Podcast: On Cats and Calamities

Virtual Memories – season 3 episode 30 –
On Cats and Calamities

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“Love is usually the end of the sentence, the end of the riddle. But what does love call forth from you? What are the faculties that come into play? It’s one of those questions that we think is settled.”

What does the search for a lost cat have to tell us about the nature of love and marriage? Peter Trachtenberg joins The Virtual Memories Show to try to answer that question and to talk about his work, including The Book of Calamities: Five Questions About Suffering and Its Meaning and Another Insane Devotion: On the Love of Cats and Persons! We discuss the tension between non-fiction and fiction, how to search for a lost cat, where the line is between the private and the public, how he stumbled into the lyric essay form, how the process of getting clean and sober influenced his writing, how marriages fall apart and how they (maybe) come back together, and more!

“Art is high-level lying.”

I’m not going to lie; our conversation jumps all over the darned place, because Peter happens to have an even more discursive mind than your scatterbrained host’s. But it’s a great talk about the nature of non-fiction writing, Buddhism, the relationship of facts to truth, respecting intuition, and how to navigate memory’s internal landscape. Sadly, we didn’t yet have the news that Another Insane Devotion received the 2013 Golden Purr Award for excellence in cat writing from Cat Wisdom 101, but there’s still some cat-talk.

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Enjoy the conversation! Then check out the archives for more great episodes! Related conversations:

• Phillip Lopate
• David Gates
• Wallis Wilde-Menozzi
• Willard Spiegelman
• Jane Borden

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About our Guest

Peter Trachtenberg is the author of 7 Tattoos: A Memoir in the Flesh (Penguin Books), The Book of Calamities (Little, Brown & Co.) and Another Insane Devotion (Da Capo). His essays, journalism, and short fiction have been published in The New Yorker, Harper’s, BOMB, TriQuarterly, O, The New York Times Travel Magazine, and A Public Space. His commentaries have been broadcast on NPR’S All Things Considered. Peter has received an NYFA artist’s fellowship, the Nelson Algren Award for Short Fiction, a Whiting Writers Fellowship, a 2010 Fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, and a 2012 residency at the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center. The Book of Calamities was given the 2009 Phi Beta Kappa Society’s Ralph Waldo Emerson Award “for scholarly studies that contribute significantly to interpretations of the intellectual and cultural condition of humanity.” He has taught creative writing at Bennington College, the New School, the University of North Carolina at Wilmington, the City College of New York, St. Mary’s College of California, the University of Iowa Summer Writers Festival, and Ashland University. He’s also taught in Bard College’s Language & Thinking Program. Since 2011, he has been an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Pittsburgh.

Credits: This episode’s music is Stray Cat Blues by The Rolling Stones. The conversation was recorded at the home of a friend of Peter on a pair of Blue enCORE 200 microphones feeding into a Zoom H4n recorder. The intro and outro were recorded at home on a Blue Yeti USB Microphone. Processing was done in Audacity and Garage Band. Photo of Peter Trachtenberg by me.