{"id":17821,"date":"2025-11-11T14:41:21","date_gmt":"2025-11-11T19:41:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/?p=17821"},"modified":"2025-11-11T14:41:23","modified_gmt":"2025-11-11T19:41:23","slug":"episode-663-jennifer-hayden","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/episode-663-jennifer-hayden","title":{"rendered":"Episode 663 – Jennifer Hayden"},"content":{"rendered":"

Virtual Memories Show 663:
\nJennifer Hayden<\/a><\/p>\n

https:\/\/traffic.libsyn.com\/secure\/virtualmemories\/Episode_663_-_Jennifer_Hayden.mp3<\/a><\/audio><\/div>

Podcast: Play in new window<\/a> | Download<\/a><\/p>

Subscribe: Spotify<\/a> | TuneIn<\/a> | RSS<\/a> | More<\/a><\/p>\n

“The great crystallizing aspect of aging is that the older you get, the more intense you get about what you really are, and the less you give a shit about all that stuff you’re not.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\"\"<\/a>Who knew that olive oil makes head lice sleepy? Jennifer Hayden<\/a> rejoins the show to celebrate her new graphic memoir\/anti-cookbook, WHERE THERE\u2019S SMOKE, THERE\u2019S DINNER: Confessions of a Cartoonist Cook<\/a> (Top Shelf), share comedic tales of domestic mess, and rebel against the expectations of wife\/motherhood. We talk about the lifetime of bad cooking that led to this new book, the revenge of turning her bad experiences into comedy, how she found a unique form to tell her story, and how a youthful reading of Babar<\/em> left her with a lifelong phobia of mushrooms. We get into how she was reverse-inspired by Lucy Knisley’s Relish<\/a>, how watercolors gave her a color toolbox for her comics, what this book taught her about storytelling, and how her daughter diagnosed her as “expectation-allergic.” We also discuss how she’s been cheating on comics with spoken word storytelling<\/a>, what life after memoir is like, how her breast-cancer memoir<\/a> doubled as a last will & testament for her family, the process of finding a new creative process and narrative voice, her shamanic experience attending The Moth<\/em>, the significance of the tarot card she repeatedly draws when she’s hard at work on a book, why the folk names of herbs are like edible emotion, and more. Give it a listen!<\/a> And go read WHERE THERE\u2019S SMOKE, THERE\u2019S DINNER<\/a>!<\/p>\n

“My great fear as a mother is that I would poison my children. But wasn’t going to poison them with frozen food, or McDonalds, or takeout; I had to try to poison them on my own.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n