Caryn Rose is a music writer, researcher and archivist. She’s written for NPR, Pitchfork, Esquire, and many other publications. Her latest book is Why Patti Smith Matters, out now through University of Texas Press, and she also contributed to the anthologies Women Who Rock and Woman Walk The Line: How the Women in Country Music Changed Our Lives. These days, she makes her home in Detroit, although she remains a New Yorker in her heart.
How did you get to where you are today, professionally?
I’m one of those people who always wrote/always wanted to write professionally, but didn’t get a lot of encouragement and was actively discouraged, so I’d go through phases of writing / not writing. I did a lot of work in and around the music business—PR, artist management, product management at a label—and at a point in the mid-90s got fed up with everything and decided I was going to move to Seattle and get a job in technology. I did that, but it still wasn’t writing. In the early 00s I started writing fiction and got a literary agent. I also kind of fell into writing about major league baseball for a couple of years. Basically I just kept writing and pitching and trying, but mostly just writing, and writing, and writing some more.
Can you please briefly describe the book?