COVID Check-In with Jane Borden

Virtual Memories Show
COVID Check-In: Jane Borden

Essayist and journalist (and one of my very first pod-guests!) Jane Borden checks in from LA. We talk about memoir-metamorphosis, her recent Vanity Fair piece on the art of making art during a plague, the solace of deep time, working for Tom Wolfe, the Ishion Hutchinson essay that recently blew her mind, the intertwining of arts criticism and memoir, whether it’s healthy to try to interpret the pandemic through metaphor, rereading her Joseph Campbell books and reflecting on her marginalia from her 20s, and more. Give it a listen! And go read I Totally Meant to Do That!

Listen to the conversation! Then check out the archives for more conversations from The Before Times.

You can listen to all these COVID Check-In episodes at The COVID-19 Sessions.

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About our Guest

Jane Borden is an author and culture journalist. She contributes regularly to the Washington Post, Vanity Fair, Real Simple, and Southern Living, among other outlets. Her work has also appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Rolling Stone, Garden & Gun, Modern Bride, Longreads, the New York Daily News, Vulture, Health, and in two creative nonfiction anthologies.

Her first book, I Totally Meant to Do That, was published by Crown in March 2011. Vanity Fair called it “affectionate” and New York Magazine deemed it “lowbrow-brilliant.” The Brooklyn Paper announced Borden as “the new ‘It’ girl.”

Before all of that, she was a staff editor for seven years at Time Out New York, where she covered pop-culture and wellness.

Credits: The conversation was recorded remotely via Zencastr. I used a Heil PR-40 Dynamic Studio Recording Microphone feeding into a Cloudlifter CL-1 and a Mackie Onyx Blackjack 2×2 USB Recording Interface. All processing and editing done in Adobe Audition CC. Photo of Jane by her, but I stole it for my instagram.

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