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. 

This essay examines Joe Cocker's cover of the Beatles' "With a Little Help from My Friends," which weaves discussions of authorship vs. interpretation vs. appropriation. It was commissioned by the annual March Xness music-essay tournament, and was voted to the final four of the competition. 

"We started this thing with the original 'With a Little Help from My Friends' because that song is the secret knowledge that Cocker’s cover spins around. Because covers are about convoluted and overlapping lineage, about how songs are passed throat to throat.

The ideal cover does not improve, does not dominate, and does not supplant the original. It may sound like an oxymoron, but the function and success of a cover song is how it uncovers. How it reveals the hidden capacity of a song in a manner that the writer or first performer could neither deliver nor predict."

"The Middle," published by Sewanee Review. Received Special Mention in 2022 Pushcart Prize Anthology. The essay recounts the story of my good friend who suffered severe brain trauma, and explores early-00s emo, Millennial nostalgia, and how memory forms identity.

"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. The essay was anthologized in Hit Repeat Until I Hate Music (Split Lip Press, 2026), and recently cited in Blank Space: A Cultural History of the 21st Century by W. David Marx.

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 Woman in the Wall" is a personal essay published by Catapult in 2018. 

"I don’t fetishize the vulnerable body. I’ve spent my life denying its existence—to friends, boyfriends, strangers on the street. To every shadow that quickens my step, every creak in an old house that sets my stupid heart spinning.

We must constantly negotiate the knowledge of our vulnerability—both real and amplified by the stories we’re told. We tamp it down while gripping it tight, keys clutched like blades between knuckles. How many risks have I taken, how many brain cells have I obliterated in order to assert my ability to move through the world on my own terms?"

"System Failure," short memoir, was published by The Rumpus in 2021. This piece adapts and distorts various systems -- 12-step recovery programs, maps, storytelling -- to recount the experience of coming of age while losing my father to death from addiction. 

"Clippings," personal essay, was published by IMAGE Journal in 2023. The essay uses newspaper clippings that mention my grandmother's name over the course of her 100-year life as an attempt to gather a portrait of a beloved and yet unknowable relative.

"A Place for It," personal essay, was published by No Tokens in 2022. This short memoir recounts guiding my mother around Paris when I was 17, one year after my father died, and visiting Jim Morrison's grave. Hijinks ensue. It explores different definitions of nourishment and rituals for grieving.  

"Little Ditty," personal essay, was published by Ninth Letter in 2024. This essay uses fictional techniques to recreate the lives of the speaker's parents before she knew them, and to recount the complicated history of John Mellencamp's "Jack & Diane," developing narrative threads until they converge in an exploration of how "origin stories" function. 

This essay, "Where You Lead (I Will Follow): Gilmore Girls and the Soundtrack of Emotional Dependency," was commissioned for the anthology, Life's Short, Talk Fast: 15 Writers on Why We Can't Stop Watching Gilmore Girls," published by W.W. Norton in 2024, edited by Ann Hood.

Excerpt:

"But what I remembered most about the Gilmore Girls versionof a catastrophic dance marathon is that Lorelai and Rory are partners. When fatigue and tension boil over and the boys leave, they're left holding each other."

As part of my creative research fellowship with the American Antiquarian Society in Worcester, Massachusetts, I delivered a virtual talk discussing some of my findings from my time in their archives. This focused on tracking the evolution of the public story of Hannah Duston, how it was published and reinterpreted by different authors, in different outlets, with different agendas, over more than three centuries, and how each of these version reflects the social movements of the moment.

The story of Hannah Duston recently re-emerged in headlines when statues dedicated in her honor in New England were vandalized, as part of the 2020 wave of public reckoning with monuments. My project follows this most recent charged reconsideration of historical memory and symbols.

This is a sketch I made of the first Hannah Duston statue in Boscawen, New Hampshire, during one of my reporting trips/site visits while working on the book.

I spent four weeks in 2025 doing archival research for this book at the American Antiquarian Society in Worcester, Massachusetts. Here, I got to view and interact with original documents and images stretching back to the early 1700s, and this work significantly deepened and expanded my knowledge and vision for the book

First-person reported feature on luxury healing crystals industry for The Believer, published in February 2020. What began as an examination of a particular product within the booming "wellness" industry took me crystal-digging in western salt flats, on a reporting trip to New Orleans, and sitting with a medium in a Tulsa hotel ballroom. This piece is included in my essay collection in progress. Excerpt: "People have always found ways to make money off each other’s spiritual desires, their search for meaning or coping tools. So why not a beautiful crystal, an intention that’s positive, a placebo that soothes? Perhaps the founders of Glacce are just examples of young people sincerely grappling with mental health while figuring out how to make a living off products that people find meaningful. This streamlining of purpose—mind, body, soul, ethics, style—feels admirable, yet still uncomfortable for its position in the marketplace."

For many years, I regularly reviewed albums and live music for outlets like Consequence and Voice Media newspapers.

I have been an accepted presenter multiple times at the premiere annual music writing and pop-music studies conference: Pop Conference/International Association for the Study of Popular Muisc. Pictured above is"Generation Brightside: How Wedding Reception Playlists Predict Future Nostalgia" is a selected presentation I delivered at the 2023 Pop Con.

The talk uses The Killers' unexpectedly enduring hit, "Mr. Brightside," to explore how songs/artists that dominate multi-generational venues like wedding receptions, where the "mainstream" is adapted to the personal, determine what music gets preserved and passed on.

I was a featured author at the Liner Notes Reading Series in Philadelphia, an interactive, multimedia literary event, August 2024.

As part of my literary and artistic citizenship, I often attend and give invited readings in local, regional, and national series.