Episode 541 – Jonathan Papernick
Podcast: Stick and Move
Virtual Memories – season 4 episode 11 – Stick and Move
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Subscribe: Spotify | TuneIn | RSS | More
“Claressa Shields was the first boxer who showed me that women can be artists in the ring, like men. It was kind of like the first time I read Virginia Woolf.”
Essayist, boxer, novelist, chef and more, Sarah Deming joins The Virtual Memories Show to talk about yoga’s role as a gateway drug into boxing, winning a Golden Gloves tournament, the joys of watching a great fighter, her literary idols, the miracle of Bernard Hopkins’ longevity, and how she found her soul.
“I really like the people who write about boxing with empathy. There’s a lot of subtly disrespectful boxing writing. I think it’s essentially because of the threat the intellectual feels from the athlete, and I think racism underlies it, too.”
We also talk about the spiteful inspiration for her first novel, the thread connecting boxers and adult film stars, the magic in the mundane, and why it’s almost impossible to write something boring about sex or a fight! Give it a listen! (And check out these wonderful essays Sarah wrote about skydiving and vodka-peddling!)
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Subscribe: Spotify | TuneIn | RSS | More
Enjoy the conversation! Then check out the archives for more great episodes! Related conversations:
Follow The Virtual Memories Show on iTunes, Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, and RSS!
About our Guest
Sarah Deming is the author of the children’s novel Iris, Messenger
Credits: This episode’s music is Brainy by The National. The conversation was recorded at Ms. Deming’s home on a pair of Blue enCORE 200 microphones
Podcast: The Slippery Animal
Podcast: Readercon 2013 – Monsters, Memories and Mythmaking
Virtual Memories – season 3 episode 16 – Readercon – Monsters, Memories and Mythmaking
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Subscribe: Spotify | TuneIn | RSS | More
“Readercon focuses on the literature. And the people who come here are really smart. They take science fiction and fantasy seriously as literature. It’s always interesting to be on panels. It’s also a real community, so I can talk with writers, small presses, editors. Beyond that, it’s really a good scene socially.”
–Theodora Goss
It’s time part two of our Readercon 2013 mega-podcast! I visited the 24th annual Readercon conference on literary fantasy & science fiction in Burlington, MA in July, and recorded five interviews in one day! Readercon has great panels and programming, a fine booksellers’ hall, and lots of fun conversation; if you’re into the “literature of the fantastic,” you really should make a point of attending this event next year.
First, Theodora Goss talks about her new accordion-shaped novella, The Thorn and the Blossom, what writing contracts taught her about writing stories, why most classic literary monsters were female, and the joys of coffee in Budapest. Then (52:00), Valya Dudycz Lupescu explores the joys of Growing Up Ukrainian in Chicago, the role of folklore and myths in her fiction, and how every immigrant wave has to choose what it holds onto when it lands in America. Finally (1:15:00), Nancy Hightower tells us why she gave up Colorado for NYC, how she made the transition from teaching the grotesque to writing epic eco-fantasy, and how we learn the cost of wilderness.
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Subscribe: Spotify | TuneIn | RSS | More
Enjoy the conversations! And check out the archives for more great episodes!
Related episodes:
- John Crowley/Scott Edelman (Readercon 2013 part 1)
- Paul Di Filippo
- Michael Dirda
- Craig Gidney
- Kyle Cassidy
Follow The Virtual Memories Show on iTunes, Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, and RSS!
About our Guests
Theodora Goss was born in Hungary and spent her childhood in various European countries before her family moved to the United States. Although she grew up on the classics of English literature, her writing has been influenced by an Eastern European literary tradition in which the boundaries between realism and the fantastic are often ambiguous. Her publications include the short story collection In The Forest Of Forgetting
Valya Dudyz Lupescu is a writer and the founding editor of the literary magazine, Conclave: A Journal of Character. Born and raised in Chicago, she received her degree in English at DePaul University, studying with Richard Jones, Maureen Seaton, and Anne Calcagno. She earned her MFA in Writing as part of the inaugural class at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where she studied under Michael D. Collins, James McManus, M. Evelina Galang, Rosellen Brown, and Carol Anshaw. Since receiving her MFA, Valya has worked as a college professor, obituary writer, content manager, goth cocktail waitress, internal communications specialist, and co-producer of the independent feature film, The Secret. She teaches workshops around the city and online, and helps to facilitate a monthly gathering of writers and artists in Chicago called the Chicago Creative Cooperative (“the Coop”). Her historical novel, The Silence of Trees, was published in 2010 (Wolfsword Press) in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook (2012, Iambik Audio). She has also been published in various journals, including Sentence, The Pedestal Magazine, and Doorknobs & Bodypaint. She is currently an Artist-in-Residence at the historic Cliff Dwellers Club and at the Everleigh Club in Chicago. Check out her website, tumblr, Facebook page and twitter feed for more.
Nancy Hightower is a speculative fiction author and poet, as well as an art critic who writes for Weird Fiction Review. Her debut epic fantasy novel, Elementarí Rising, will be published in September 2013 with Pink Narcissus Press. She has co-authored, along with Carrie Ann Baade, the Cute and Creepy exhibition catalogue, an art book of contemporary macabre and surrealist works. She reviews books for Fantasy Matters and interviews writers such as China Miéville and Neil Gaiman for DJ Spooky’s Origin Magazine (interviews can be read online here). She has a Ph.D. in literature from the University of Denver, and previously taught the rhetorics of the fantastic, uncanny, and grotesque in art and literature at the University of Colorado. Her short fiction and poetry has appeared in Up the Staircase, Word Riot, Strange Horizons, Neon, Bourbon Penn, Prick of the Spindle, Liquid Imagination, Corvus, Red Fez, Prime Number Magazine, The New York Quarterly, storySouth, and Dense Macabre, among others. She now resides in New York City. Check out her website, Facebook page and twitter feed for more.
Credits: This episode’s music is Budapest by Blimp by Thomas Dolby. All conversations were recorded in a room at the Burlington Marriott on a pair of Blue enCORE 200
League of Extraordinary Gentlemen
I’m a little busy this morning, dear readers; gotta put together an advertising promo for our October ish and finish laying out the 50-page guide for our annual conference. Also, I’m hoping to finish a slightly longer post tonight called Tabloid Dreams and the Plastic People of the Universe (which isn’t about Robert Olen Butler or Czech rock music).
So you get a couple of items from the Official Newspaper of Gil Roth:
First, Adam Kirsch reviews Mark Mazower’s book Hitler’s Empire, which chronicles Hitler’s plans for the Nazi empire’s expansion. His thesis? The holocaust was just a warm-up:
[T]here is every reason to believe that the techniques the Nazis perfected in the Holocaust would have been used, in the event of a German victory, to clear all of Eastern Europe for German settlement. Poles and Ukrainians who eagerly assisted in killing Jews in 1941-2 began to realize, as the war stretched on, that their turn might be next. Mr. Mazower quotes one German officer in Poland who explained that the Polish resistance was fueled by the Poles’ belief that the Holocaust offered “an atrocious picture of their own destiny.” Reinhard Heydrich, the SS ruler of what had been Czechoslovakia, spoke of sending millions of Czechs to Siberia — a clear echo of the euphemism used for the Jewish genocide, “resettlement in the East.”
Second, on a lighter-hearted note, today’s NYSun also has a review by Robert Winder of Jennet Conant’s new book, The Irregulars. Evidently, during WWII, there was a British spy ring operating in the U.S., and its members included Ian Fleming, C.S. Forester, Isaiah Berlin, Noël Coward, David Ogilvy (of Ogilvy + Mathers), and Roald Dahl. Ms. Conant’s book tell’s Dahl’s story as an Irregular, and it sounds like a blast:
He was handsome, tall (6-foot-5), witty, flirtatious, and a wounded British flying ace — an alluring combination that made him a dashing addition to the social scene . . . There was a good deal of top-grade tittle-tattle available to such a man, and Dahl took faithful notes and palmed them, with discreet skill, to his superiors. He gathered information on American isolationists and business lobbyists who wanted to keep America out of the war (and who argued that God could save the King if he so desired), and helped smear them as Nazi sympathizers. He even passed on reports of American plans to put a man on the moon, which were roundly laughed at in London.
All of Dahl’s derring-do, seductions and cloak-and-dagger play have to be seen in the context of that review of Hitler’s Empire. In fact, Kirsch’s review dominates the front page of today’s Arts+ section, with Ms. Conant’s book running alongside it, sans graphic. Now get to readin’!