideas together one at a time, and the song takes shape as the lines hang together. I’ve never had a song where I got to the chorus and rewrote it from the ground up.”

And just like a song needs an indelible hook or a memorable melody, Lenker said a good piece of writing needs to capture your reader’s attention from the very first sentence.

“That’s really the one rule of writing: that it be compelling,” Lenker said. “There’s no other rule. It doesn’t matter how long it is, as long as the reader turns the page. I like that freedom.”