“The core Hampshire experience was figuring out how to do things for myself and figuring out how to excite other people about what I wanted to do.”

It’s time for the first installment of The Hampshire Tapes! Halstead York (F88) joins the show to talk about his experience at Hampshire College, how the spirit of the school and its grand experiment of student-driven education has stuck with him all these years, how the school’s structure taught him how to pitch projects, how the cover of an unstructured “hippie-trippy” college (my words) masked intense competitiveness and the need to be a self-starter, how reflecting on his time there has helped him maintain his techno-utopianism, and plenty more. Give it a listen!

“It’s amazing how much Hampshire prepared me — in stark terms — for what I would actually be doing for a lot of my career, which was pitching.”

“With interns from Hampshire, there was no middle-ground: you would either get absolute morons that thought they were geniuses, or some of the most self-possessed, thoughtful, intelligent people I ever worked with.”

“Hampshire’s experiment is a worthwhile alternative education structure. It provided a unique take on how you should approach higher education, and what a degree should mean.”

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

Lots of ways to follow The Virtual Memories Show! iTunes, Spotify, BlueSky, Instagram, YouTube, Tumblr, and good ol’ RSS!

About our Guest

Halstead York is a technology product consultant and co-host of The Inflection Cut podcast. He has worked at the crossroads of media and technology for over a quarter of a century. In 1994 he took a wrong turn while trying to get a feature film edited and accidentally co-founded Journeyman, a pioneering services company specializing in digital media production and integration. Over the years, he has worked with Sony, Intel, and Microsoft as a media consultant, as well as Lightstorm Entertainment, Nike, and Hasbro, doing software development and integration.

Halstead’s lifelong passion for media and its relationship with culture has lead him to teach media studies at Portland State University and the American Film Institute, and create media programs for Portland Community College and The Northwest Academy. He watches too many movies and plays too many video games for a man of his quickly advancing age, and hopes that he’ll figure out what he wants to be when he grows up before his AARP card arrives.

Follow Halstead on Letterboxd, Bluesky and Instagram, and subscribe to The Inflection Cut podcast.

Also, he may kill me for posting this, but here’s a pic of Halstead (2nd from right) & other Hampshire pals (yes, that’s me on the far left), c.1990-91:

Credits: This episode’s music is Fella by Hal Mayforth, used with permission from the artist. The conversation was recorded remotely via Zencastr. I used a Heil PR-40 Dynamic Studio Recording Microphone feeding into a Zoom PodTrak P4. All processing and editing done in Adobe Audition CC. Photo of Halstead by someone else. It’s on my instagram.

“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!

Lots of ways to follow The Virtual Memories Show! iTunes, Spotify, BlueSky, Instagram, YouTube, Tumblr, and good ol’ RSS!

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.

“I think mythology and fairy tales provide a good baseline, because almost everyone has read a subset of those stories, and the symbolism is something most people can reach for and relate to.”

With her debut poetry collection, OFFERINGS FOR ORDINARY GODS (Clash Books), Ali Trotta brings myth, magick, tarot, and ritual to bear on the eternal & primal struggle of women. We talk about those roots and how tarot and ancient myth inspired her work, where tarot began for her — ’90s, The Craft — and how past guest Katelan Foisy resparked her interest and showed her new depths in the cards, and her focus on revising ancient myths to retell the stories of wronged women like Persephone, Medusa, and Dido. We get into how she feels at seeing her work collected and how to look at her development as a poet without cringing at her younger selves, how everything is fair game and poetry can serve as exorcism, and how confession can be deeply coded in a poem. We also discuss the teacher who gave her the tools to read poetry deeply, her Very Online-ness and how she’s built relationships and writer communities online (and how it’s good to be part of the Group-Chat), her online #tinypoem flurries and how rockstar she felt when someone got a tattoo of one on their arm, the project(s) she’d love to write, and more. PLUS: She reads a few of her poems and gives me my second tarot reading of the summer! Give it a listen! And go read OFFERINGS FOR ORDINARY GODS!

“I know I’ve done my job as a writer if I’ve made someone cry or made someone angry.”

“We get stuck in the everyday bits of life. You forget the things that are worth living for, the things that matter. You can sacrifice yourself as much as you want to earning a living and paying taxes, but you can’t forget to live. Don’t sacrifice the pieces of yourself that you shouldn’t.”

“I think in poems. That’s how I look at the world and figure the world out, and figure myself out.”

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

Lots of ways to follow The Virtual Memories Show! iTunes, Spotify, BlueSky, Instagram, YouTube, Tumblr, and good ol’ RSS!

About our Guest

Ali Trotta is a poet, writer, editor, word nerd, and unapologetic coffee addict. Her poetry has been published in Uncanny, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Asimov’s, Small Wonders, The Deadlands, Fireside, Enchanted Living, Strange Horizons, Cicada, Nightmare, Mermaids Monthly, The Best of Uncanny Magazine (Subterranean Press), and several of the Rhysling Anthology compilations. She lives in New Jersey with a rescue cat named Thor, who is part Maine Coon and part gremlin.

Follow Ali on Bluesky, Instagram and Tumblr, and subscribe to her newsletter.

Credits: This episode’s music is Fella by Hal Mayforth, used with permission from the artist. The conversation was recorded at Ali’s home 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. Photo of Ali by her; cover art of book by Katelan Foisy; selfie of us by me. It’s on my instagram.

“By contrasting the Declaration with the Emancipation Proclamation, I was showing some of the evolution that also happens in the Constitution.”

Let’s celebrate (or commemorate) America’s independence with an amazing new double book, DECLARATION ILLUSTRATED / EMANCIPATION ILLUSTRATED (Drawn & Quarterly). R. Sikoryak rejoins the show to talk about adapting foundational American documents (verbatim!) with a mind-blowing array of comic art parodies, ranging from the Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers to Jump Start to Check, Please! to Thanos! We talk about how this project spun out of his CONSTITUTION ILLUSTRATED in 2020, why he decided to include the Emancipation Proclamation and the Gettysburg Address alongside the Declaration of Independence, how he gave himself some pretty strict rules about which artists and characters he could and couldn’t use, including not re-using artists he used in his Constitution (which meant employing 200 different artists’ styles over the course of these books), and his goal of trying to bring the whole history of American comics into these books. We get into what it’s all taught him about America, the ways these documents show how America changed, why he doesn’t take offense at being a called a rip-off artist, and why he conceives of these books like a quilt. We also discuss whether he’s more sensitive about parodying art by living artists or dead ones, why he wants to get back to comics-parody adaptations of classic books and plays, the ways that access to comprehensive digital comics archives is both good and bad for his work, the artists he wishes could have included in these books, why he brought in many African-American artists and characters in the Emancipation portion of the book, but still found room for Barney Google & Snuffy Smith, the page that almost broke him (okay, it was his Emil Ferris parody), his series of 8-page comics stories for Tom Hanks’ first novel (!), and a lot more. Give it a listen! And go read DECLARATION ILLUSTRATED / EMANCIPATION ILLUSTRATED!

“All my work is about constraints.”

“There’s so much history referenced in the grievances of the Declaration that I just didn’t know and had to learn.”

“If someone else did these books, they could have chosen entirely different artists for every single page. Anybody could do this, and they’d be different. When I was young, I thought about making the definitive parody of a certain comic, but I got over that.”

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

Lots of ways to follow The Virtual Memories Show! iTunes, Spotify, BlueSky, Instagram, YouTube, Tumblr, and good ol’ RSS!

About our Guest

Cartoonist R. Sikoryak is the author of Constitution Illustrated, Masterpiece Comics, Terms and Conditions, and The Unquotable Trump. He’s adapted the classics for various anthologies, including The Graphic Canon and RAW. His comics and illustrations have appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times Book Review, The Nation, The Onion, MAD, and more. He’s done storyboards and character designs for Augenblick Studios on various animated projects. He teaches in the illustration department at Parsons School for Design and previously at The Center for Cartoon Studies. Since 1997, he’s presented his live comics performance series, Carousel, around the United States and Canada. He lives in New York City with his spouse, Kriota Willberg.

Listen to my 2012 and 2020 conversations with Bob.

Credits: This episode’s music is Fella by Hal Mayforth, used with permission from the artist. The conversation was recorded at Bob’s home 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. Photo of me & Bob by me. It’s on my instagram.

“I was on twitter and saw someone say, ‘The Weeknd makes music for haunted strip clubs,’ and that idea is something my brain kept coming back to.”

After a 12-year Virtual Memories gap, Katie Skelly is back to celebrate her fantastic new graphic novel, HEAVEN (Fantagraphics)! But that’s not all: she’s also got the Bad Girl Tarot II (Kickstarter closing July 16, 2026), her horror comics anthology, Viscere, and the Thick Lines podcast! We talk about how she restructured her life and creativity post-lockdown, how she wound up marrying Jaime Hernandez, moving to LA, abandoning the Mets, and finding a community of cartoonists (spoiler: community is the thread that runs through Katie’s art and life), the funny tweet about The Weeknd that inspired HEAVEN, why she designed this new tarot deck to be like a prop for a movie you’d want to live in, and why she didn’t learn from my example and avoid making her own podcast. We get into how writing Ed Piskor’s obituary broke her, and the episode in Ed’s life that she takes as a cautionary note, the festival that drew her into the comics world, how she measures herself against her yearly Nabokov read, why she’s pretty much done with social media, the flight delay that led to her next comics project, and more! PLUS, Katie reads my tarot as we talk about what it’ll take for me to finish my book! Give it a listen! And go read HEAVEN!

“I started to incorporate tarot into my daily practice of life. Not in a way that restricts anything, but just in a way that gets a little bit more perspective or think about things that are just out of my control. It’s about a getting a bigger picture.”

“You have this idea in your head and you feel like you can project it out of your mind onto the wall and define exactly what it is, and you can’t! You can’t! You just have to work through it.”

“In my way, I’m going to honor Ed Piskor’s life by just being happy with everything I get: The win doesn’t matter if you don’t feel it.”

“Making an anthology was like, ‘I’m gonna outsource all my pain and get OTHER people to draw!'”

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

Lots of ways to follow The Virtual Memories Show! iTunes, Spotify, BlueSky, Instagram, YouTube, Tumblr, and good ol’ RSS!

About our Guest

Katie Skelly is the author of Maids, The Agency, and My Pretty Vampire. She was born in Pennsylvania in 1985 and holds a B.A. in Art History from Syracuse University. Katie lives in Los Angeles with her husband Jaime and their two cats.

Artists in (my) residence

Here’s the tarot spread Katie laid out for my reading:

And heck, here’s the three of us, because those two are adorable:

Credits: This episode’s music is Fella by Hal Mayforth, used with permission from the artist. The conversation was recorded at the AC Hotel in Beverly Hills 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. Publicity photo of Katie by someone else; other ones by me. It’s on my instagram.

“The creation of culture is what marks us as human beings, and the fact that everybody has that desire connects us to each other.”

With his amazing new book, THE MIDNIGHT SPECIAL: The Secret Prison History of American Music (WW Norton), author Colin Asher explores how the criminal justice system changed the course of twentieth century music. We talk about how Elmo Hope’s Sounds from Rikers Island album inspired the book, how he chose the five artists to focus on — Huddie “Lead Belly” Ledbetter, Elmo Hope, Johnny Cash, Ike White, and Tupac Shakur —, the history of the carceral state, criminality and the popular images of Black and white “outlaw” artists, and how many artists’ careers were shaped, derailed, inspired by prisons. We get into the tightrope act of using Johnny Cash as a counterpoint to the racial dynamics of the book (as well as the work Cash did for prison reform), why he had to close the book with the story of Tupac and his mother, Afeni Shakur, and how hip-hop developed in response to America’s mass incarceration movement, how the philosophy of incarceration shifted from rehabilitation to punishment, Musicambia‘s work to bring music education into prisons, and what it means to pursue the arts for personal growth, even when you’re on death row. We also discuss how some arts writing can suck the joy out of the arts, why he prefers discussing art in relation to society rather than in relation to other works of art, why he made playlists for The Midnight Special, how playing vinyl records makes music a choice instead of wallpaper, the “burn the world down and replace it with an utopia” phase of his youth, the secret origins of his writing career, his dream projects (incl. the novel he’s noodling on), and more. Give it a listen! And go read THE MIDNIGHT SPECIAL!

“The problem isn’t that Johnny Cash was granted any sort of grace from the law, it’s that everybody isn’t granted that sort of grace.”

“If I’m beating the drum for a cause, it’s that music makes people better, that the skill of learning an instrument is going to make people more productive outside. That may well be true, but my core belief is that it doesn’t matter.”

“In my 20s I did a bunch of working-class jobs — bike messenger, drove a truck, worked in a warehouse — and at some point people stop taking you seriously if you have no education at all and look like you make 12 grand a year.”

“Three things I know a good deal about: literature, music, and politics, specifically political conflict. . . . I’d love to write a book about people who dedicate their lives to political movements and then outlive those movements.”

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

Lots of ways to follow The Virtual Memories Show! iTunes, Spotify, BlueSky, Instagram, YouTube, Tumblr, and good ol’ RSS!

About our Guest

Colin Asher is the author of THE MIDNIGHT SPECIAL: The Secret Prison History of American Music. He also wrote Never a Lovely so Real: The Life and Work of Nelson Algren, a literary biography written as a work of creative nonfiction. That book was celebrated in The New York Review of Books, the New Yorker, and the New York Times Book Review, among others. It was named “One of the Most Anticipated Books of 2019” by Apple Books, a “Book of the Week” by Publishers Weekly, and an “Editors’ Choice” selection by the New York Times Book Review. Both Publishers Weekly and Booklist gave it starred reviews.

Born in Morgantown, WV, and raised in Brooklyn, NY, Colin dropped out of high school and spent a decade in California, working as a bike messenger, stocking shelves in a warehouse, and driving a truck. Eventually he started working in homeless services, then enrolled in the City College of San Francisco. Later, he received a Bachelors of Science from Northeastern University, and a Master of Arts from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. Despite the fact that he wrote a book about musicians, Colin has no musical talent – but that didn’t stop him from spending one of the best years of his life playing in a band with Spencer Ackerman.

Credits: This episode’s music is Fella by Hal Mayforth, used with permission from the artist. The conversation was recorded at my home 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. Photo of Colin by Nora Carroll; photo of us by me. It’s on my instagram.

BLARDY BLARDY BLARDY

During my recent LA weekend, I asked author, pal, and past guest Kate Maruyama if she’d be interested in interviewing me, and for some crazy reason, she said yes! So this time around you get me doing my best not to ask the questions, and just letting it fly, as we talk about the history of the podcast, my dream list of pod-guests, my semi-fake erudition, why we should practice arts we’re no good at, my thoughts on mortality and progeny, the gentle change of years, the legend of the fire defenses of the Beinecke Library at Yale, and a ton of stories. Give it a listen! And go read Kate’s newsletter and check out our conversations from 2019, 2020, 2021, and 2025!

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

Lots of ways to follow The Virtual Memories Show! iTunes, Spotify, BlueSky, Instagram, YouTube, Tumblr, and good ol’ RSS!

About our Guest

Kate Maruyama is the author of Alterations, The Collective, Bleak Houses, and Harrowgate and her novella Family Solstice was named Best Fiction Book of 2021 by Rue Morgue Magazine. Her short work has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies and she is a two-time Pushcart Prize nominee, and winner of the Uncharted Short Story Prize.

She served on the working Board for Women Who Submit, and is currently on the Board of Directors for the Shirley Jackson Awards. She writes, teaches, cooks, and eats in Los Angeles.

Credits: This episode’s music is Fella by Hal Mayforth, used with permission from the artist. The conversation was recorded at Kate’s home 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 Shure Beta 58A mcrophone feeding into a Zoom PodTrak P4. All processing and editing done in Adobe Audition CC. Photos by me. It’s on my instagram.

“This was the most fun I ever had making a book. I got to sit on the attic floor, going though Harold’s papers and books, and there were a lot of surprises.”

“A letter is a joy of Earth — It is denied the Gods —,” sez Emily Dickinson (#1672), and THE MAN WHO READ EVERYTHING: The Literary Letters of Harold Bloom (Yale University Press) proves it! Heather Cass White rejoins the show to talk about editing Harold Bloom‘s letters for the book, her history with him and what she learned about him over the course of the project, and how the letters revealed a less determined Bloom and how she empathized with the struggles he went through in his career. We get into the people whose correspondence she included — Alvin Feinman, Northrop Frye, AR Ammons, John Hollander, John Ashbery, James Merrill, Henri Cole, and Ursula K Le Guin — and all the writers and critics she wishes she could have included, the books and projects Bloom proposed but never completed (or started) over the years, the fun she had writing the footnotes, the one person Bloom was intimidated to meet, Bloom’s role in the Canon Wars 30-40 years ago (and my practice of checking off books from The List at the end of The Western Canon), where he fell on Ashbery vs. Ammons, and whether marriage is the true subject of literature. We also discuss how her next book on the correspondence of Elizabeth Bishop and Marianne Moore is the opposite of this one, her go-to books to teach American fiction, why she dropped out of Knausgaard before the finish line, how students have & haven’t changed over a quarter century of teaching, her late arrival to Surfjan Stevens’ music, how I solved her long-standing question about a moment from Bloom’s memorial, and a lot more. (Also, I talk about the Knicks A LOT in the intro; jump to 14:20 go to right to the conversation.) Give it a listen! And go read THE MAN WHO READ EVERYTHING: The Literary Letters of Harold Bloom!

“The real fun of being an editor, to me, is that it turns into a de facto literary detective.”

“Bloom didn’t want acolytes. He didn’t want students who agreed with him. He liked being challenged. Not that ever admitted that he was wrong.”

“I’m sure if someone were to write my one-word epitaph, it would be: READER.”

“It’s hard to overstate how pernicious the use of AI is in the classroom. . . . It’s like students are being trained into helplessness.”

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

Lots of ways to follow The Virtual Memories Show! iTunes, Spotify, BlueSky, Instagram, YouTube, Tumblr, and good ol’ RSS!

About our Guest

Heather Cass White is an English professor at the University of Alabama. She is the author of Books Promiscuously Read: Reading as a Way of Life, among other volumes.

Go listen to my 2021 conversation with Heather and my 2016 talk with Bloom.

Me & Harold Bloom in 2016

Credits: This episode’s music is Fella by Hal Mayforth, used with permission from the artist. The conversation was recorded at an undisclosed location in Manhattan 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. Photo of Harold Bloom by Jim Wilson; photo of Heather by Crosby Thomley; double-selfies by me. It’s on my instagram.

“We’re so used to organizing society by male/female and other binaries and age, and so many things that slot you into places, and comics perfectly avoid those things. They’re a maverick medium or art form that’s never been respected.”

Happy Pride! Let’s get Queer As Comics! Writer, critic, curator, and publisher Paul Gravett rejoins the show to talk about curating a fabulous new exhibition, Queer As Comics, to help launch the Quentin Blake Centre for Illustration! We talk about what makes comics queer (it’s not just an issue of sexuality), the artists and comics he wishes he could have included in the show, the challenges of exhibiting comics as opposed to paintings, and why Queer As Comics’ survey of 65 artists covering 80 years of history “starts with the Finnish” (as in Tom of Finland and Tove Jansson). We also get into the endlessness of Tove Jansson’s life & creativity (and why Paul’s committed to writing a big book about her anyway), his first exposure to queer comics (and again, why all comics are queer), how it feels to see the Quentin Blake Centre come to life and to see Quentin still making art in his 90s, and more. Give it a listen! And go check out Queer As Comics at the QBC!

Also, I couldn’t resist sharing this pic of Quentin Blake’s watercolor palette from an exhibition at the QBC:

“So much of the curation process is searching and searching, and connecting, and trying to dig deeper into archives.

“We have to find our identities somewhere.”

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

Lots of ways to follow The Virtual Memories Show! iTunes, Spotify, BlueSky, Instagram, YouTube, Tumblr, and good ol’ RSS!

About our Guest

Paul Gravett is a writer, critic, curator, publisher and broadcaster who has been working in the comics industry since 1981. He is author of many books about comics, including Mangasia: The Definitive Guide to Asian Comics, Graphic Novels: Stories to Change Your Life and Comics Art, and was general editor of 1001 Comics You Must Read Before You Die, and has also written on Tove Jansson and Posy Simmonds. He is co-director of Comica, the London International Comics Festival.

Listen to my 2014 and 2017 conversations with Paul!

Credits: This episode’s music is Fella by Hal Mayforth, used with permission from the artist. The conversation was recorded at the Quentin Blake Centre for Illustration 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. Photo of Paul by Etienne Gilfillan; photo of Queer As Comics display by Rich Johnston, from his article about the opening of the QBC. It’s on my instagram.

“Mundo Mendo is like the world of Mendo. It’s my world, and you need a spaceship to arrive here.”

Welcome to Mundo Mendo! I visited artist and writer Luis Mendo in Karuizawa, Japan for a wide-ranging conversation about art, creativity, community and more. We talk about how he left design and embraced drawing and illustration, why he created the Mundo Mendo platform so fans/members can support his art and stories (and get an annual print edition of his work), the limits of money and the joy of making art, and how artists can escape “working for Mr. Zuckerberg” and stop chasing likes on Instagram. We get into how internal change has to be accompanied by an external change, the challenge of not having a client, his critique of AI “art”, and the tension between world of numbers & metrics and the world of serendipity. We also discuss the creative residency he & his wife ran, Almost Perfect, his love of old movies, how the creative life can be a chain of projects, what brought him to Japan and what keeps him there (even if he feels like a foreigner wherever he is), his newsletter that highlights other illustrators and artists, why I should be a male model in Japan, and a lot more. (Plus, after the conversation I share a story about my Japan business trip and some Kafkaesque flop-sweat moments.) Give it a listen! And go support Mundo Mendo!

“I’m greedy for making something interesting, it’s a healthy greed.”

“Why are we all working for Mr. Zuckerberg instead of working for ourselves?”

“My first art influences were comics, women’s magazines, and bullfighting on the TV.”

“If you choose the right people, they attract the right people.”

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

Lots of ways to follow The Virtual Memories Show! iTunes, Spotify, BlueSky, Instagram, YouTube, Tumblr, and good ol’ RSS!

About our Guest

Luis Mendo is an artist and author based in Japan. He studied graphic design in Spain and The Netherlands. After working as an editorial designer and creative director for 20 years in Amsterdam, Luis moved to Tokyo and changed his career to drawing. His illustrations can be found on books, websites, magazines, advertising and clothing worldwide. His artworks have been shown in art galleries in Spain, France, Japan, South Korea and the USA.

His preferred subjects include sensory-driven stories, city/urban life, interiors, objects, animals and people in context. Also travel, narratives, feelings and human interactions. Luis’s illustration signature is to make mundane things look special and make visible the invisible. He can’t avoid impregnating positivism to everything he draws.

Luis was the Creative Director and co-founder of creative residency Almost Perfect together with his wife Yuka, from 2018 to 2025. In 2024 Luis launched Mundo Mendo, a membership program where he shares art, stories and thoughts that subsequently and annually become printed books. In the newsletter, The Illustrated, Luis shares and promotes his favorite illustration talent.

Follow Luis on Instagram and Bluesky, and support MUNDO MENDO.

Credits: This episode’s music is Fella by Hal Mayforth, used with permission from the artist. The conversation was recorded at Luis’ home in Karuizawa on a pair of Blue enCORE 200 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. Drawing of us by Luis. It’s on my instagram.