Virtual Memories Show 685:
Sarah Minor
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“The panorama is a metaphor for the type of looking or the type of dizziness that early audiences felt. . . . It was like people in the 19th century were experiencing virtual reality for the first time.”
With her amazing new book, CAROUSEL: An Essay On Seeing (Yale University Press), Sarah Minor offers a multi-threaded exploration — lecture, memoir, and art criticism — of how we see and are seen, how our language changes with our vantage points, how all these screens are changing human consciousness (and physiology). We talk about the history of the panorama painting and how it presages today’s phone-panopticon, the COVID-era constraints that sparked the book (and the other constraints she needs for writing), and how she struggled with a conventional literary nonfiction structure for Carousel after years of crafting visual essays, then found its shape and voice after a live reading. We get into the comfort of white space, the humor of the Bayeux Tapestry (not a tapestry), the benefits of having a mother who was a late-breaking medievalist, finding live performance modes, and what happened when a student heard her read from Carousel and asked, “How do you balance historical context with reader fatigue?” We talk about how (some) students prefer lectures over discussion and how she almost made it through college without reading a contemporary writer, her shadow-performance collaboration and why it’s important to have artistic offshoots, and more. Give it a listen! And go read CAROUSEL: An Essay On Seeing!
“I’m really moved by performances that work well and so I’m interested in making that happen for others who interact with my work.”
“It’s interesting to see the book now — something I wrote over 4 or 5 years — and to note how different my concerns about looking are, how many things have changed.”
“The Bayeux Tapestry is about what’s happening to us today when we look at screens.”
Enjoy the conversation! Then check out the archives for more great episodes!
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About our Guest
Sarah Minor is the author of two previous books, Bright Archive and Slim Confessions: The Universe as a Spider or Spit, as well as the chapbook The Persistence of the Bonyleg: Annotated. She teaches writing at the University of Iowa. Minor lives in Iowa City, IA.
Follow Sarah on Bluesky and Instagram.
Credits: This episode’s music is Fella by Hal Mayforth, used with permission from the artist. The conversation was recorded at an undisclosed location on a pair of Shure Beta 58A microphones feeding into a Zoom PodTrak P4 digital recorder & interface. I recorded the intro and outro on a Heil PR-40 Dynamic Studio Recording Microphone feeding into a Zoom PodTrak P4. All processing and editing done in Adobe Audition CC. Nice photo of Sarah by Anna Morrison; others by me. It’s on my instagram.