Listen in to part 2 of my conversation with Linn Ullmann about her new novel, The Cold Song (Other Press)! We talk about her writing habits and practices, her favorite Scandinavian authors, how she tweaked the book for its translation into English, and how August Strindberg got revenge on people. We also talk about the lengths she and her husband go to in order to get undisturbed writing time, when she realized she wasn't going to become a ballerina, and how to convey the Norwegian concept of skavank to some zhlub from New Jersey. Bonus: I let her interview me, and boy does THAT go off the rails!
The Virtual Memories Show
Season 4, Episode 18 - Persona
[music] Welcome to the Virtual Memories Show. I'm your host, Gil Roth, and you're listening to a weekly podcast about books and life. Not necessarily in that order. You can subscribe to the show through the iTunes Store, and you can find past episodes, get on our email list, and make a donation to the show at either of our websites, vmspod.com, or chimeraobscura.com/vm. You can also find us on Twitter at vmspod@facebook.com/virtualmemoriesshow and at virtualmemoriespodcast.tumbler.com. I just got back from a long weekend at TCAF, the Toronto Comic Arts Festival, where I got to record a bunch of good episodes for you. TCAF, which is hosted by the Beguiling, which is North America's greatest comic store, was a blast, as it always is. Toronto is a nice city for us to visit with some really fine restaurants. In fact, I got out to two of my faves, Bent and Laiwaheen during the trip. I also managed to get a couple of wins for my new business on Friday, so I'm calling this a good weekend, even if one of my podcast sessions didn't exactly work out. It's pretty rare for me that an interview doesn't work. I don't want to go into details about this one. I'm just going to chalk it up as cosmic balance for the double episode we're currently in the midst of. I mean, a few weeks ago, I had no idea what to expect when I met with Lynn Almond to talk about her new book, The Cold Song. While I was struggling to make my way across Manhattan so I could park close to her publisher's offices, all I could think was, "What the heck am I doing this for?" But Lynn and I hit it off great, and by the time we had to shut down our conversation because of her schedule, we decided to set up time for another session that weekend so we could keep talking. That brings us to part two of my conversation with Lynn Almond. If you want to check out part one, you can download it at iTunes or at either of our sites, VMSPod.com or chimeraobscura.com. This time we recorded at the business center of her hotel the day before she was returning to Norway after her week at the Pan America Festival in New York City. We couldn't really use the desks in the business center, so we went with handheld microphones this time. You may notice a little more variation in tone and breathiness and such because of it. Now, as I mentioned last week, Lynn Almond's new novel, The Cold Song, is a really gorgeous and strange book, and honestly, it's continuing to lurk in my mind in a month since I finished reading it, and I've found myself suggesting it to a couple of friends who are looking for new contemporary novels. I also just got two more of Lynn's books in the mail, Stella Descending and A Blessed Child. She's got five books in total, all of which have been translated into English. Now, one thing is that I don't plan on starting her new books until after July 4th because my time's going to be a little constrained until then. If you want to find out why, you're going to have to listen to the rest of this episode. Now, Lynn Almond is the author of five books of fiction, as I mentioned. This recently, The Cold Song, which is published in America by Other Press. She lives in Oslo with her husband, the novelist playwright and poet, Neil's Frederick Dahl, and has two children and two stepchildren, and a dog named Charlie. Her parents are Liv Almond and Ingmar Bergbitten, which is a whole part of this conversation. Lynn also conducts literary interviews back in Norway, which, as you'll see, puts me in a pretty strange spot this time around. Also, I should tell you, in case you ever meet her, she has one of the firmest handshakes of anyone I have ever met, male or female. And now, part two of the virtual memories conversation with Lynn Almond. We left off with the issue of the ethics of writing fiction explicitly drawn from life, and we've sort of talked about your -- both a memoir into novel that you may or may not be working on and the incorporation of life elements into The Cold Song and other fiction of yours. Have you had time to think over the last two days about the ethics of writing and what knowledge Nauskarge means and what your own take on life experience into fiction really is? Well, this is something that I've been thinking about a lot even before. We talked about it two days ago, so I think this is an issue that all writers confront in some way or another, obviously, Nauskarge, who we talked about, who's written this brilliant and many faceted memoir about his own life, where his father figures and also his wife who's still living with him and his children and friends and people, that's really taking it very far. So it raises this book, obviously raises some questions about how can you meet someone or how can you be with someone and then put them in the book. But Nauskarge is not the first one to do this. This is something that writers and artists have had to face up to or have a talk with themselves about or think about where those boundaries go. And I certainly think about that a lot because, well, first of all, I like the idea of fiction. I like the idea of the imagination at work. I often think, like many writers before me, that if you really want to go at the truth or get to the truth, fiction's the way to do it. To tell something exactly as it happened, it's going to be clouded by a lot of, you know, maybe vanity or maybe shyness or maybe kind of self-indulgence, you know, the telling something exactly as it was is, to me, very often a way of, then I often think if somebody says this is exactly as it is, this is exactly like it happened. That's often a warning signal that it's clouded by the various factors that come in when you try to tell something exactly as it happened. I think fiction is a good way of, and the imagination is a good way of getting to a deeper truth, a more meaningful truth than just telling the facts as they happen, because something's going to intervene with those facts, probably vanity or shyness. But then again, I mean, there are a lot of things that drives a writer, it can be vanity and shyness can be two big ones. Well, vanity and shyness, of course, those vanity and shyness are probably not always the best factors, but certainly very common. Rage can be one, passion can be one, Strinberg. When he met somebody that he really didn't like, he used to say, "Well, I'll see you in my next play." And then on the other hand, you know, there are always people, you know, when they read your books, they always, people always want to find themselves, well, yeah, it's always, you know, if they're close to you or if they're around you, smile, they wonder if, you know, they look for themselves. I mean, that's what every author, I think, discovers, especially in family, you know. So I've thought a lot about these questions also, because I'm from a family that's been public in my country and in Scandinavia and, well, to me, my family is very private. I don't play into that or I don't, you know, I don't relate as much to the public side of my family, but I will write about or think about or have conversations, especially with my father, but with his work and with the, you know, just as I would have silent conversations in my head with other artists' work, that mean a lot to me, it just happens that he's my father. You don't see a particular, this is what he was really getting at, sort of thing. You really see the artwork in terms of what it is for itself. Well, I think I... You don't feel any familial privilege, I guess, is the question when you're assessing a work for. Not more than when I would read Philip Roth or see the wire, just because they resonate with me in a very specific way. Okay. Now, how did you get started in writing? We talked about the storytelling impulse, but what brought you to become a writer? Well, I started out as a journalist and I worked for a journalist. Well, first I studied literature and well, before that I wanted to become a dancer, actually. So I danced classical ballet until I was at 16 and that didn't work out. I really wasn't one of the really good ones, I was almost really good, did I tell you that? No, no, but I was just listening to an interview with Judy Greer, the actress and, oh, comic actress just yesterday, where she mentioned how she was a terrible ballet dancer and it thought, as she was a little kid, that yes, I will be a ballerina and realized, you know, there are certain things that parents really should tell their children you're never going to be good at, but I'm assuming you were better, you know, leading up to... Well, I was one of those almost little sadder cases because I was pretty good, but I just wasn't good enough and, you know, with classical ballet or with any art form, really, you really need to be... Yeah, very, very top. And I wasn't. But I think I somehow took the whole idea of dance into writing. I heard Peter Herg, a Danish writer say this once he lived with a dancer and how dance played a role in his writing and I think I understood what he meant because the movement of bodies across the stage, you know, I often imagine my characters in some kind of difficult dance, like in this book, which portrays two lovers or a married couple right in the middle of life, they're... It's pretty broken and I sort of imagined them in a very tight embrace, but where they were partly, you know, trying to get out of that embrace and also holding on at the same time. And I saw that almost as a choreography, so... You express it, you know, in physical terms also with them. It's not simply a metaphor for how they live. I mean, you also managed to incorporate that into the sort of the sensuality of, you know, their day-to-day lives. Well, because I think the physicality of characters in novels, well, I like to read about that and I like to write about it, too. I like to imagine, I mean, them as bodies. Bodies that are uncomfortable with itself and maybe with each other or bodies that could be aching, bodies that are somehow in the way. I often write about young girls. I mean, I think it's, you know, and in this book there's a young girl, she's 13 years old and she's, you know, she's not quite sure what she is yet. I mean, she's not even decided if she wants to be a girl. I mean, she has just as much of a boy in her and, you know, the whole idea of gender, body, physicality, the body is such a, often such an uncomfortable place and that's the first place. I mean, I do like to focus on place when I write and the body, obviously, is the first place and so there's the young girl here and there's the older woman here and they all have a little, they all have, what is the English word, Skavank? We don't call it that. You don't have a skavank. Well, like Jenny has a bump on her foot. And Sherry has the back. And Sherry has a slightly asymmetric back, which John finds very attractive but there's a little, well, flaws, I guess is the best word for Skavank. Okay. And I'm learning a little bit every time I do one of these shows, so what's your writing practice like? Well, I like to say that I'm very disciplined that I start, you know, that I go to my, I send my daughter off to school, I have breakfast with my husband, who's also a writer, and then we, when we were both writing at home, we exchanged cell phones so that he would hide mine and I would hide his and then we sort of, we had this thing that we de-materialized and that's not the word, the whole modem. Oh, just, yeah, shut off everything. Now of course you can pay to do that. You can, you know, you can, first you pay to have internet and then you pay to turn it off for a certain amount of hours. Now we have breakfast and I go to my little studio and I work there for a certain amount of... I'll recite a remote place. And I love that little studio now because it's, you know, there's only work there and it's so tiny that I can actually have visitors and, you know, have people over for coffee. If you think this room is tiny, my studio is, you know... I've debated building a small writing cabin off the backyard of the house, even though my wife would take it really badly. It's a good idea. Given that we've already built a library downstairs that, you know, is basically my space while she's got her studio upstairs, nonetheless I still have, yeah, just maybe that area in the backyard I could make the non-internet just sit down and write. And the non-internet part of it is really important because I still have to, you know, I still have to force myself to, you know, turn it off, hide my phone and sit there for, you know, X amount of hours. And then I go home, so it's a pretty boring routine. And if I deviate from that terrible things happen to my mood in a way... It just starts pervading your whole... Well, yeah. I mean, then I start, you know, being a nuisance at home. And since I live with a writer too, the same goes for him. So we pretty much know that we have to sort of keep everything sane and normal to just stick to the hours and the solitude of writing. And actually, I interviewed Jennifer Egan once and I think it was she that said something about, you know, having the courage to first write something bad because you have to write... You have to do bad writing before it gets to good writing. I mean, very few just immediately when they start out with something... Write out a box or something. Write something brilliant. But it's so horrible to sit down and produce bad writing. And you have to go through that stage of producing bad writing before you make it good. Which I've been putting off for decades now because everything has to be absolutely perfection the moment it leaves my hand. Yes. And that's why, and that's very often why when rather than do the bad writing, you don't do the writing. You do no writing because... And then you run a pharmaceutical trade magazine for... Oh, sorry. Yeah. Well... Before you do it. But in general case... Before you do it. Or in my case, I start renovating, you know, the house and bother my family with new family rules. And I become very creative about, you know, I become sort of cosplay nightmare. You know, we're sitting down and everyone, you know, trying. So there needs to be bad writing. And that writing stage is a writing a book. For me, it's very often, it goes like this, you know, you start out by having thoughts about the book and thinking this book is going to be about everything. And everything becomes relevant to the book. It's all in your head and it's in notes and everything you read, people you meet, conversations you have, memories, I mean your whole... It's a wonderful place to be. It's a place of grace because everything will be in this book and this book will finally be the one that tackles everything. And then comes the moment for me, this is, and you actually sit down and start and you've done your sort of untitled book or book 2014 or novel number six, chapter one. And then you're going to write the first sentence and there's this enormous sense of falling. Because there's that first sentence or there's that sentence that you're writing and it's such a sense of failure and falling and... From the potential to the real and... Well yeah, because there it is. That's all there was for now and then you sort of have to recover or that's, this is again how it is for me, sort of recover from that first sentence or the first paragraph, that fall and start building up again. But the thing is, with books and you've probably talked to writers about this before and I mean, I think, and you probably agree, it's just every time you're there with the blank page, it's starting all over again and nothing is a given as you have some experience and you know more than you did. But often with writing, knowing more just takes away also, also makes you less confident. And I think a certain lack of confidence is good in writing because you want to go places where you're not on a safe ground, just pulling old tricks out of the hat is not what you want to do. What contemporary writers, I mean young contemporary writers as opposed to Philip Roth, who's now allegedly retired, what contemporary writers do you enjoy reading? Or do you not enjoy reading because you actually have a second job of writing literary criticism? Well, I don't write as much literary criticism anymore, so I read, I do some, and I interview writers, which I like a lot, I like- I have no idea what you're talking about. I like actually being in your side of the microphone, asking the questions. Don't you get to ask me one before we finish, if you think I'm one. Oh, good. Why don't we do it? Why don't we switch right now? I can interview you. Well, what would you like to ask me? Well, are you writing on anything now? Are you working? I know you're working on a book. I'm working on a long short story, I think, about my fictional alter ego. I had the epiphany about a year and a half ago of the name of my fictional alter ego, a la Nathan Zuckerman. I came up with that character's name, and the moment I did that I realized I could write everything about him, and unfortunately, I've only done one story of his life, but I've got a great one about him and his father trying to find a temple to go pray in for the high holidays because his father wants to go pray for his deceased parents, and neither of them are good Jews, and they end up trying to bluff their way through services in an unorthodox black hat, you know, Khabad, sort of temple. Yeah, see, this is something on the Norwegian perspective. I'm not sure if you're going to get the humor of, although with the Woody Allen background that you have. I'm a Philip Roth back. Yeah, so this is, you know, two really assimilated Jews who are not good father and son trying to kind of make their way through this bearded black hat world while they're, you know, essentially just trying to sneak in, get these prayers in, and get back out. To me, this is, I've written, I've had this experience in the past, and I've written about it in long form. Do you have this experience with your own father? Yeah, and I'm going through the process of understanding how to make art out of something that's already been, that I've already written thousands and thousands of words on for blog posts, where I realize the germ of that idea I need to accept does not have to correspond to reality. And that to me is, it's the question that I guess comes up for me whenever I'm talking to a successful writer, is where do you make art? Where do you make that leap? How do you take that step, I suppose, away from this is the real to this is my imagination that's going to be more real than what happened? And I have a very difficult time doing that because I guess because I document things in reality an awful lot, that it's interesting when I try to figure out how to do it and let things go and learn to trust the art, I suppose, as opposed to the factuality. So that's what I'm struggling with, but at 43 I figure I've got a long time to keep putting it off. Well, how would you answer that question if you had to answer it right now, how to make that leap? I've written one short story in the past 20 plus years that came out of walking through the Art Institute in Chicago about a year ago while I was in town for a trade show. And a thing happened and I realized this thing was going to become a short story that had nothing to do with the reality of what occurred, but that I would make art out of it. And I was just flooded during the walk from the Art Institute back to my hotel. I literally had tears at one point realizing how this whole thing was going to fit and snap together and then I sat down at my laptop and barely got out 500 words before getting frustrated by my inability to make good art. I managed to finish it within a week, do some revisions on it and I'm relatively happy with what's there, but this is now a year plus since I did it and I have 30 more stories of this alter ego of mine that I've been writing notes on and it's still that inability to just sit down and do the work, I guess, is the issue. This is kind of funny because it's -- Is it that you're afraid of the bad writing or is there some other reason that the bad writing has always had to be there before? And that's the thing. I'm afraid of demonstrating that I'm actually a crap writer. The great moment for me in writing this piece was my realization that I did not have to be Thomas Pinchon or Henry Miller who I idolized also and that I could in fact, once I discovered his writing later in the year, I could be Bruce J. Friedman. I could write short entertaining stories about neurotic Jews and never be as inventive and off the wall as Friedman, but that I could write about Abe Lesser and his world and not have to do something as -- I don't have to be Philip Roth. I don't have to try to compete on any grand level. The plus side of that or the way I could reconcile to that is the fact that I have a job and don't have to worry about making money from writing something. If I was actually in a position where I wanted to make a living as a writer, I'd be doomed. I just assume I would have no future, which, again, is a chicken and egg thing. I took this sort of job to keep myself. The practical -- often I think that the practical framework around writing, like you have to make money, you have to make your deadline, are very good because, I mean, who knows if Tolstoy or does he obscure any of these great Russians had written because they had people pounding on their doors to get next installment. I don't think I'd write anything without a deadline. Well, you are. Well, I did. When I was doing on the magazine, I would always save my editorial for the very last thing. And the editorial was where I let my brain out and I would have fun and write these fun 600-word shticks, which built up a nice following -- when I was leaving people have written to me saying, you know, can you just let me know where else you're writing? And people enjoyed this because I was writing stuff that wasn't pharmaceutical, business-type stuff. I was writing about the Talmud and my dogs and Gilgamesh and all sorts of wacky stuff, which I'd managed to tie back into the industry in some way every time, but people just enjoyed it. Yeah, this is from the editor page. And from the editor page. This is wonderful. Oh, it was a blast. But even that's -- I mean, there's a story. Yeah. And that's what Abe Lesser's job is. Well, not the same sort of thing, but he was an editor at a trade magazine who goes through different sets of frustrations and I've gone through in my life. But yeah, I know that sort of thing is where I would let my brain out and it was, you know, it was fun. I could do something good I knew. I had a readership of 20,000 people. But that said, you know, it was always a deadline. Nine times a year there was a, you know, and everything else in the issue was out and I've got to go write this out. How are you going to finish this story about the father and the son? I just keep putting it off. Well, when are you going to finish it? What date? What's the date? I need an actual deadline. Well, you need a date. Yeah. My problem is that I let everything else take over. Well, it's not very strange how writers do that. And I think that's a very common for writers. You just -- you put -- the thing that you have -- you want to do the most or you have to do. I mean, important, you got to finish the story. You want to write the story. And still, even though this is very important to do, it's the thing that always gets put off. I think part of it, you know, I give myself this show every week to do, which is a good way of avoiding other stuff, but I can say, well, I'm meeting interesting people and having great conversations with them. But at the same time it's -- So when are you going to finish the story? I will finish it. Can you give me a date? I will finish it before July 4th. You'll send it to me. Before July, I'm writing it down right now. Before July 4th, which is a big thing for us because, you know, we're Americans. Yeah. July 4th, I don't know who is, you know, who might be your editor or who's the person who's -- I have no -- well, I will send it to you before July 4th. I will -- by July 4th, and I get very upset if people don't meet their deadlines. That's -- it makes me extremely, you know, I'll hunt you down. All the way from Norway. You know, whalers and -- Yeah. It will not be pleasant. I trust you again, I'll -- so you're going to have to make a plan because that's the whole thing, right? You're going to have to make a plan now with your shows and your job and where you're going to write, and you're going to have to plan out the time schedule and how this is going to be done and how much you're going to need to write every time you sit down to write, and how -- and you're going to have to do all this because you're going to need to send that to me on July 4th, you know, otherwise I'll be doomed, you know, because I know you've got -- you think I'm kidding. No, no, I know. You've got foot soldiers, you know. You've got, you know, the literary troops out there who kill me. I'm really not very nice when it comes to people who missed their deadlines with me. My magazine always came out on time. I will now, you know, produce a short story. We have. We have a deal. It's either that or there's another one that I've also started -- another A Blesser story but when he was a kid. But it's so culturally specific to better. I like the one that you told me about, and I like culturally specific. Yeah, this one's pop culturally specific, which might make it a little weirder because it's a 1970s thing. But I'll tell you about that one off, Mike, because we'll just bore the listeners otherwise, and I don't want to give away the plot of the story. Okay. Well, we have July 4th. I haven't. I've written it down to July 4th. The fourth is the date for Operation News Corps. We'll get back to asking you a question. This book, the Cold Song, translated into English. You've mentioned in past interviews that you had the opportunity to make some changes and tweaks in the process of translating it into English. Did you change anything substantive in the book? How would you characterize what you did in the process of helping bring it into English? I've tried to almost understand it myself because I did work extensively first with my translator, Barbara Havlon, who's a wonderful translator. When Judith Gervich of Other Press was the publisher of Other Press, and she's also an editor came into my life, we had discussions about the book, and I really wanted to do things with it. Even though it was finished, it had been published in several countries and done very well. It was something with my familiarity with the English language and that it was special, that it was coming out here, and two years had passed, and it still had a little bit of a translaty feel that not due to the translator or not anything wrong with it, it's just some of the characters did not talk to each other the way that I imagined they would have talked to each other if they had talked to each other in English. So I started rewriting parts of the text, and it was also two years later in my life. So I was really taking the whole book back into the cutting room, and once you tweak a little there, or do a little rewrite or write a little more there, then you have to do it maybe 100 pages later, too, because this is a novel that's not chronological. I mean, it has resonances, it has echoes, it has a lot of, it's choreographed more than sort of a chronological story, and so once I change something on page one, I might have to change it on page 200. So if I changed anything substantive, substantive, well yes or no, I mean it's still the same book. There's nothing very odd that happens. Yeah, it's the same book, it's the same story, it's the same characters. One scene, we're in the Norwegian, or the European edition, it's Siri doing it, I changed it to that John is doing it, that kind of thing, because it felt more. Their marriage is slightly warmer than when I wrote it. He still cheats on her, he still does all these things, and she's still a nuisance in many ways, I mean they're, you know, they're not managing that well. But there are elements of warmth that I wrote into it a little bit, to give them a little bit more of a chance maybe, than in the earlier, just simply because you regretted the way it came across the first time, or had your life changed. No I didn't regret, I don't regret anything that's in the Norwegian edition, it was just when I took it back into the cutting room, and I was two years wiser, and I had been with this book for a while, and there were just certain things, it's just, it's just nuance, it's just small things, and a reader of both books might not even notice it. I just didn't know if you had a sense of things being sacrosanct, or no it's okay, I can make changes, but it's not the Kugelmoss episode where the Woody Allen thing, where the character falls into metabovary, no, no, it's not like that, it's, but I don't think that anything, I don't think that works of fiction, I don't think any, I don't, I don't think it's, what's the word you, sacrosanct, I can't say this in English, it's Latin, so that it's sacred, you know, I don't think it's sacred, I think you can, you can work on something, and when you change the work might change with you, and when it's in a new language, it will certainly change if you can work in that language, and writing this and working on this in English made me think, oh, maybe my next book, the one that I'm writing on, maybe I could write it in English, but then I've already started it in Norwegian, so, and then I can't do every other chapter, but it's, you know, it's, it's, it's dealing with two different languages, it's, it, as I'm doing now, it's interesting to do that, it's, it's fun to do that, and nothing's sacred, everything can just be worked on forever, but then you want to do something new, so then you do something, you call it a day, you have to call it, and that's the journalist in me really, I mean, you've got to call it a day at some point, you have to be done, and then you go to a new thing. Besides yourself, can you name an under-appreciated Scandinavian writer you would want to see get over in America? Well, my favorite Norwegian writer, he asked me about the young ones a little while ago, so now I'm going to come with another one that's not so young, called Dog Sulstah, who is translated to English, but in the UK, he, he is somewhat legendary in my country, and I think what he does so brilliantly, I mean, there is such a voice in everything he does, it's something so specifically novelistic, something that you can't really, once you break it down, I mean, there's, you know, you can break a book down into many things and you can talk about plot and you can take, talk about characters and you can even talk about voice and you can talk about all these things and composition, but then there's still something there that is just like a heart beating or, you know, or a footprint or however you want to describe it, that's just so distinct, which makes it not just great books, it makes it, you know, works of art, and he is that kind of writer. He grants and he, he goes on and it's all about just, you know, older or slightly older, aging men, male narrators, you know, ranting about how everything's going to help, and you know, he actually reminds me a little bit of Philip Roth. I was going to say, no region Philip Roth, but I didn't want to presume. But he does, he is. So that's, that's one. In Sweden, there's a wonderful writer called Justin Ekman, who's also grown up. She's not one of the younger generation. There are a lot of great younger ones too, but she is just, just such a wonderful storyteller and you know, with so many layers and deaths, and you, you just, you're drawn into her voice and into her wisdom and into her, her modernism all at once. So she means a lot to me. These are two Scandinavian's. And translation also? Her earlier books are in translation. And I like her later books even better. Okay. But I won't be able to read them because I'll just do the Swedish chef thing. Lin Omen, I want to thank you so much for, for two sessions on the Virtual Memory Show. I really appreciate it. I have a safe trip home and I, I promise by July 4th, you will get a draft of, of a short story. Good. And you know, I'm really bad. Would you giving me excuses, you know, emailing me about the excuses why you're not going to send it to me? Yeah. No, no, I'll, I'll, I'll do it. Yeah. I'll do it. You'll see. I promise. I promise. I promise. Good. Thank you so much for coming on the show. Thank you so much. And that was part two of my conversation with Lin Omen. I'm now on the clock to produce a new short story. So I'm going to get to work on that. You, meanwhile, should go get Lin's new book, The Cold Song, which was published by other press. It really is a wonderful novel. Also, visit Lin's website, Lin Omen dot N O slash E N to learn more about her work. And I'll spell that for you. It's l-i-n-n-u-l-l-m-a-n-n dot N O slash E N. If you don't add that slash E N, you get the Norwegian version of the site. And that is it for this week's virtual memories show. Thank you so much for listening. Check in next week for a conversation with Mimi Pond, the author of the New York Times best-selling comic memoir Over Easy. We met up during T-Cav and had a really fun conversation. Also please visit our websites, vmspod.com, or chimeraobscura.com/vm, and make a donation to this ad-free podcast. You can get on the show's email list from either of those sites, and you can download part one of our talk with Lin Omen if you haven't checked that out yet. If you've got ideas for guests, drop me a line at groth@chimeraobscura.com. That's G-R-O-T-H, or at VMSPod on Twitter, or at our Facebook page, facebook.com/virtualmemoriesshow. And go to the iTunes store if you can. Look up the virtual memory show and leave me a nice review of rating. I'd really appreciate it. Until next time, I am Gil Roth and you are awesome. Keep it that way. [Music] [BLANK_AUDIO]