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. 

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."

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

"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.