The Virtual Memories Show

With her new book, Looking for Miss America: A Pageant's 100-Year Quest to Define Womanhood (Counterpoint), Margot Mifflin has written a compelling, thoughtful history and exploration of a uniquely American phenomenon. We got together to talk about the story of the Miss America Pageant — sorry, Competition — and its cultural significance (including its racist restrictions), how the pageant has evo...

Author, editor & memoirist Benjamin Taylor joins the show to talk about his wonderful new memoir, Here We Are: My Friendship with Philip Roth (Penguin). We get into how his relationship with Roth evolved over 20 years, how it affected his own writing, and his notion that everything that happened is still happening. We talk about the nature of friendship and how it may differ from literary friendsh...

Comedian, actress and Emmy-winning TV writer Judy Gold joins the show to celebrate her brand new book, Yes, I CAN Say That: When They Come for the Comedians, We Are All in Trouble (Dey St.). We get into the role of comedy in society, the perils of censorship (from the left and the right), and what living through the AIDS crisis taught her about the need to laugh. We get into her history in standup...

Batter up! Let's celebrate Major League Baseball's 2020 Opening Day by talking with cartoonist, illustrator and baseball fan Ellen Lindner . We get into Ellen's great 'zine about the role of women in the history of baseball, Cranklet's Chronicle ( 1 & 2 ), her own history with baseball, why she's a Mets fan, her theories about Aaron Judge's mystery-injury, and what it's like being in the narrow Ve...

Cartoonist and illustrator Adrian Tomine is in it for the long haul. With his new graphic memoir, The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Cartoonist (Drawn & Quarterly), he explores his lifelong connection to comics and the embarrassments & humiliations they've caused him. We get into the new book and talk about whether it was worth it, what brought him to the sketchbook style he adopted for this one,...

Artist, cartoonist, and clotheshorse Everett Glenn joins the show from Berlin to talk about how narrating his life as a story helped him make (some) sense of his fragmented, chaotic upbringing (he talks more about that upbringing in this great conversation with Noah Van Sciver ). We get into his evolution and influences as a cartoonist through his Unsmooth graphic novel and his recent amazing achi...

With Three Fifths (Agora), debut author John Vercher explores race and representation in a taut crime novel. We get into Black identity and the notion of 'passing' in America, the origins of Three Fifths and its evolution over a two-decade span, and how John's literary idols led him to the spare prose that carries the book's tension. We also get into his roundabout writing career, how an MFA progr...

Author & St. John's College tutor Zena Hitz joins the show to talk about her wonderful new book, Lost in Thought: The Hidden Pleasures of an Intellectual Life (Princeton University Press). We get into the nature of learning for its own sake, the corruption of academia and its potential reform, how St. John's prepared us for the world by not preparing us, and why the Newton's Principia is the tough...

Author & publisher Bill Campbell joins the show to talk about what he's learned from running Rosarium Publishing (and how he accidentally became a publisher). We get into how having a diverse roster of authors and cartoonists is easy if you're willing to look, how independent bookstores generally don't support independent presses, and how work-life balance is something he doesn't even consider. We...

The beyond-legendary designer Milton Glaser died on June 26, 2020, on his 91st birthday . To celebrate his life and world-changing career, I've re-posted our 2019 podcast , along with a new introduction. • More info at our site • Support The Virtual Memories Show via Patreon or Paypal

I nerd out with author, English professor, and hardcore comics reader Jonathan W. Gray . We talk about how Blackness is represented in American comics (the subject of his next book), how Alan Moore's Swamp Thing changed his life, and how he was teaching comics when there weren't a lot of college courses on comics. We get into the perils and perks of academia, what it's like teaching at John Jay Co...

Herblock Award-winning cartoonist Ruben Bolling joins the show to celebrate 30 years of his comic, Tom The Dancing Bug! We talk about his two new collections, Into the Trumpverse and The Super-Fun-Pak Comix Reader , and how pandemic-uncertainty means you'll need to pre-order those books NOW in order to get 'em. We also get into how Tom The Dancing Bug has evolved over the decades, why he's never d...

Designer, artist and writer Keith Henry Brown joins the show to talk about his new kids book, Birth of The Cool: How Miles Davis Found His Sound . We get into the twists and turns of his illustration career, exploring the balancing act of art & commerce in his main role as an art director, the role of jazz in his work, how he started off by achieving his childhood goal of drawing for Marvel Comics...

Through his work at Publishers Weekly , editor Calvin Reid has been an important advocate for comics and graphic novel publishing for decades. We get into his history with comics and making art, how he began writing about the book publishing world, and the weirdness of having to update the annual retailer survey to reflect the effect of the pandemic on booksellers. Calvin talks about the transform...

Author Arthur Hoyle joins the show to talk about his new book, Mavericks, Mystics, and Misfits: Americans Against the Grain (Sunbury Press), in which profiles of American figures help illustrate the paradoxes and aspirations of a nation. We get into how the book grew out of the concept of the exemplar put forth by Henry Miller (the subject of Arthur's first book ), his vision of America and how th...

Translator and director Philip Boehm joins the show fresh off winning his second Helen & Kurt Wolff Translator's Prize . We talk about his prize-winning translation of Christine Wunnicke's The Fox & Dr. Shimamura ( New Directions ), and the research and challenges that went into bringing the eerie historical novel to life in English, then get into his time in Poland in the '80s, how it shaped his...

Cartoonist Dylan Horrocks checks in from Wellington, NZ. We celebrate his country's success at overcoming the pandemic , but get into the darker lessons he learned during lockdown, and his shame at having to shrink his circle of concern during the depths of it. We get into making & reading comics during This Whole Situation, the grace of NZ's prime minister and the dry wit of its director-general...

Photographer Steve Prue checks in from Brooklyn. We talk about how he got started in (largely NSFW) photography and the origin of Teamrockstar Images , how he's dealing with pandemic life (his roommate is yesterday's guest, Stoya ), figuring out how to coordinate remote shoots with models, his love of burlesque and people who have an aversion to clothes, how he melted down when he met Britney Spea...

Writer, actress, publisher and adult performer Stoya checks in from Brooklyn. We talk about social change and protests against police violence, why now isn't the time for self-promotion and why it is the time to promote Black voices, what the next world may look like, and why the AVN Awards committee's decision to eliminate the category of "interracial" is long overdue. We also get into her pandem...

Cartoonist, activist and live-drawing pioneer Liza Donnelly checks in from Rhinebeck, NY. We talk about the rhythm of her daily live-drawing video sessions and how they've improved her drawing & maybe her mental health, the Zoom event she held for Society of Illustrations with Roz Chast & Liana Finck, the longform graphic novel she's pondering, what she misses about NYC, her upcoming exhibition at...

Author & photographer Kipp Friedman checks in from Milwaukee, hours after the death of his father, the great writer Bruce Jay Friedman . We trade stories about BJF, but first we talk about how Kipp has been coping with pandemic life, and how, with his bar/bat mitzvah photography business on hiatus, Kipp has returned to a novel he began a few yeas ago about his time as a newspaper reporter in FL in...

The first great author I ever recorded with, Bruce Jay Friedman , died on June 3, 2020, at the age of 90 . His work means the world to me, so to celebrate his life, I've re-posted that 2014 podcast, along with a new introduction. • More info at our site • Support The Virtual Memories Show via Patreon or Paypal

Design scholar, teacher, and author Steven Heller checks in from New York City. We talk about the anxiety & stress of pandemic life , and why he's thinking of designing a watch that just tells you the day of the week. We also get into his upcoming 70th birthday, and why that number is a big rubicon for him, his reread & revised opinion of Philip Roth's The Plot Against America , the relaunch of Pr...

Caldecott Medal-winning author & illustrator David Small checks in from SW Michigan. We talk about the "what am I going to do next?" moment he's fallen into, the bad timing of selling his papers to a university library last fall and how it means he has to recreate the opening of his next graphic novel from memory, whether his background as a kids book author & illustrator would help him explain Th...

Cartoonist & illustrator Robert Sikoryak checks in from NYC. We talk about his just-completed new book, Constitution Illustrated (Drawn & Quarterly), what he learned about the US Constitution & America in the process of making that book, and how that deadline insulated him a little from the effects of sheltering in place. We get into remote teaching of his art classes at Parsons, finding his best...