He was far more approving of a band I had formed. At one school “concert” in our auditorium, the teenage audience derisively laughed at my wordy, confrontational lyrics. I pulled out an accordion; “Fag machine!” a kid in the front row yelled. I spotted Simon standing in the back, listening with seriousness and leaving after I was done.

I’d frequently go over to Simon’s house to talk. He’d pour me a pint of home-brewed beer — which seems inappropriate when I write it down, but which made me feel respected and trusted, like a peer. We’d chat warmly, though Simon’s accent and intellect always made him seem a bit remote. I spent most of the time talking around the fact that I had no idea what to do with my life. At one point, he stopped me. “I think that the next step, for you, is to call yourself an artist, and to understand that you are an artist,” he said. “Stop fussing about it and just decide to be an artist. Everything will follow from there.”

As much as I was obsessed with writing and music, I thought actual artists lived far away from the practical world, in some realm I’d never escape to. Simon’s pronouncement had an almost magical effect on me. I slowly became braver in trying that word on, and my work got better.

Shortly after I graduated, I learned Simon had lung cancer. I sent him a letter, along with a collection of poems I’d written, with a handprinted woodcut cover. And then, on a trip back to New Hampshire, I stopped by to see him.

I’d expected a rattled and diminished man, but Simon was the same dapper, witty Englishman. He told me that the first thing he’d done after the diagnosis was to start smoking again, since he liked smoking and was going to die anyway. Next he bought the most outlandishly expensive chair he could find, to read in. Rolling a cigarette, he sat back in that overstuffed chair, which felt like it took up most of the living room, and told me: “It really is true: You get what you pay for. I intend to be carried out in it.”

He described in great detail what it feels like having emphysema. He told me a hilarious story about a door-to-door salesman coming to his house and demonstrating a state-of-the-art vacuum; Simon regretfully told the salesman he wasn’t going to buy it because that was probably the last time his house would ever be vacuumed. We talked about books and about art again, and then I left. I knew I’d never see him again, but he was so calm he made that feel normal somehow.

I had charged into college with a head full of European modernists only to discover that nothing could have been more out of fashion. Frustrated and constricted, I decided that I wanted to do something my peers would find disreputable, so I started a rock band again. I wanted to fuse the language and complexity of literature with the scrappy immediacy of rock ’n’ roll, and I wanted to bring to rock singing the hypnotic quality I’d heard in the cassettes Simon had assigned me. I named the band Okkervil River, after a short story by Tatyana Tolstaya.