The Virtual Memories Show

With The Dark-Robed Mother: A Memoir (Wesleyan University Press), poet-translator-professor Rachel Tzvia Back explores her life with high-functioning depression, weaving Ancient Greek myth, poetry, family history, interviews, and more into an amazing tapestry of life in the dark forest. We talk about the challenge of structuring the arc-less nature of depression, the shame of not being completely debilitated by her illness, how the myth of Demeter and Persephone helped her translate and understand her experience as a mother and a daughter, what it means to be the mother who fails and why she included interviews with her adult children in the book, whether there's a therapeutic aspect to writing a memoir like this, and how much of a departure this book was from her poet-roots. We also get into how she found herself in Greek and Roman myths in contrast to her orthodox Jewish upbringing, how she manages to bridge the Athens and Jerusalem divide as a teacher, her family's roots in Israel and what the country has become since she moved back 40+ years ago, what it's like to live life under rockets and how normalizing it affects us, our takes on Achilles and Odysseus, and more. More info at our site • Support The Virtual Memories Show via Stripe, Patreon, or Paypal, and subscribe to our e-newsletter

Essayist Sven Birkerts, one of my favorite past pod-guests, welcomes me back to the mic for a conversation about writing, art, mortality, resistance, technology, and selling rare books! We talk about what he's learned about writing from his Substack essay-experiment, how he rediscovered his bookselling persona with his daughter, what he gets from audiobooks, the pros and cons of knowing your audience, and more. Plus, I talk about my book-in-progress, what I've learned from stepping back from the weekly podcast routine, why I'd like to see Dylan play one more time before one or the other of us is gone, and where this podcast might be going, among other stuff. Follow Sven on Instagram, subscribe to his Substack, and check out his and his daughter's rare bookstore, Birkbooks, at eBay and Instagram • More info at our site • Support The Virtual Memories Show via Stripe, Patreon, or Paypal, and subscribe to our e-newsletter

Essayist Sven Birkerts, one of my favorite past pod-guests, welcomes me back to the mic for a conversation about writing, art, mortality, resistance, technology, and selling rare books! We talk about what he's learned about writing from his Substack essay-experiment, how he rediscovered his bookselling persona with his daughter, what he gets from audiobooks, the pros and cons of knowing your audience, and more. Plus, I talk about my book-in-progress, what I've learned from stepping back from the weekly podcast routine, why I'd like to see Dylan play one more time before one or the other of us is gone, and where this podcast might be going, among other stuff. Follow Sven on Instagram, subscribe to his Substack, and check out his and his daughter's rare bookstore, Birkbooks, at eBay and Instagram • More info at our site • Support The Virtual Memories Show via Stripe, Patreon, or Paypal, and subscribe to our e-newsletter

For his 2025 year-end wrap-up, Gil's putting the podcast & newsletter on hiatus: talk about your crazy New Year's resolutions! He talks about how he recognized It Was Time For A Break, whether or not this podcast is what gives his life meaning, what he might get up to (HINT: it's WAY past time he finishes writing his Instax book), and how months of depression after his dad's death left him feeling like he was out of options. He gets into his 2025 highlights and why he needed to visit his photo library to overcome his amnesia, the hairiness of his professional life, the thrill of receiving holiday cards from his arts-heroes, the blessings of this world, and a lot more. It's the last episode for a while, so GIVE IT A LISTEN! • More info at our site • Support The Virtual Memories Show via Stripe, Patreon, or Paypal, and subscribe to our e-newsletter

It's time for our year-end Virtual Memories Show tradition, now celebrating its thirteenth anniversary: The Guest List! I reached out to 2025's pod-guests and asked them about the favorite book(s) they read in the past year, as well as the books or authors they're hoping to read in 2026! Twenty-six guests responded with wonderful, idiosyncratic, and illuminating book recommendations: Jonathan Ames, Kayla E., Dan Goldman, Dean Haspiel, Jennifer Hayden, Rian Hughes, Paul Karasik, Glenn Kurtz, David Leopold, Seth Lorinczi, Sacha Mardou, Kate Maruyama, Whitney Matheson, Josh Neufeld, Lance Richardson, Ari Richter, ML Rio, Dmitry Samarov, Jonathan Sandler, Damion Searls, David Shields, Peter Stothard, Tom Tomorrow, Peter Trachtenberg, Cecile Wajsbrot, and Mia Wolff (and me)! This annnual episode of The Virtual Memories Show offers up a huge list of books that you're going to want to read in the new year!

Let's close out 2025 with graphic memoirist and comics journalist Jonathan Sandler! We talk about his childhood secret origin in comics, the comics course in 2017 that brought him back to the form, the process of turning his grandfather's WWII memoir into a comic, THE ENGLISH GI (with art by Brian Bicknell), and how he really became a comics aficionado after publishing his first graphic novel. We get into how he started the Graphic Memoir blog and began reviewing comics, interviewing cartoonists, visiting exhibitions, and spreading the comics gospel, and why this very podcast has provided him with a ton of inspiration. We also discuss what he's learned from and about interviewing, why he's started drawing his own comics, why he's glad he dived into making The English GI instead of researching all the other WWII graphic novels out there, what the late Tom Spurgeon meant to me and everyone else he met, why the most difficult thing about making comics is choosing what to put in the panels, and more. Follow Jonathan on Instagram and subscribe to his Graphic Memoir blog • More info at our site • Support The Virtual Memories Show via Stripe, Patreon, or Paypal, and subscribe to our e-newsletter

With THE MASTER OF CONTRADICTIONS: Thomas Mann and the Making of The Magic Mountain (Yale University Press), Morten Høi Jensen brings us a masterful biography of one of the great novels of the 20th century and shows how it and its author speak to our present moment. We talk about Morten's history with Mann's novel, his weeks of research in the sanatoria of Davos and his discovery of how much of The Magic Mountain's world is intact a century later, and how Mann's novel changed for him in the process of writing this book. We get into Mann's political transformation from a nationalist into an antifascist, how art & politics can make for a disastrous mix, Mann's rivalry with his novelist brother Heinrich, and what it was like to write about a novel about life in a TB clinic while in the middle of a pandemic. We also discuss the weird connection I draw between Mann and Thomas Pynchon, how Morten became a literary biographer via the biography of another novel, spiritualism before and after WWI, how he came around on the chapter of The Magic Mountain that bored him in his earlier readings, why Robert Musil resented Mann, whether it's okay to write margin notes and never look at them, and more. Follow Morten on Instagram and Bluesky • More info at our site • Support The Virtual Memories Show via Stripe, Patreon, or Paypal, and subscribe to our e-newsletter

With her amazing new book, DANTE: THE ESSENTIAL COMMEDIA (Liveright), scholar Prue Shaw brings us a canto-by-canto journey through Dante's masterwork, interweaving translated verses with her commentary, and serving as a Virgil-like guide to the poem. We talk about how she was inspired by John Carey's The Essential Paradise Lost, why the Paradiso was her biggest challenge, how the poem has changed for her over the course of her life, and why she went with prose translations of Dante rather than verse. We get into Dante's balance of pride in his art and his humility before God, the modern sound of Dante's verse and the challenge of translating Italian into English, what she's learning from helping translate Shelley into Italian, why she wants The Essential Commedia to serve as a gateway drug into Dante, and the nature of language & why the Tower of Babel plays a big role in the Commedia. We also discuss her incredible work on third edition of the Digital Commedia, life after the death of her husband, Clive James, and putting a collection of his final poems together, how an issue of the X-Men turned me on to Dante as a kid, my changing views on Ulysses in the Commedia, why sloth is my fave of the deadly sins, and more. More info at our site • Support The Virtual Memories Show via Stripe, Patreon, or Paypal, and subscribe to our e-newsletter

Who were the men who built the Empire State Building? Glenn Kurtz returns to the show to tell their story with MEN AT WORK: The Empire State Building and the Untold Story of the Craftsmen who Built It (Seven Stories Press). We talk about how he accidentally fell into this project, how "turn every page" led him to a key discovery about Lewis Hine's photos of the Empire State construction, how his experience researching and writing THREE MINUTES IN POLAND helped him with this book, his childhood connection with the Empire State, and how identifying their subjects affects the mythic aura of Hine's photographs. We get into the corporate perspective of the building and how it dehumanizes the workers who built it, and similarly how that heroic collectivist notion of The Worker devalues workers as people, whether craftsmanship and artisanship survived the transition into mass production during the skyscraper era, Hine's authorial fallacy and the genius of his portraits, and what the Empire State says about the immigration-dynamics of the workforce and the role of unions, We also discuss the question of context and how the question, "What are we looking at?" can reveal the world, the resonance of Hine's Icarus/Sky Boy pic, the messiness of history, the joy of Virginia Woolf's diaries, why Glenn just wants to write a novel without it inspiring a nonfiction project, and more. Follow Glenn on Instagram and Facebook • More info at our site • Support The Virtual Memories Show via Stripe, Patreon, or Paypal, and subscribe to our e-newsletter

Who knew that olive oil makes head lice sleepy? Jennifer Hayden rejoins the show to celebrate her new graphic memoir/anti-cookbook, WHERE THERE'S SMOKE, THERE'S DINNER: Confessions of a Cartoonist Cook (Top Shelf), share comedic tales of domestic mess, and rebel against the expectations of wife/motherhood. We talk about the lifetime of bad cooking that led to this new book, the revenge of turning her bad experiences into comedy, how she found a unique form to tell her story, and how a youthful reading of Babar left her with a lifelong phobia of mushrooms. We get into how she was reverse-inspired by Lucy Knisley's Relish, how watercolors gave her a color toolbox for her comics, what this book taught her about storytelling, and how her daughter diagnosed her as "expectation-allergic." We also discuss how she's been cheating on comics with spoken word storytelling, what life after memoir is like, how her breast-cancer memoir doubled as a last will & testament for her family, the process of finding a new creative process and narrative voice, her shamanic experience attending The Moth, the significance of the tarot card she repeatedly draws when she's hard at work on a book, why the folk names of herbs are like edible emotion, and more. Follow Jennifer on Instagram and Facebook, and subscribe to her Substack • More info at our site • Support The Virtual Memories Show via Stripe, Patreon, or Paypal, and subscribe to our e-newsletter