Virtual Memories Show #126:
Liz Hand – People From Away
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“When I was young, I always wanted to be a writer, but I thought that one could write science fiction and then also write ‘serious’ literature . . . that I could be Samuel R. Delany, but I could also be F. Scott Fitzgerald. That I could be Dorothy Parker, and I could be Angela Carter. But I found that you tend to get pigeonholed.”
Award-winning author Elizabeth Hand joins the Virtual Memories Show to talk about her new novel, Wylding Hall
“In the ’70s, I really wanted to be a photographer. I wanted to be a lot of things that I wasn’t. I wanted to be Lester Bangs. I wanted to be Patti Smith. I wanted to be all these things, but I had no talent for any of them. I was in the position of being the fan, the participant observer.”
The conversation also covers the changing models and markets of genre writing, the importance of fan interaction, why she loves coming to Readercon (where we recorded this episode), why it ultimately paid off to opt in favor of experience over college classes, and why her protagonist Cass Neary is like her “if my brake lines had been cut when I was 20 years old and I’d never been able to come back.”
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We talk about a lot of books in this episode. Here’s a list of ’em:
- Elysium
– Jennifer Marie Brissett
- The Modern Antiquarian: A Pre-Millennial Odyssey Through Megalithic Britain
– Julian Cope
- I’m with the Band: Confessions of a Groupie
– Pamela Des Barres
- Afterparty
– Daryl Gregory
- Wylding Hall
- Generation Loss
– Liz Hand
- Available Dark
– Liz Hand
- Mortal Love
– Liz Hand
- Glimmering
– Liz Hand
- The Silence of the Lambs
– Thomas Harris
- Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century, Twentieth Anniversary Edition
– Greill Marcus
- Hold Still: A Memoir with Photographs
– Sally Mann
- Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk
– Legs McNeil
- Tapping the Source
– Kem Nunn
- Edie: American Girl
– Jean Stein, George Plimpton
- The Red Pony
– John Steinbeck
- The Hobbit; or, There and Back Again
– JRR Tolkien
- Find Me
– Laura van den Berg
- Electric Eden: Unearthing Britain’s Visionary Music
– Rob Young
Enjoy the conversation! Then check out the archives for more great episodes! You might like:
- John Crowley, Scott Edelman
- Michael Dirda, part 1 and part 2
- Theodora Goss, Valya Lupescu and Nancy Hightower
- Maria Alexander
- Brad Gooch
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About our Guest
Elizabeth Hand is the bestselling author of 13 genre-spanning novels and four collections of short fiction. Her work has received the World Fantasy Award (four times), Nebula Award (twice), Shirley Jackson Award (twice), International Horror Guild Award (three times), the Mythopoeic Award, and the James Tiptree, Jr. Award, among others, and several of her books have been New York Times and Washington Post Notable Books. Her recent, critically acclaimed novels featuring Cass Neary, “one of literature’s great noir anti-heroes” (Katherine Dunn) — Generation Loss
Credits: This episode’s music is Three Hours by Nick Drake. The conversation was recorded at the Boston Marriott Burlington on a pair of Blue enCORE 200 microphones
(Maclehose Press), imagines Hitler mysteriously awakening in modern Berlin and trying to make sense of the world since 1945, and prompts us to explore what it means to laugh at Hitler (and laugh with him)! 
, by Natasa Dragnic, and 
, by Alexandre Dumas, fils. 
, came out in 2013.
(Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2015) and the forthcoming edited collection, “If Only We Had Died in Egypt!” What Ifs of Jewish History From Abraham to Zionism (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2015). He has also written numerous articles, is a frequent contributor to the Forward newspaper, and runs the blog, 
. Her Illustration work has appeared in The SD Reader, OC Weekly, The Village Voice, SPIN, Guitar Player, Musician, and Entertainment Weekly, as well as projects like 
, 
(CD box set), 
(the James Brown CD box set), Carlsbad Museum of Making Music – “Hands on the Future” exhibit, and CD covers for The Insect Surfers and Buddy Blue. Her paintings have been exhibited at La Luz de Jesus Gallery, Track 16, David Zapt Gallery, Laguna Beach Art Museum Annex, LACE (Los Angeles), COCA (Seattle), Southwestern College, Patricia Correia Gallery, Sushi Gallery and Ducky Waddle’s Emporium. She also enjoys making hand-built ceramics and wheel thrown functional pieces that she glazes and fires in her own kiln. She enjoys painting on velvet, that which we all consider the King of Kitsch, but which also makes her color and “cubismo” style of drawing even more dramatic and mysterious on the plush background of black velvet. She lives is in Encinitas, CA, with her husband, a dog, a cat, and lots of stringed instruments. They have a band called The Wigbillies.
(Amazon/New Harvest), profiles a dozen New Yorker cartoonists. We talk about the genesis of that project, lament the dearth of cartooning in print and online, bond over Abe Vigoda, and ponder why it is that so many New Yorker cartoonists had teachers or educators for parents. We also get into Richard’s history in the arts-journalism racket, the joys of Robert Walser, his time in the Boy Scouts with Matt Groening, how he built a career out of his oddball enthusiasms, and the most mind-blowing “Which celebrity did you totally melt down around?” story in the history of this podcast. (Seriously.) 
and co-authored 
with the Vermont quartet. His new book is 
, and why he thinks Thomas Pynchon understood things about the world that people are only now coming to grips with. (BONUS: I clean up some loose ends from last week’s podcast with Merrill Markoe)
, 
and 
— between 1990 and 2002. He’s written songs for plenty of acts you know, and he wrote many of the songs on 
, which is a story he gets into in our conversation. He’s also done a lot of work in movies and TV, both scoring music and writing songs. David’s 
, and has produced translations of Plato’s Timaeus and Statesman for Focus Philosophical Library. He is also author of two texts that have been used in the St. John’s music program, On the Measurement of Tones and Elements: A Workbook for Freshman Music.
(Counterpoint), but we talked about a lot more in our hour! Listen in to learn how she and her husband began recording literary readings by authors like James Baldwin, Philip Roth, John Updike, William Styron in the ’60s, and how they’ve 
, was nominated for a National Book Award and the PEN/Hemingway First Novel Award. Her other novels include 
; 
; 
; and 
, nominated for the PEN/Faulkner Award. She and her husband Harry have launched 
. The intro and outro were recorded on