Behind the scenes trailer for the making of Dead Dad Club, featuring Katie Moulton (me - writer, narrator) and composer Evan Stephens Hall. Created/directed by Dylan Owens.

Dead Dad Club: On Grief & Tom Petty is my audio memoir, published by Audible in June 2022. The book seeks to collapse the distance between personal narrative of coming-of-age through grief and close examination of defining popular music. What are the limits of what the past can return to us--and can we make the record jump the loop? 

This is the opening interlude of Dead Dad Club (Audible Original 2022). I perform the narration over a score composed by Evan Stephens Hall. 

First-person reported feature on luxury healing crystals industry for The Believer, published in February 2020.  

"The Middle," published by Sewanee Review. Received Special Mention in 2022 Pushcart Prize Anthology

"The Middle of Everywherre: How Nelly's 'Hot in Herre' Defined Millennial Dance Pop," personal essay first commissioned and published for the March Xness annual music essay competition. 

Excerpt: "The bridge, in true country songwriting fashion, punctures the dream, as Nelly keens, “I just want to go and look/Won’t you please take me on in.” “Nellyville” is definitively not St. Louis. It’s not where Nelly is, or where he can even get to.

The official “Hot in Herre” video was not the first. The original, rarely seen video is another club scene. But this party is happening inside the Arch. The link is literal: The world’s first image of Nelly is him tapping on the camera from the ground below the Arch, and now he’s at the very top of the symbol of his city. That room, of course, doesn’t exist as such. As St. Louis schoolchildren, who get bussed there on a field trip every single year, know: Once you ride the glowing-egg elevator up a click at a time up one grand leg of the Arch, the “top” is a narrow hallway covered in industrial carpet. There’s nothing to do but peer down from cloudy windows to see just how puny our city looks from up there. (As one KMOX reporter put it, “Something great happened here, but it’s over now.”) But that scene, of a club full of real bodies draped in recognizable glamor, at the top of our small world, is a powerful fantasy of belonging.

I was like— “Hot in Herre,” then, is both a bridge and a compromise. We from the middle know about these things. We can’t make you know us, how it feels to grow up with a river above your head, watchful of how it rises and falls. We can’t stick you in the wild heat of the downtown fair on the Landing, sweat stains on the concrete, fire rocketing from the barges in the dark."

"The Elvis Room" is a personal essay, published and featured in New England Review in fall 2022. It was listed as "Notable" in Best American Essays 2023 and anthologized in A Flame Called Indiana: An Anthology of Contemporary Hoosier Writing. It is included in my essay collection in progress. "The Elvis Room" traces my quest to listen to the last existing recording of my father's voice, preserved on a rapidly decaying cassette tape from 1978. In doing so, the essay explores the nature of voice, echoic memory, material devotion to loved ones and pop icons like Elvis, to whom my parents maintained a shrine of kitschy ephemera. 

"There's a difference between absence and loss. There is a way we can pretend that Elvis is just in the next room, that the man is somehow contained in his ephemera and vinyl. But this cassette tape could mean another death for my dad and me...What if I listen to the tape, and what I hear--that voice, unknown, unfamiliar--replaces whatever remnants of him I hold in my mind? Would he be reduced, and therefore lost again?"