Novelist Catherine Lacey — whose 2014 novel Nobody Is Ever Missing the opera adapts — wrote about traveling to Baltimore in October 2025 to see the work staged outdoors, under a bridge and later on open grass. She reflected on the strangeness and honor of having her own novel adapted by a composer who first wrote to her in 2016, years before the piece was ever produced, and singled out one specific musical choice: Tim Holt’s translation of a recurring image from the novel, the narrator’s inner “wildebeest,” into the production’s percussion writing.