Episode 240 – John Crowley and Michael Meyer
Episode 239 – Pete Bagge and Mimi Pond
Episode 238 – Shannon Wheeler
Virtual Memories Show 238: Shannon Wheeler
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“Cartooning for The New Yorker is like being in a jazz club, and you don’t go into a jazz club and play the Ramones.”
It’s late-night podcast-action with cartoonist Shannon Wheeler! We get into the history of his Too Much Coffee Man comics and his new book, Sh*t My President Says: The Illustrated Tweets of Donald J. Trump
“Liberals can be some of the most conservative people you’ll ever meet.”
Enjoy the conversation! Then check out the archives for more great episodes!
Lots of ways to follow The Virtual Memories Show! iTunes, Twitter, Instagram, Soundcloud, Facebook, Tumblr, and RSS!
About our Guest
Shannon Wheeler is the Eisner Award-winning creator of Too Much Coffee Man, who has appeared internationally in newspapers, magazines, comic books and opera houses. He has contributed to a variety of publications, including The Onion newspaper and The New Yorker magazine. Wheeler currently lives in Portland, OR with his cats, chickens, bees, girlfriend and children. He publishes a comic every day at tmcm.com.
Credits: This episode’s music is Nothing’s Gonna Bring Me Down by David Baerwald, used with permission from the artist. The conversation was recorded at an undisclosed location on a pair of Blue enCORE 200 Microphones
Episode 237 – Ann Telnaes and Matt Wuerker
Virtual Memories Show 237:
Ann Telnaes and Matt Wuerker
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“I did some hard-hitting cartoons during the Bush administration. . . . I kind of wish I held back a little because now it’s like, ‘Where do we go from here?'” –Ann Telnaes
It’s a double-Pulitzer-winner episode! First, the great editorial cartoonist, animator and essayist Ann Telnaes joins the show to talk about the role of satire against the abuse of power, her political awakening, her present sense of urgency and her upcoming Trump’s ABC (Fantagraphics), the reaction to the Charlie Hebdo murders, the images editors won’t print, and the sanctuary of the Alexander Calder room at the National Gallery. Then past guest Matt Wuerker returns to the show (here’s our first ep.) to talk about The Swamp, the loss of comity and the growth of tribalism in contemporary DC (characterized by that weekend’s dueling rallies between Trump supporters and Juggalos), the problem with having easy targets, bringing conservative cartoons into his weekly roundup for Politico, taking up fly-fishing in his dotage, and more! Give it a listen! And go preorder Trump’s A B C
“It hasn’t been this good for political cartoonists since Nixon and Watergate.” –Matt Wuerker
Enjoy the conversation! Then check out the archives for more great episodes!
Lots of ways to follow The Virtual Memories Show! iTunes, Twitter, Instagram, Soundcloud, Facebook, Tumblr, and RSS!
About our Guests
Ann Telnaes creates editorial cartoons in various mediums — animation, visual essays, live sketches, and traditional print — for The Washington Post. She won the Pulitzer Prize in 2001 for her print cartoons and the National Cartoonists Society’s Reuben for Outstanding Cartoonist of the Year for 2016.
Telnaes’ print work was shown in a solo exhibition at the Great Hall in the Thomas Jefferson Building of the Library of Congress in 2004. Her first book, Humor’s Edge
Telnaes attended California Institute of the Arts and graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts, specializing in character animation. Before beginning her career as an editorial cartoonist, Telnaes worked for several years as a designer for Walt Disney Imagineering. She has also animated and designed for various studios in Los Angeles, New York, London, and Taiwan.
Matt Wuerker is the staff cartoonist and illustrator for POLITICO. He likes to cross hatch… a lot. He was the winner of the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Cartooning. He was a finalist for the award in 2009 and 2010. He has also been awarded the 2010 Herblock Prize (presented at the Library of Congress) and the 2010 Berryman Award by the National Press Foundation.
Credits: This episode’s music is Nothing’s Gonna Bring Me Down by David Baerwald, used with permission from the artist. The conversation was recorded in my room at the Bethesda North Marriott during the Small Press Expo on a pair of Blue enCORE 200 Microphones
Episode 236 – Mimi Pond
Episode 235 – Liz Hand and John Clute
Virtual Memories Show 235:
Liz Hand and John Clute
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“I think of a collector as a gardener, rather than someone who just buys books. Like gardeners, they do a lot of murdering. They cull books.”
It’s another Readercon episode! First, Liz Hand rejoins the show for a little conversation about what she’s been reading lately (it’s some creepy stuff, of course), the regenerative aspects of Readercon, why the novella is ideal for dark/spooky fiction, and whether the attendee wearing an ASIA t-shirt is doing so ironically. Then John Clute talks about the ruins of futurity and the launch of the Clute Science Fiction Library at Telluride Institute. We get into the need for visual presentation and accessibility of original books in their context (including dust jackets), his transition from book accumulator to collector, the externalization of one’s mind into one’s library, why he doesn’t write fiction, the Easter eggs he sneaks into the Science Fiction Encyclopedia, why Galaxy Quest is the best Star Trek movie (except for Wrath of Khan), reaching a uniform degree of incompletion, generational shifts in SF/F, and the sneaky adoption of Fantastika. Give it a listen! And go buy Liz Hand’s new collection, Fire.
“Most scholars, academic institutions, libraries are not interested in context. In that sense, the Science Fiction Library at Telluride is transgressive.”
Enjoy the conversation! Then check out the archives for more great episodes!
Lots of ways to follow The Virtual Memories Show! iTunes, Twitter, Instagram, Soundcloud, Facebook, Tumblr, and RSS!
About our Guests
Elizabeth Hand flunked out of college a couple of years after seeing Patti Smith perform and became involved in the nascent punk scenes in DC and New York. From 1979 to 1986 she worked at the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum. She was eventually readmitted to university to study cultural anthropology and received her BA. She is the author of many novels, including The Winterlong Trilogy
John Clute is a multiple Hugo Award and World Fantasy Award winner and Visiting Fellow at Anglia Ruskin University in Cambridge, England. He is perhaps best known for his editorship, with David Langford, and others, of the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (sf-encyclopedia.com). As an illustrious and prolific reviewer and essayist, he has profoundly influenced science fiction writing in his time.
Credits: This episode’s music is Nothing’s Gonna Bring Me Down by David Baerwald, used with permission from the artist. The conversation was recorded at the Marriott in Quincy, MA during Readercon on a pair of Blue enCORE 200 Microphones
Episode 234 – Kathy Bidus
Virtual Memories Show 234: Kathy Bidus
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“If you write something and you think it’s not that good, you should throw it away. If you write something and you think it’s really good, you should throw half of it away.”
Poet/muse/amanuensis Kathy Bidus joins the show to talk about her contribution to the new collection SisterWriterEaters (Griffith Moon). Along the way, we get into her “quit college and move to New York” decision in the late ’70s, the formation of an art salon in the early 80s, her Jean Valjean moment, meeting her husband (artist and past pod-guest Drew Friedman), Mad cartoonist Al Jaffee’s impact on her sense of humor, the Old Jewish Comedian she’s had a crush on all these years, what she learned from raising champion beagles, and the worst “please read my poetry” moment she ever had. Plus: I talk a LOT about dogs. Give it a listen! And go buy SisterWriterEaters
Enjoy the conversation! Then check out the archives for more great episodes!
Lots of ways to follow The Virtual Memories Show! iTunes, Twitter, Instagram, Soundcloud, Facebook, Tumblr, and RSS!
About our Guest
Kathy Bidus was born and raised in Philadelphia and attended Kutztown university before moving to New York City, where she met her husband, artist Drew Friedman. Bids is a published poet, and in collaboration with Friedman, has written illustrated humor pieces for The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, and The New York Observer, among many others. For the last twenty years, she has raised champion show beagles. She currently resides in rural Pennsylvania with Drew.
Credits: This episode’s music is Nothing’s Gonna Bring Me Down by David Baerwald, used with permission from the artist. The conversation was recorded at Ms. Bidus’ home on a pair of Blue enCORE 200 Microphones
Episode 233 – Ellen Datlow
Virtual Memories Show 233: Ellen Datlow
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“The biggest part of the editor’s job is asking questions. If something’s not on the page, you have to ask the writer.”
Legendary (as in mega-award-winning) horror, science fiction and fantasy editor Ellen Datlow joins the show to talk about her career. We get into defining horror (and its subset, the conte cruel), how the business has changed and hasn’t, the proper care and feeding of writers, dealing with diversity and representation in the anthologies she edits, finding good stories in translation, the pros and cons of blurring genre boundaries, keeping up with new voices, her preference for editing short fiction over novels, the writers she wishes she solicited stories from, running the monthly Fantastic Fiction reading series at the KGB Bar, the editing lesson she got from Ben Bova, and why it’s never good when an author says, “This is the best thing I’ve ever written”! Give it a listen!
“Anytime a writer sends me a story and tells me it’s the best thing they’ve ever written, it’s always shit.”
Enjoy the conversation! Then check out the archives for more great episodes!
Lots of ways to follow The Virtual Memories Show! iTunes, Twitter, Instagram, Soundcloud, Facebook, Tumblr, and RSS!
About our Guest
Ellen Datlow has been editing science fiction, fantasy, and horror short fiction for over thirty-five years as fiction editor of OMNI Magazine and editor of Event Horizon and SCIFICTION. She currently acquires short fiction for Tor.com. In addition, she has edited more than 90 science fiction, fantasy, and horror anthologies, including the annual The Best Horror of the Year, The Doll Collection
Her forthcoming anthologies are Haunted Nights
Ellen has won multiple World Fantasy Awards, Locus Awards, Hugo Awards, Stoker Awards, International Horror Guild Awards, Shirley Jackson Awards, and the 2012 Il Posto Nero Black Spot Award for Excellence as Best Foreign Editor. She was named recipient of the 2007 Karl Edward Wagner Award, given at the British Fantasy Convention for “outstanding contribution to the genre,” was honored with the Life Achievement Award by the Horror Writers Association in acknowledgment of superior achievement over an entire career, and honored with the World Fantasy Life Achievement Award at the 2014 World Fantasy Convention.
She lives in New York and co-hosts the monthly Fantastic Fiction Reading Series at KGB Bar. Ellen is active on Facebook, Twitter, and Flickr.
Credits: This episode’s music is Nothing’s Gonna Bring Me Down by David Baerwald, used with permission from the artist. The conversation was recorded at Ms. Datlow’s apartment on a pair of Blue enCORE 200 Microphones
Episode 232 – Gordon Van Gelder
Virtual Memories Show 232:
Gordon Van Gelder
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“For years, my basic rejection letter would use ‘alas,’ and the SF community picked up on that and started calling them ‘alas-o-grams.'”
Editor/publisher Gordon Van Gelder joins the show to talk about his career in the science fiction and fantasy fields. We get into publishing F&SF Magazine, coping with burnout, balancing the demands of art and business, exploring the differences between editing for magazines vs. anthologies, trying to avoid disruption, handling diversity issues without implementing a quota, figuring out the dystopian theme of his current run of anthologies, dealing with the cultural, um, norms of stories of past decades, avoiding the perils of chasing “name” authors and rejecting a story by Ray Bradbury, making the shift from print to online, watching new writers develop a strong voice, working with the necessary egotism of writers, explaining how the internet has wrecked SF/F criticism, and more! Give it a listen! And go buy his new anthology, Go Forth And Multiply: Twelve Tales of Repopulation
“The best stories transcend race and gender. . . . On the page, everyone is black and white.”
Enjoy the conversation! Then check out the archives for more great episodes!
Lots of ways to follow The Virtual Memories Show! iTunes, Twitter, Instagram, Soundcloud, Facebook, Tumblr, and RSS!
About our Guest
Gordon Van Gelder published his first story in 100 Great Fantasy Short, Short Stories
Credits: This episode’s music is Nothing’s Gonna Bring Me Down by David Baerwald, used with permission from the artist. The conversation was recorded at the Boston Marriott Quincy during Readercon weekend on a pair of Blue enCORE 200 Microphones
Episode 231 – Sven Birkerts
Virtual Memories Show 231:
Sven Birkerts
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“There are thresholds or shelves where we go from having incremental change to systemic moments of transformation.”
In the ’90s, Sven Birkerts cautioned us about the impact of technology on reading with The Gutenberg Elegies
“When I was your age, I discovered the doubling over of one’s own experience. . . . Themes, recurrences and motifs in my life began to manifest. Then as if on command, the whole sunken continent of memory began to detach from the sea-floor.”
Enjoy the conversation! Then check out the archives for more great episodes!
Lots of ways to follow The Virtual Memories Show! iTunes, Twitter, Instagram, Soundcloud, Facebook, Tumblr, and RSS!
About our Guest
Sven Birkerts is the author of Changing the Subject: Art and Attention in the Internet Age
Credits: This episode’s music is Nothing’s Gonna Bring Me Down by David Baerwald, used with permission from the artist. The conversation was recorded at Mr. Birkerts’ home on a pair of Blue enCORE 200 Microphones