Virtual Memories Show

Virtual Memories Show 697:

“I don’t think we can escape our programming completely, or even develop any level of freedom from it, unless we look at it with wide open eyes for what it is.”

Biblical scholar David M. Carr rejoins the show for a conversation about his fantastic new book, UNMAKING EDEN: Genesis and the Domestication of the World (Cambridge University Press). We talk about how his close reading of the first 11 chapters of Genesis opened up a new understanding of how human beings related to non-human beings (animals, that is), the concept of onto-stories and how those chapters set up a world of subjugation and othering, how Tiger King inspired him to write this book, and how God’s first idea of the world fell out of harmony and led God into becoming a genocidal maniac (my words, not David’s). We get into how we need to find a new story to change our domestication-programming so we can see what it means to live in relation to others and not just see everyone/everything in terms of utility, how integrating indigenous, non-western traditions can help with that process (without just being a la carte cultural appropriation), how AI may accelerate our self-domestication, and how embracing a sabbath might be the first step in fixing our world. We also discuss David’s jazz-funk organ habit, his other project on scroll technology, his Quaker-Buddhist outlook and how he continues to pursue traditions that range farther from the Bible, what it means for something to be freely given, and more. Give it a listen! And go read UNMAKING EDEN and check out his new podcast, The Bible And The Living World!

“Genesis is far more interested in the question of how humans and animals relate than other ancient near-eastern myths.”

“The process of human domestication of each other has been underway for thousands of years, but we’re moving into a world with digital technology and AI where it seems ever clearer that if we don’t do something soon, this is our destiny.”

“One of the amazing things for me about being in this line of work: I’ve been at it for almost 40 years with this relatively limited set of texts, and yet I keep learning. It’s so exciting to see new things.”

Enjoy the conversation! Then check out the archives for more great episodes!

Lots of ways to follow The Virtual Memories Show! iTunes, Spotify, BlueSky, Instagram, YouTube, Tumblr, and good ol’ RSS!

About our Guest

David M. Carr is Professor of Hebrew Bible at Union Theological Seminary in New York City. An internationally recognized authority on the formation of Genesis and other biblical books, he is a leader in the emergent field of human-animal studies and the Bible. Recipient of the Alexander von Humboldt Fellowship, he is the author of Holy Resilience: The Traumatic Origins of the Bible, The Formation of Genesis 1-11, and Genesis 1-11: A Commentary. His new book is Unmaking Eden: Genesis and the Domestication of the World.

Follow David’s podcast, The Bible And The Living World, and listen to our 2016 conversation.

Credits: This episode’s music is Fella by Hal Mayforth, used with permission from the artist. The conversation was recorded at David’s home on a pair of Shure Beta 58A microphones feeding into a Zoom PodTrak P4 digital recorder & interface. I recorded the intro and outro on a Heil PR-40 Dynamic Studio Recording Microphone feeding into a Zoom PodTrak P4. All processing and editing done in Adobe Audition CC. Photo of me & David by me. It’s on my instagram.

Virtual Memories Show 696:

“I have 40,000 followers on Instagram, and I’d say 39,000 of those are people who like cats.”

With PEPPER (Toon Books), Karl Stevens brings us the latest adventures of existentialist housecat, Penny, and her eponymous sister. We talk about the fun of making a sequel to 2021’s PENNY, the challenge of getting all the cats’ markings right, how he found the right balance in the voices & outlooks of his main cat-characters, how giving Pepper mystical powers allowed him to get away from drawing his apartment over and over, and how cat comics PULL. We get into his realist drawing style and the underexamined potential of realistic art in comics, his upcoming gallery show of oil paintings, how he might fuse his interest in comics and oils by exploring narrative genre paintings, his collaborations with other writers (and the cartoonists he’d love to write for), and how listening to music on vinyl gives him an excuse to get up from the drawing table and stretch every 20 minutes. We also discuss Something Fell, the page-by-page podcast he co-hosts about Dave Sim’s Cerebus comics to try to appreciate Sim’s art and storytelling modes, his recent focus on Pre-Raphaelite painters, his progress with finishing the last book of Knausgaard’s My Struggle, his thoughts on making one more big autobio book, life after having to say goodbye to Penny and whether he’s drawn her since, and a lot more. Give it a listen! And go read PEPPER!

“When you’re making comics, you have to draw the words and write the pictures.”

“It’s madness, this style that I’ve adopted for my career, to draw everything. . . . I feel like if I simplify, it’ll be cheating.”

“The idea of narrative painting is something I’ve been concerned with for a long time.”

Enjoy the conversation! Then check out the archives for more great episodes!

Lots of ways to follow The Virtual Memories Show! iTunes, Spotify, BlueSky, Instagram, YouTube, Tumblr, and good ol’ RSS!

About our Guest

Karl Stevens is an artist whose work is said, per The Boston Globe, to “blend and blur high art and low… the result is a singular visual and storytelling experience”. His graphic novels include Whatever, The Lodger, Failure, The Winner, Penny, and Mother Nature in collaboration with Jamie Lee Curtis and Russell Goldman. He is also a regular contributor to The New Yorker.

Go listen to our 2019, 2021, and 2023 conversations.

Credits: This episode’s music is Fella by Hal Mayforth, used with permission from the artist. The conversation was recorded at Karl’s home on a pair of Shure Beta 58A microphones feeding into a Zoom PodTrak P4 digital recorder & interface. I recorded the intro and outro on a Heil PR-40 Dynamic Studio Recording Microphone feeding into a Zoom PodTrak P4. All processing and editing done in Adobe Audition CC. Photo of me & Karl by me. It’s on my instagram.

Virtual Memories Show 695:

“Her poetry — as with most Italian poetry — is dedicated . . . to addressing all that has previously been written as poetry.”

She’s been on the show to talk about her essays, novel, and memoir, and now Wallis Wilde-Menozzi gets to talk about translation! With Emerging from the Winter Sea: Selected Poetry and Prose (FSG Poetry), Wallis has translated a career-spanning collection by Antonella Anedda. We talk about her love of Anedda’s writing and how it led to their friendship, how Italian poetry addresses past poetry and changes in language, how the island of Sardinia stands in for the “I” in Anedda’s poems, and how Anedda chooses the world over herself (a la Kafka) and how her writing changes over the course of decades. We get into how Wallis tends to lose herself in the voice of the people she translates (which is why she’s resisted requests to be a writer’s official translator), the masked, genderless figure of the Componidori and how it corresponds to Anedda’s art-identity, how Anedda shows us reconciling ourselves to suffering and cruelty by associating it with someone else, and how Italian poetry’s ambiguity contrasts with American poetry’s “just the facts, ma’am” vibe. We also discuss These Times and how Wallis’ activism in the ’60s contrasts with today’s clicktivism, the new memoir she’s working on, how personal change can be like the discovery of dark matter, and more. Give it a listen! And go read Emerging from the Winter Sea!

“Anedda sees language as a historical reality, as something that is part of history, in a dialogue with society.”

“We’re mostly not what we are. The further we go, the more miraculous and strange and odd things become. Things we thought we knew, we don’t know.”

“I resist translating because I virtually give up most of my ego and try to hang on to what’s there on the page.”

Enjoy the conversation! Then check out the archives for more great episodes!

Lots of ways to follow The Virtual Memories Show! iTunes, Spotify, BlueSky, Instagram, YouTube, Tumblr, and good ol’ RSS!

About our Guest

Wallis Wilde-Menozzi is the author of Mother Tongue, The Other Side of the Tiber, and Toscanelli’s Ray. Her poetry, essays, and translations have appeared in Granta, The Best Spiritual Writing, Words Without Borders, and Tel Aviv Review. A collection of her essays was published in Italian as L’Oceano e’ dentro di noi. She lives in Parma, Italy. Her most recent book is Silence and Silences.

Listen to our 2013, 2017, and 2022 conversations.

Antonella Anedda is an Italian poet, short-story writer, essayist, and translator. She was born in Rome to a Sardinian family in 1955. She is the author of nine books and the recipient of the prestigious Viareggio Prize for her 2012 collection of poetry, Salva con nome.

Credits: This episode’s music is Fella by Hal Mayforth, used with permission from the artist. The conversation was recorded at Palazzo Dalla Rosa Prati on Zoom H2n. I recorded the intro and outro on a Heil PR-40 Dynamic Studio Recording Microphone feeding into a Zoom PodTrak P4. All processing and editing done in Adobe Audition CC. Photo of Wallis by me; photo of Battistero di Parma by me. It’s on my instagram.

Virtual Memories Show 694: Nate Powell

“I’ve been drawn my whole life to a certain type of mystery: mystery that is not to be solved, but about the state of mystery.”

With DIANA (Abrams ComicArts), Nate Powell has completed his “accidental triptych” of Ozark horror & the punk scene. During SPX weekend, he returned to the show to talk about the creative leap he took with this book, the ways that DIANA fulfills but doesn’t complete the stories of COME AGAIN and FALL THROUGH, why this book is set during the transitional period of the early ’90s, and the challenge of writing characters in their early 20s while he’s approaching his 50s (and what it meant for Frank Miller to write about 50-something Bruce Wayne when he was in his 20s). We get into his re-imagining of the punk music/art scene in Arkansas, the ways horror-genre gave him a framework on which to build story, his use of duotone and spot colors to get a midcentury color palette for the book, how he’s making his art messier as an unconscious reaction to generative AI, and his lead character’s self-identity and the importance of being your own canon. We also discuss how Bob Ross got him started on art, and what he got from rewatching Bob’s show during lockdown, the joy of his annual pilgrimage to Small Press Expo and embrace of the comics community, his formative experiences at School of Visual Arts, the total lack of crossover between the readers of his John Lewis biography and his personal work, the right age to expose kids to the golden age of the X-Men, why his ultimate goal is to channel Alex Toth, and more. Give it a listen! And go read DIANA!

“In terms of talking about the underground punk of my era, as a creative community, and the transitional moments and what they meant for me personally and generationally, I feel like I’ve finally said all I want or need to say. . . . But maybe in 10 years . . .”

“How do you prepare young ones for a future in which you feel like it’s been yanked out from under their feet?”

“Comics-making is such a solitary pursuit that coming to SPX is like a pilgrimage for me, driving across the Appalachian mountains, getting the very first whiff of fall in western Maryland, listening the esoteric Maryland band Moss Icon: I treat it like a ritual.”

Enjoy the conversation! Then check out the archives for more great episodes!

Lots of ways to follow The Virtual Memories Show! iTunes, Spotify, BlueSky, Instagram, YouTube, Tumblr, and good ol’ RSS!

About our Guest

Nate Powell is a National Book Award-winning cartoonist who began self-publishing as an Arkansas teenager in 1992. His work includes Fall Through, Come Again, Save It For Later, Swallow Me Whole, civil rights icon John Lewis’s MARCH trilogy and its follow-up RUN, a comics adaptation of James Loewen’s Lies My Teacher Told Me, and more.

His work has received multiple Eisner and Ignatz Awards, ALA and YALSA distinctions, the Robert F. Kennedy Book Award, the Comic-Con International Inkpot Award, and he is a two-time finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. He fell into the hardcore punk community in 1991, playing hundreds of shows in underground legends Soophie Nun Squad and other bands, and managed do-it-yourself label Harlan Records from 1994 to 2010.

Follow Nate on Instagram and Bluesky, and listen to our 2021 conversation.

Credits: This episode’s music is Fella by Hal Mayforth, used with permission from the artist. The conversation was recorded at the Bethesda North Marriott during SPX weekend on a pair of Shure Beta 58A microphones feeding into a Zoom PodTrak P4 digital recorder & interface. I recorded the intro and outro on a Zoom H2n. All processing and editing done in Adobe Audition CC. Photo of Nate by me. It’s on my instagram.

Virtual Memories Show 693:

“Whenever an iconic place closes, everyone laments, ‘The neighborhood’s never going to be the same again,’ but whatever replaces it becomes iconic five or ten years later.”

With his amazing IN THE CITY comics (self-published), cartoonist Karl Christian Krumpholz manages to capture the ephemerality and dynamism of urban life, fueled by the stories of bar and club patrons. We talk about how he began In The City and how it unfolded and grew over five parts, how he learned to let his minor characters breathe and have their own stories, why his stand-in plays the Harpo-ish role of mute observer, and why The City isn’t a specific city (but isn’t Chicago). We get into Orwell’s 10 rules for a perfect pub and why his new coda to In The City is (tentatively) named Moon Under Water, why it’s better for his characters to embody flâneur-hood instead of his trying to seem smart by being explicit about it, how he began drawing cityscapes to get over how much he hated drawing backgrounds and then fell in love with that mode, how Evan Dorkin’s Milk & Cheese was his gateway drug into indy comics, how it took him quite a while to find his voice and comics-mode, and why he hopes to keep making comics about The City for a long time. We also discuss his fashion choices and hat fixation, and how led to him getting (visually) mistaken for Seth (or cosplay-/stunt double Seth), the importance of showing up at comics events, getting stories from his adventures in different cities (esp. the bars, of course), how he’s the second guest of mine named Karl who has a comic about his cat, and more. Give it a listen! And go read IN THE CITY!

“The one rule Kelly and I follow for anywhere we go is: find the oldest bar.”

APPLE player TK

Enjoy the conversation! Then check out the archives for more great episodes!

Lots of ways to follow The Virtual Memories Show! iTunes, Spotify, BlueSky, Instagram, YouTube, Tumblr, and good ol’ RSS!

About our Guest

Originally from a city on the American East Coast, cartoonist Karl Christian Krumpholz’s work has appeared in many different formats, publications and even animated in a documentary. He is the author of several comic series set in The City including It’s Oola!!, In The City, and The Lighthouse in The City. His book Queen City: A Brief History and Illustrated Architecture New and Old of Denver, Colorado was a History Finalist in the Colorado Book Awards, 2022. Karl continues to live in the city, though now a different one, and also owns way too many hats.

Follow Karl on Instagram, Bluesky and Flickr, and check out his Etsy shop.

Credits: This episode’s music is Fella by Hal Mayforth, used with permission from the artist. The conversation was recorded at the Bethesda North Marriott on a pair of Shure Beta 58A microphones feeding into a Zoom PodTrak P4 digital recorder & interface. I recorded the intro and outro on a Heil PR-40 Dynamic Studio Recording Microphone feeding into a Zoom PodTrak P4. All processing and editing done in Adobe Audition CC. Photos of Karl by other people; double-selfie by me. It’s on my instagram.

Virtual Memories Show 692:

“New Orleans has come to be defined by this hyper-awareness of its own identity. It’s all music, food, and culture, and it’s Bunny’s generation that started that deep examination of the identity of New Orleans.”

Let’s celebrate a New Orleans legend with Alison Fensterstock and Michael Tisserand‘s fantastic new book, BUNNY MATTHEWS: HIS LIFE, ART, AND OBSESSIONS (Historic New Orleans Collection)! We talk about the role Bunny Matthews played in shaping New Orleans’ identity with his comics, music reviews, art, and cultural criticism, how Alison & Michael found their collaborative voice for the book, their first encounters with Bunny’s work, his satirical comic about David Duke that thankfully never got published, and how Vic and Nat’ly became a cultural phenomenon (and how Bunny drew the grossest po’boys ever). We get into Bunny’s role in parsing Yat culture and promoting music, the lengths they went to find his earliest writing and drawings, Bunny’s influences (and the shadow of Stan Mack in the alt-weekly world), how he quoted Cab Calloway next to Balzac, his transition to painting, and the masterpiece of his Nint’Wardica canvas, in response to the BP oil disaster. We also discuss the decline of alt-weeklies, the obit pre-write that led to this project, how thrilled they are with the design and production of the book, what it means to be a New Orleanian, and a lot more. Give it a listen! And go read BUNNY MATTHEWS: HIS LIFE, ART, AND OBSESSIONS!

“No one saw and satirized New Orleans selling itself as lovingly and wonderfully and snarkily as Bunny did.”

“Part of the curse of being a writer is that various people will tell you, ‘You know, my life would make a great book.'”

Enjoy the conversation! Then check out the archives for more great episodes!

Lots of ways to follow The Virtual Memories Show! iTunes, Spotify, BlueSky, Instagram, YouTube, Tumblr, and good ol’ RSS!

About our Guests

Alison Fensterstock is a former music critic for the Times-Picayune and Gambit in New Orleans and a columnist for the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities’ quarterly 64 Parishes. Outside of New Orleans, her writing has also appeared in Rolling Stone, Pitchfork, MOJO, the Oxford American, and other places. Her books include The Definition of Bounce and How Women Made Music: A Revolutionary History from NPR Music. She’s been a substitute DJ on WWOZ 90.7 FM since 2006.

Michael Tisserand is a former Gambit editor whose books include Krazy: George Herriman, A Life in Black and White; The Kingdom of Zydeco; Sugarcane Academy; and My Father When Young. His work has been honored with a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Eisner Award, and the ASCAP Deems Taylor Award. He’s at work on a history of Charlie Chaplin’s movie The Great Dictator for Oxford University Press.

Credits: This episode’s music is Fella by Hal Mayforth, used with permission from the artist. The conversation was recorded at an undisclosed location in Brooklyn on a pair of Shure Beta 58A microphones and a blue enCore 200 feeding into a Zoom PodTrak P4 digital recorder & interface. I recorded the intro and outro on a Heil PR-40 Dynamic Studio Recording Microphone feeding into a Zoom PodTrak P4. All processing and editing done in Adobe Audition CC. Photo of Michael & Alison by me. It’s on my instagram.

Virtual Memories Show 691:

“With comics, I think I was looking for an art form that I could devote the most amount of creative skills to, and graphic novels let me do art, let me write, let me do graphic design: different types of skills.”

With his fantastic debut graphic novel, THE NIGHTINGALES (Avid Reader Press), Emil Wilson tells a heartbreaking and beautiful coming-of-age story of the AIDS era. We talk about his father’s decision in 1985 to bring a work-friend with AIDS into their home (in a small town in Oregon), how he fictionalized his family and the story well enough to make the fiction true, how he figured out the amazing sketchbook style of the book, and how he only came to comics in his 50s, following a 25-year career as an at director an ad agency. We get into his experiences at The Center for Cartoon Studies, where he was older than most every other student, the Nora Krug book that was his gateway drug into comics, my advice when he began this project, his work as an AIDS buddy for Gay Men’s Health Crisis in the ’80s and how younger people he meets have no knowledge of the AIDS era, how making The Nightingales changed his understanding of his family, and how it felt to make a “user’s manual” for his father. We also get into the contrast between advertising and comics, how making comics can feel a bit like making films or videos, how the language to describe comics may need to evolve just as the language for gay life had to, why this book isn’t a memoir but is full of faces, how kindness can be complicated, and more. Give it a listen! And go read The Nightingales!

“There was this feeling in the small town I grew up in, that AIDS is something happened in New York or San Francisco, but it didn’t happen here.”

“The thing I went to CCS for was to meet people and to give myself time to just think about how I wanted to do this.”

“Drawing your family is a different ballgame than just writing about them.”

“I believe that all the people reading middle-grade books are going to become adults and they’re going to start saying, ‘I’m not going to walk away from this form, and I just want it to evolve with me.’ I think that’ll be really exciting.”

Enjoy the conversation! Then check out the archives for more great episodes!

Lots of ways to follow The Virtual Memories Show! iTunes, Spotify, BlueSky, Instagram, YouTube, Tumblr, and good ol’ RSS!

About our Guest

Emil Wilson is an art director, illustrator, and comic artist based in San Francisco. His work has appeared in numerous magazines and newspapers, as well as on websites, billboards, National Public Radio, the Oscars, and the Super Bowl. He is a graduate of The Center for Cartoon Studies. The Nightingales is his first book.

Credits: This episode’s music is Fella by Hal Mayforth, used with permission from the artist. The conversation was recorded remotely via Zencastr. I used a Heil PR-40 Dynamic Studio Recording Microphone feeding into a Zoom PodTrak P4. All processing and editing done in Adobe Audition CC. Photo of Emil by Bee Elton. It’s on my instagram.

Virtual Memories Show 690:

“My goal is creating that sensation for the reader of having to turn the page. It’s like a kind of music.”

Jonathan Ames returns to celebrate his fantastic new crime novel, A PAST WITHOUT PICTURES (Mysterious Press). We talk about his obsession with pulp fiction, how he found the character of Maria Cole and her tortured relationship with her father after setting out to write a companion to You Were Never Really Here, how hard (and rewarding) it is to craft page-turning prose, and how he compares the experience of reading Death in Venice to reading a Parker novel. We get into how his Buddhist interests are under the surface of this book and are on the surface of his Happy Doll novels (including the one he’s working on!), how writing is a form of seeing, and how good writing helps the reader create a movie in their mind. We also discuss his samsara of not reaching out to people, the bit from Our Town that guides him to be more loving and present in the world, the shock of seeing his lengthy letters from the ’80s and ’90s, why LA is so weird for me, why he reads different translations of the Tao, how Marc Maron gives us a model of how to learn to listen, and more. Give it a listen! And go read A PAST WITHOUT PICTURES!

“Everything we do causes a karmic ripple.”

“If you don’t have utter clarity, it’s better to be quiet.”

“When you cut off entirely from social media, you don’t miss it. There’s literally nothing to miss.”

Enjoy the conversation! Then check out the archives for more great episodes!

Lots of ways to follow The Virtual Memories Show! iTunes, Spotify, BlueSky, Instagram, YouTube, Tumblr, and good ol’ RSS!

About our Guest

Jonathan Ames is the author of thirteen books, including the Happy Doll series. Two of his books, You Were Never Really Here and The Extra Man, have been turned into films. Ames is also the creator of two television series: Bored to Death and Blunt Talk. Earlier in his life, he was an occasional guest on The David Letterman Show, was a frequent performer with The Moth, and dabbled in boxing, fighting as “The Herring Wonder.” He currently lives in Los Angeles.

Listen to our 2018, 2022, and 2025 conversations!

Credits: This episode’s music is Fella by Hal Mayforth, used with permission from the artist. The conversation was recorded at Jonathan’s home on a pair of Shure Beta 58A microphones feeding into a Zoom PodTrak P4 digital recorder & interface. I recorded the intro and outro on a Heil PR-40 Dynamic Studio Recording Microphone feeding into a Zoom PodTrak P4. All processing and editing done in Adobe Audition CC. Photo of us by me; Fezzik, too. It’s on my instagram.

Virtual Memories Show 689:

“Something not being placeable sticks with me a lot longer, and I think about it a lot more.”

With his new book, LIKE SWIMMERS (New York Review Comics), Dash Shaw brings us a supernatural murder mystery set in COVID-era Richmond, VA. We talk about how he uses that story to explore memory, identity, art, marriage, and the social breakdown in America, how a murder mystery helped him reflect on the losses of COVID, LIKE SWIMMERS‘ pamphlet comic-feel and how that pay tribute to a lost friend who liked very different comics than what Dash usually makes, and how writing this story in the middle of COVID helped him capture details he’d never have recalled after the fact. We get into how we uncover different versions or aspects of the people we’ve lost, why he eschews three-act structures to find new shapes of storytelling, his use of Richmond as a character (and the very bizarre Kroeger that he couldn’t fit into the book), and what it was like to go jogging in 2020 when there were snipers on rooftops. We also talk about his peripatetic project management style, what he thinks about Roy Lichtenstein’s art and what it means to love cliches, getting inspiration from an unfinished Winsor McCay cartoon, working with New York Review Comics for several books, how coloring his comics is almost as tough as writing them, and more. Give it a listen! And go read LIKE SWIMMERS!

“Rashomon was different versions of an event, and this is different versions of a person.”

“When movies are good, they feel dreamlike, even more than comics.”

“I want a narrative structure that’s created by the story. I can feel the limitations of three-act structures; they just don’t work for me anymore.”

Enjoy the conversation! Then check out the archives for more great episodes!

Lots of ways to follow The Virtual Memories Show! iTunes, Spotify, BlueSky, Instagram, YouTube, Tumblr, and good ol’ RSS!

About our Guest

Dash Shaw is a cartoonist and animator. His previous graphic novel, Blurry, from New York Review Comics, was named a graphic novel of the year by The New York Times, The Washington Post, Forbes, and others. He’s also the cartoonist of Discipline, New School, Bottomless Belly Button, BodyWorld, and others. He’s written and directed two animated features, most recently the 2021 film Cryptozoo, which won the Sundance Next Innovator Award. He currently lives in Richmond, Virginia.

Listen to our 2021 and 2024 conversations!

Credits: This episode’s music is Fella by Hal Mayforth, used with permission from the artist. The conversation was recorded remotely via Zencastr. I used a Heil PR-40 Dynamic Studio Recording Microphone feeding into a Zoom PodTrak P4. All processing and editing done in Adobe Audition CC. Photo of Dash by someone else. It’s on my instagram.

Virtual Memories Show 688:

“The whole history of American prose passed through Irving, then went somewhere else.”

Five-Timer Club Alert! Essayist Phillip Lopate rejoins the show as we celebrate his wonderful new book, A WASHINGTON IRVING SKETCH BOOK (Princeton)! We talk about the origins of the biography, incl. how he wound up with a 12-volume set of Washington Irving’s complete works, his choice to write the bio in the form of sketches, how Irving as America’s first professional writer is a precursor/trailblazer for Phillip’s career, and how well Irving understood the fickleness of literary fame. We get into 19th Century American lit and its tensions with Europe, Irving’s fixation on Spain, why he wrote under pseudonyms even late in his career, and how Phillip’s affection for Irving deepened over the course of the book. We also discuss Phillip’s complicated relationship with his brother, Leonard Lopate, why personal essayists tend not to write autobiographies, and how Leonards’s death has spurred him to write a memoir, his passion for visiting writers’ homes (including Irving’s Sunnyside and Montaigne’s tower), his career-long goal of passing along the writing that’s worth keeping (whether through teaching, editing essay anthologies, or appearing multiple times on some guy’s podcast), our shared exhilaration over the Knicks’ championship (and how we can’t get excited about baseball this season), and a lot more. Give it a listen! And go read A WASHINGTON IRVING SKETCH BOOK!

And listen to our 2013, 2017, 2020, 2023 conversations!

“What I was trying to do in the essay anthologies I edited was to pass on the canon of what was worth keeping. I felt that was deeply part of my teaching, and that’s one of the reasons that I stopped teaching; I felt that I’d done it.”

“My brother [Leonard Lopate] and I were friendly, but also competitive. I had to listen to a lot of bragging.”

“Irving was always expecting to be forgotten.”

Enjoy the conversation! Then check out the archives for more great episodes!

Lots of ways to follow The Virtual Memories Show! iTunes, Spotify, BlueSky, Instagram, YouTube, Tumblr, and good ol’ RSS!

About our Guest

Phillip Lopate is an award-winning nonfiction writer noted for his anthology The Art of the Personal Essay and his essay collections Bachelorhood, Portrait of My Body, Portrait Inside My Head, and A Year and a Day, as well as Notes on Sontag, Waterfront, and My Affair with Art House Cinema. He is professor emeritus of creative writing at Columbia University and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Go listen to our 2013, 2017, 2020, 2023 conversations!

Credits: This episode’s music is Fella by Hal Mayforth, used with permission from the artist. The conversation was recorded at Phillip’s home on a pair of Shure Beta 58A microphones feeding into a Zoom PodTrak P4 digital recorder & interface. I recorded the intro and outro on a Heil PR-40 Dynamic Studio Recording Microphone feeding into a Zoom PodTrak P4. All processing and editing done in Adobe Audition CC. Photo of me & Phillip by me. It’s on my instagram.