The Virtual Memories Show

Charles Bivona 's business card reads, "Poet, Writer, Professor," but he's a lot more than that. Over the course of an hour, we talked about what it means to be  NJPoet , his theory on the transmissibility of PTSD (based on the first-hand evidence of his father's Vietnam War trauma being visited on his family), the value of building a massive Twitter network, the lessons of growing up poor, how Wa...

Jonathan Rose , the William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of History at Drew University, joins the show to talk about his new book, The Literary Churchill: Author, Reader, Actor (Yale University Press). It's a fascinating work about the books and plays that influenced one of the 20th century's greatest statesmen, drawing connections from Churchill's literary interests to his policy decisions, and helping...

Frank Wilson, book reviewer, columnist and founder of the Books, Inq.  blog, completes our August book critics miniseries! Frank talks about 50 years in the book review biz, the similarities of poetry and religion, whether Catholics can write good novels, the perils of using big-name writers as book reviewers, the biggest gap in his literary background, his underrated/overrated ranks, and more!

Jessa Crispin, founder of Bookslut  and Spolia , joins us to talk about 12 years of book-blogging, the downsides of learnign to write online, how she learned to love Henry James, why lack of ambition may have been Bookslut's key to success, and more!

Pulitzer Prize-winning book critic Michael Dirda  rejoins the Virtual Memories Show at Readercon 2014 to talk about the time Neil Gaiman tried to explain Twitter to him, his new project on the golden age of storytelling, what he dislikes about the tone of today's book reviewers, and more! [Also, we remastered our original Dirda podcast from 2012, over here !]

Ron Rosenbaum  returns to the show to talk about the new edition of his amazing book, Explaining Hitler: The Search for the Origins of His Evil (Da Capo Press)! We talk Hitler, the meaning(s) of evil, determinism and free will, Hitler-as-artist vs. Hitler-as-suicide-bomber, "degenerate art," the tendency to blame Jews for their misfortune, and how internet culture has warped the meaning of Hitler...

"It's said that the sources of writing are mysterious, but the sources of not writing are pathological." Ron Slate spent more than two decades in the corporate world before returning to poetry and writing The Incentive of the Maggott , an award-winning collection praised by the likes of Robert Pinsky. We talk about his roots in poetry, how those "lost" years weren't so lost, what it's like to be t...

"Artistically, LA's a disaster. It's full of amazing stories. But as a city, it's not a city. Nobody but bus-drivers see the whole place." Singer-songwriter, musician, inventor, dad, reader, and writer David Baerwald joins the show to talk about the ups and downs of his career in the music biz, his crazy family history, the perils of grafting personalities onto up-and-coming musicians, and why he...

Comedy legend Merrill Markoe joins The Virtual Memories Show to prove Christopher Hitchens wrong: women can be very funny! We talk about her career, helping launch Late Night with David Letterman , her opinions on today's late-night TV scene, the show she'd write for if she was starting out in TV now, her literary influences, her favorite cartoonists, and why Curly was the greatest of the Three St...

How does a man go from being a ne'er-do-well in a Pennsylvania mining town to a tutor at St. John's College? Peter Kalkavage joins the show to talk about his path to that Great Books institution, what he's learned in his 38 years as a tutor, how he fell in love with the music program, what he learned from his study of Hegel, what he'd add to the St. John's curriculum, and more! (Also: Iliad or Ody...

The great cartoonist (and designer and illustrator) Seth joins the Virtual Memories Show to talk about memory and time, his love of digression, being "Mr. Old-Timey", and learning to let go of the finish and polish that used to characterize his work. "When I was young, I thought there were an infinite possibility of stories you could do. As you get older, you realize you're following a thread, and...

"When I first started out, what I liked was the unlikely image, the unlikely metaphor. What I like now is finding that simple sentence that captures something you haven't thought of before." Rupert Thomson  joins us to talk about his new novel Secrecy (Other Press), a smart thriller set in 1690s Florence. We also talk about how to keep from hitting the reader over the head with research, how to le...

"I'm never gonna be a parent, but if I were, I'd be like, 'We're skippin' this Goodnight, Moon thing; you're goin' to Pale Fire .'" Cartoonist Katie Skelly joins the show to talk about her new book, Operation Margarine (AdHouse Books), which is really just an opportunity for us to talk about Barthes, Edie Sedgwick, and The Maxx , before getting to the moment when she was 15 and read the least "YA"...

"Zweig was immersed in the problem of the disjunction between our grand desires for the kind of life we dream we should be living and the actual circumscribed canvas on which we must operate." At his peak, Viennese author Stefan Zweig was one of the most widely read authors in the world. How did he and his wife end up a in a double-suicide in a bungalow in Petropolis, Brazil? George Prochnik joins...

Mimi Pond joins the Virtual Memories Show to talk about Over Easy , her 15-years-in-the-making, New York Times bestselling graphic novel about diners, drugs and northern California in the 1970s!

Listen in to part 2 of my conversation with Linn Ullmann about her new novel, The Cold Song  (Other Press) ! We talk about her writing habits and practices, her favorite Scandinavian authors, how she tweaked the book for its translation into English, and how August Strindberg got revenge on people. We also talk about the lengths she and her husband go to in order to get undisturbed writing time, w...

In part 1 of our first 2-part episode, Linn Ullmann talks about the influences of her parents -- Liv Ullmann and Ingmar Bergman -- on her storytelling process, her subversion of the "Scandinavian crime novel" in The Cold Song  (Other Press) , the importance of place in her writing, the perils of overthinking the ground rules for an interview (not ours!), how she transposed a character from The Wir...

Novelist, essayist, poet, short story writer, and translator Lynne Sharon Schwartz  sat down with me to talk about her newest essay collection, This Is Where We Came In: Intimate Glimpses  (Counterpoint), but we talked about a lot more in our hour! Listen in to learn how she and her husband began recording literary readings by authors like James Baldwin, Philip Roth, John Updike, William Styron in...

"I'm a person who works in comics and knows a lot about comics, and I'm teaching people who know nothing about comics to talk to other people who know nothing about comics, about comics." Caitiln McGurk, fresh off of curating her first exhibition at Ohio State's  Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum , The Irresistible Force Meets the Immovable Object: A Richard Thompson Retrospective , joins us...

"I like that we live in an age that's increasingly curious about this dark side, and not merely in terms of its pure darkness, but of how seemingly ordinary or normal people can commit atrocities." Daniel Levine joins us to talk about his debut novel, HYDE , an inventive and gorgeous retelling of The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde . It's a fun conversation about our public and private sel...

Literature professor and book critic DG Myers  is dying of cancer, but that doesn’t mean he’s planning to go gentle into that good night. In a wide-ranging conversation, we talk about why he believes university English departments will barely outlast him, how he made the move from Southern Baptist to Orthodox Judaism (getting recircumcised a few times along the way), what he’d like to be remembere...

Tova Mirvis  joins The Virtual Memories Show to talk about her brand-new novel, Visible City  and how she learned to act on her unhappiness , as well as the lifelong advice she got from Mary Gordon, the ways that writing a book is like building a stained-glass window, why being an orthodox Jew in Memphis wasn't just like Designing Women with better wigs, and the advantages of being offline for a w...

“Claressa Shields was the first boxer who showed me that women can be artists in the ring, like men. It was kind of like the first time I read Virginia Woolf." Essayist, boxer, novelist, chef and more, Sarah Deming  joins The Virtual Memories Show to talk about yoga’s role as a gateway drug into boxing, winning a Golden Gloves tournament, the joys of watching a great fighter, her literary idols, t...

“There's a sort of romance in riding a bicycle across the country. It's something that some people would fantasize about, and when they saw me ride into their town, it brought them back to their own dreams, their own wishes about what they wanted to fill their life with." Maya Stein is a poet, a teacher, a photographer, and more. We sat down in her restored trailer,  M.A.U.D.E. (Mobile Art Unit De...

"We move through a human-centric world as if that is reality, but we're surrounded by other species, and their species is centric to their world. I'm interested in how that works, not in humanizing other animals." In honor of K-9 Veterans Day , our guests are Sheila Keenan and Nathan Fox , the writer and the artist behind Dogs of War , a YA graphic novel about dogs on the battlefield. We talk abou...