(upbeat 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 on iTunes, and you can find past episodes, get on our email list, and make a donation to the show at our website, chimeraobscura.com/vm. You can also find us on Twitter at VMSPod at facebook.com/virtualmemoriesshow and at virtualmemoriespodcast.tumbler.com. Another week recruiting companies for my new business, and I am feeling that much better about this career move. I spent the week in New York City attending a big exhibition for my client base, and on Tuesday morning, I was standing on stage at the opening of the show since the organizers are just gaga over this idea of mine. They're revamping their event, and the opening had a marching band and confetti cannons and stuff. I was hoping for t-shirt guns and mascots on trampolines, but I took what I could get. I mean, one of the upshots was a floutist in the high school marching band passed out from standing in place too long during the opening speeches, but other than that, it all went pretty well. And the way I figured it, she was 17. It's probably just a blood pressure thing from locking your knees. If she was my age, then yeah, aneurysm stroke, get an ambulance, but they walked her off and made sure she was okay. Overall, I had a good three days, at least better than hers. And a lot of the companies I met were almost pre-sold on my new idea. One of them even said, you know, when I read that email about this where you said you were quitting your job to run this association, my jaw just dropped. And if you're making that commitment, we need to be in. So that's sort of what I was hoping was gonna happen. It was nice to see it actually come through because it saved me from having to actually sell, sell people on this idea. And a day after all this was over, I went right back into New York to interview this week's guest because, you know, why would I let you guys down? And now that the big Russia trade shows is over for a while and I'm just hoping to get settled and do some of the administrative stuff behind launching this business, like figuring out my health insurance and also get more interviews done for the show. I've been running sort of behind schedule so that I've been interviewing someone the week it goes up and I'd like to get ahead of things a little bit. I've got a pretty interesting slate of guests lined up for April ranging from a first-time novelist to a writer who's publishing her 20th book to the curator of a comics museum out in Ohio. I may have some clients to visit also during the month in Chicago or Toronto, but, you know, maybe I can tie some interviews into those trips too. Now our guest this episode is Sarah Deming, connected with Sarah through Zack Martin, the former US Marine Major I interviewed last November rather than tell you about her and why Zack suggested I get in touch with her. Here's the bio from her blog. Sarah Deming is the author of the children's novel, Iris Messenger, which came out from Harcourt in 2007 about the Greek gods in suburbia. Her essays have appeared in The Three Penny Review, The Huffington Post and wnyc.com. In 2013, she won a Pushcart Prize and was listed as notable in Best American Essays. Sarah has ghost-written several erotic novels and assisted on ultra marathoner, Scott Jurek's memoir, Eat and Run. She was a writer researcher for CNBC's boxing coverage of the 2012 Olympics. Before becoming a writer, Sarah was a Golden Glove's boxing champion, a chef and a yoga teacher. She volunteers as a strength and conditioning coach for young boxers at the Atlas cops and kids gym in Brooklyn and teaches yoga at the New York Health and Rocket Club. You can check out her work at sarahdeming.typepad.com. And we had a great time talking, even if I did focus on boxing a bit too much, and she was kind enough to offer to make lunch for us after the session. So I figured she was a chef once upon a time and I'm not turning that down. It was interesting 'cause listening back to our conversation, I found myself kind of comparing and contrasting Sarah with a previous guest, Maya Stein. Maya found her calling in creative writing or teaching creative writing, as well as her poetry and doing her typewriter bicycle tours. Well, Sarah's found hers in writing and covering the world of boxing. They're both pretty nifty writers and they've eschewed the straight world of a nine to five gig and well, I'll admit, I find myself wondering a lot in the last few months about how I chose a career rather than pursuing my art. And I don't know if I ever would have made anything for real had I been working on my writing, that sort of writing for 20 years as opposed to editing at trade magazines. I do think the new gig's gonna give me more freedom, but it's still of a piece with a job I held for the past 15 years. It kind of springs off of all those connections I made and all the people who've come to, well, trust me, based on the work that I did for the magazine and really for them, for so long. And those relationships I made are proving pretty valuable now, like I said. People are willing to buy into this idea because I'm putting my name on it. But still, I'm hoping that I managed to manage my time better in this new phase of things. And besides, I still wanna get this show out every week. So I may not get around quite as much to writing as I'd hope, but still, I'm glad to meet so many creative people and it is kind of charging me up. In fact, something that might turn into a short story happened to me just today, which I'm not gonna tell you anything about 'cause I still have to formulate it. Maybe you'll get to read that down the line. For now, you get the virtual memories conversation with Sarah Deming. ♪ You're the song ♪ ♪ You're the song ♪ ♪ So I think I better ♪ - So I'm probably paraphrasing, but I'd heard that Mike Tyson once said, "Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth." Is that something that resonates with unboxing circles at all? Is that a-- - Absolutely. - Okay. I was making sure 'cause I'd heard that years ago and I thought that that's-- - I think that is a Tyson quote or it's definitely a quote. Everyone's a plan until they get punched in the face or punched. - Yeah, that's true. - How did that hold up within your world in unboxing? So talk about your unboxing experience and getting hit in the mouth the first time. - Oh, yeah, I guess some people hate it getting hit and I think those people are probably not meant to be boxers. I mean, it's not good if you really like getting hit because you should have good defense and try not to get hit, but I think the people that boxing appeals to are people who like contact. And who don't, like when you get hit, you're kind of like, oh, I'm here, I'm in a fight. - The only professional boxer I know, he's retired now, a guy named Bobby Chez. He came from our, well, the town next to ours, where we're growing up in Jersey. Late in his career, he was trying to get ranked as a heavyweight solely so that he could get a match up with Tyson. And it wasn't for the payday, he told us. It was because he wanted to find out how hard Tyson really hit. And that's when we knew years of boxing had essentially destroyed his man's mind. Or the machismo that drove him into boxing just had taken over everything. - Yeah, that seems unwise. - Yeah, I think it was as late in his, and Tyson was already, I think, post Holy Field Ear stuff, but it was still wanting to know just how hard Mike Tyson really hit. So, but in your experience, boxers tend not to be quite that irrational or insane, right? - No, I mean, it's kind of the mark of a bad boxer if you are wanting to get hit or thinking about taking punishments more, you should be wanting to dish it out, really. - I'm not sure that was part of it for him. But how did you get started? We're gonna get touched on all the other things in your life also, but I thought we'd start with boxing and what you're doing now with it and how you began in the field. - Well, I began, it started with teaching yoga at health clubs. I had graduated from Brown with a fairly useless degree in comparative literature, and I knew that I wasn't gonna be able to support myself. I don't come from money. I couldn't just go to New York and try to work in publishing. I needed a gig that actually could pay the rent. So, I got certified as a yoga teacher and I started teaching yoga. This was back in like '97, '98, and I was going around to a lot of different health clubs and teaching, and there was one health club in Brooklyn Heights, Eastern Athletic Club, and there was a great Tai Chi teacher there, so it's kind of a roundabout story. I, so I started taking Tai Chi and then that teacher, JP, wonderful Tai Chi teacher and author also. And he told me that in order to be really good at Tai Chi, I needed to learn to kick and punch because Tai Chi is an internal martial art and all the moves, although they seem quite gentle and sweet and soft, they're actually hidden strikes. And so to learn to kick and punch, it's sort of like doing Tai Chi without knowing what it's like to kick and punch in real time is maybe like painting abstractions before you even learn to paint figures, you know? You should learn how to, you should learn the reality first before you go up to the metaphorical or something. So I learned to kick and punch at this kickbox in class and I just fell in love with it. I remember the first time I sparred, I was like, this is it. This is the most exciting thing I've ever done. And the New York City Golden Gloves had recently opened their doors to women. It's an exciting tournament. Right now it's going on in New York. I've got now I'm a trainer and I've got fighters fighting in it. But so I, I joined up and I won my first fight. That was the greatest feeling in the world. And then my second fight, believe it or not, I was in Madison Square Garden. Oh, well. Yeah, there were only four female bantamweights that year, you know, so, and I fought this girl who was really good, nationally ranked. You know, she took care of me pretty handily. But I didn't get knocked out. You know, I felt good about how I did. And then it became my goal to really win the Golden Gloves and to get better. And so I kept training and eventually I did win in 2001. Knockouts tend not to be much of a thing in women's fight and women's boxing, right? Yeah. How does it differ? Given that you train men and women, right? Right, right. Well, in the amateurs, in the amateurs in general, there are a few stoppages, unless it's really a big mismatch. Because amateur fights are only three rounds. Well, women now women fight four or two minute rounds and men fight three, three minutes if they're open level fighters. So they're short bouts. The gloves are a tiny bit bigger. You aren't headgear. So there's not as many knockouts as in the pros. But also women, you know, don't have the one punch knockout power, usually, and-- Except this Irish girl I used to work with who apparently could knock people the hell out at my-- Well, once she was drunk at least, that was not-- It was something that came up at our company. They, well, the company I left a few weeks ago, they've done a series of, you know, sort of biggest loser competitions, getting people to lose weight, which I thought unfairly penalized people who were actually in shape and relatively slim. Totally, yeah. So I proposed Fight Club for the-- (laughing) I thought it would be a good idea if we all, you know, trained for a while and had a round robin to beat the hell out of each other, which then led to the question-- They didn't institute it, but that led to the question of who would actually win. We had one guy who was built like a brick-shit house and a kung fu guy. We figured on the men's side he would win, then it turned into the, who would win on the women's side? And once we started asking around, everybody said, no, no, that Irish girl, the marketing assistant, we've seen her knock people unconscious at a bar, then, you know, who broke it. And that was the, okay, yeah, she might even win the male round. - Right, right. - Well, we thought about it, but you just get her drunk and angry enough at the bar. - Yeah, yeah. - But how did you go into training? How did you become a trainer within the-- Well, I took a long, long break from boxing. It was hard to quit, but there was nothing really in it for me anymore. And that was sad, you know, stopping competition. And I was completely out of it for like 10 years. I didn't, I was doing other things. And then I had this epiphany preceding the London Olympics that they had finally let women boxing, women's boxing into the Olympics. And I thought, oh my God, I gotta write about this story. I have to follow this. Yeah, I'm probably the only person in the world who can really tell it the way I can tell it from the inside. And I talked to my husband and he said, "Hey, go for it." And so I went out to Spokane, Washington for the women's Olympic trials. And that was just an incredible experience. It was, let me think, how many women? 24 women contending for three spots on the first ever US women's Olympic boxing team. And before I went out there, I thought, let me do some pre-research into the New York contenders. So there were two girls coming from New York and they were fighting out of this gym uptown. And it was Atlas cops and kids where it was their sponsor. So, and I've been thinking for a long time, I've been trying to volunteer at a boxing gym. And I asked them, "Hey, do you guys need trainers?" And they said, "Absolutely, come in. "We need all the help we can get." So at the same time as that I started writing about fighting, I started getting back in the gym and working with the boxers as a trainer. Mostly I do strength and conditioning. I'm also kind of a mentor. I help them with homework and essays. And is there any male trainee versus female trainee issue? Do they accept you, you know, regardless of gender, I guess, in terms of the physicality? At this point, they do. You know, I think maybe there was some suspicion initially, but not, you know, actually, to be honest, I feel more, I feel there's more misogyny in the world of female sports writing than female boxing training. Because in the gym, before I even tried to train anyone, I just came into the gym every day and worked out for months. And so then they could see how serious I am. I mean, I don't play around. Like, I'm work one of the hardest of anybody in there. And I'm 40, you know. So then I think that got their respect. And then-- and I also don't try to-- these guys are better than I ever was as a boxer. So I'm not going to try to tell them how to box, per se, but I can give them advice about conditioning, about flexibility. I can see what they need and help them with that, you know. Um, and I wish that I train more girls. There are very few-- I train almost exclusively boys. There's a couple girls who come into the gym. But mostly it's young men, like between the ages of about 15 and 25. - Is it making progress at all in terms of women getting into the sport or not? - Oh, yeah. I mean, I think the London Olympics was a tremendous debut for the sport. I think, you know, there's still-- it's still much shallower talent pool. It's still very common. If you're a young woman boxing, you might show up to a tournament. You might win by walkover because there's nobody in your weight. Or maybe there's only, like, one other girl in your weight. So-- but there's-- you know, in London, I think we saw some incredible talent. I just got done writing an essay about my favorite star to emerge from there was Clarissa Shields, who-- she won the gold for the US in middleweight. And she's from Flint, Michigan. I came up out of a really hard background and is a delightful, brilliant young woman. So much fun to write about because she just-- everything she says is a pull quote. She's very unguarded. Like a lot of boxers, Floyd Mayweather's been bad for boxing writing because he-- you know, everybody now spews this stuff about, like-- - The standard breakadow show. - Yeah, yeah. And also, like, now studied with brand names. And, you know, I love Floyd, actually. I love what he does in the ring. But that kind of speech, it doesn't make for great copy. Amateurs are different, you know? And Clarissa is the best of them all because I kind of feel like I got to see her grow up. She became the second youngest US Olympic boxing champion in our history. She beat Floyd Patterson's record. And so now she's second to Jackie Fields from, I think, the 1924 Games in Paris who won featherweight gold. She was 17 years old. Yeah. And most importantly, she's just a tremendous boxer. Like, she was the first-- she was the first boxer who I saw. And I was like, oh my god, women can be as good as men. Women can be kind of artists in the ring. Kind of the way I felt when I read Virginia Woolf for the first time. And I thought, wow, women can be as intelligent as men. Like, women can be great minds on the level of some of the great, you know, Shakespeare and the great male geniuses. That's what I felt about Clarissa when I saw her box. And it was very moving for me. I moved every time I see her fight. And so that was a very fun journey. Also, Katie Taylor's incredible, this Irish gold medalist. And there's a lot of-- all the women I met were true inspirations to me. Even some of the ones who didn't win, who were just kind of, you know, on personal journeys of their own. Yeah. Not sure with a lot of countries, it's-- like when women's soccer took off or the US dominated so long because in other countries, it was just-- women don't get together to play sports or-- Absolutely. No, there was the-- a big story was the Afghan women, who they were there in China for the Women's World Championships. And unfortunately, you know, they just weren't at a very high level, technically, at all. They all got knocked out, basically. But just seeing them there in their headscarves, you know, in their own country, they're not allowed to-- they get harassed. They're not allowed to appear in public. They're not supposed to train with men or in front of men. And just to see them there doing that was deeply moving. So there's a way in which it's a story about empowerment for women. But I always love technical excellence. I'm not that into-- The triumph of the human spirit. Yeah, but it's lauding it just because it's women. And I go, women, I love it when it can even transcend that. And it can just be good on its own merits. And Clarissa is that good. Now, let's talk about writing. OK. And you're writing career. How did you-- well, how do you manage to balance the need to keep writing and the storytelling that you do with having the various careers or occupations you've put together over the years? Well, I don't think I really knew that writing was the main thing until I wrote my first novel, Iris Messenger, which is a children's novel about Greek mythology. And I did that while I was working at this hedge fund in recruiting. And that was a hard job for me. My boss was really great, really, really brilliant man. And the work was stimulating in a way, but that was not where my soul was. And luckily, they let me come in late. And I would get up in the morning and go to Starbucks and just write this novel. And I was also broken up. My husband had broken my heart. And first I broke his heart, then he broke mine. And so I was partially like revenge motivated. I was like, I'm going to show him. I'm going to write a novel. And I did. And after that, then I think I really realized this is my path. And all the other jobs are just that. They're kind of like ways to make a living. And the boxing is different. Now I feel like I've really found balance with this gym. I don't know. I can't believe that it's only been in the last two years that I've been working with these young people at the gym, because it fills me up so much. And I think it's important to give back. There's a sort of service type of feeling to it, even though I'm lucky enough to get a stipend we get paid by the Atlas Foundation, this charitable organization run by Teddy Atlas. And also by Pat Russo, who's my wonderful, wonderful boss, who a small businessman and a retired NYPD detective who opened these gyms to serve the needs within the community, get young people off the streets, reduce the temptation of gang involvement and drug involvement. And so it's really like a family. For me, it's a place to work out. It's a place to connect. It's a beautifully diverse community. I mean, it's incredibly diverse. And so now I do feel like I finally have a lot of balance in my life. It wasn't always there. And you get to write about the field in general for-- what's a stiff jab? Stiff jab, yeah. That's been a great collaboration. Gelfam Nagesh founded this blog. And I admired it before he asked me to write for it. It was just very funny. Also, there's this guy, Dr. Octagon, who writes MMA coverage. I just was attracted to the voice of the blog. It's funny, but it's also really respectful of the fighters. Because I also don't approve a fight writing that puts the fighters down. I think there's a lot of people right about boxing from that perspective, a sort of magisterial. The pen is mightier than the sword kind of way. Stiff jab respects the essential difficulty and self-sacrificial nature of the arts of Pugilism. But there's also a lot of personal voice freedom for that. So that's been really fun. It's fun to just get to go out and see the pro fights and sit on press row. And it's good to have deadlines. I think writers need deadlines. I've struggled with that a lot. But that's been my biggest struggle, I think, just like nobody's waiting. Nobody's out there knocking on my door saying like, when's your next novel coming out? I've never had a steady job in writing. And so it's nice now to have this association with the blog where he'll say, hey, cover the Koto Martinez fight. And so then I know I'm going to need to produce for that. Yeah. And you have the great coverage of the Bernard Hopkins press day. I noticed a recent post, because I've always had a soft spot for Bernard. Oh, I didn't know that he's my favorite fighter of the modern era. I mean, now he's older than the two of us combined. Exactly. I love him. Yeah, he's an amazing piece of work. So it is astonishing that a guy like that can be going strong at-- I can't even guess how old he is at this point. But I guess the prison years were actually beneficial in terms of not being punched for seven or eight years. Also, I mean, he's an example of a superior defensive fighter. Defense gives you a long career. He also takes great care of himself. I know that he was a vegetarian for many years. He doesn't drink. I think he's got the chip on his shoulder, keeping him going. His trainer, Naseem Richardson, one of the best trainers in boxing, he said to me at the way in that there's a lot of great athletes right now boxing. But there's very few fighters in that old school way. And Bernard is one of those. He's a fighter. I noticed in another one of your pieces, you're talking about defense within boxing and interspersed that with a segment from WGC Bald's great novel, "Osterlitz." How-- well, I guess, how out of left field does that come to your readers first? And do you study literature of boxing at all? So, Mailer, obviously, Tom Jones, and his pugilistic rest, things of that ilk. Yeah, I did that a little bit. I made the "Osterlitz" quote a little bit to be just, I don't know. That wasn't boxing specific. It was more about the defensive participation concept. Yeah, that has always struck me about how the more we fortify ourselves, the more we reveal our essential weakness. But I mostly just did that to freak people out. I mean, I know-- I don't think it's extra civil. What is she talking about? Yeah, then I figured most people would just skip over that. But yeah, I do study literature of boxing. I try to read the things that people consider the best writing and see what they're doing and, you know, to, like, inform my own work. Who are your favorites in that field? Leebling is my absolute favorite. I love him. I also really love this. Just that essay I wrote on Clarissa Shields, I did for this guy, Carlo Rotella, who's-- he's editing, hopefully, forthcoming anthology. And I love his work. I hadn't read it before I got that invitation. And he's just doing some beautiful stuff. I love the combination of empathy. I really like the people who write from a point of view of empathy, as opposed to from just a subtly dis-- there's a lot of subtly disrespectful boxing writing. And if I feel that in the work, I just have, like, an allergic reaction to it. What do you think accounts for that? I think it's essentially the threat that the intellectual feels faced by the athlete. I think there's also a lot of racism underlying it. These are white people usually writing about black people or Latinos. And I just think it's like the emasculated white man trying to get one over on the black man, honestly, and couching it in these tricks of rhetoric. And it pisses me off. And I can't read it, you know. In addition to boxing, you've also ghost-written, erotica, and worked with adult film stars, and that milieu. Any common thread you find within writing in those fields? Oh, absolutely. OK. I assume, but didn't want to jump to a conclusion that you were going to sneer at me for. No, no, no. I mean, well, just picking up that theme, first of all, I think these are people that writers often or intellectuals sit in judgment of. You know, and I find that astonishing, because the first thing that strikes you when you interact with a porn star or a boxer is just their great beauty. And they're great, like, I don't know. You just feel lucky to be in the room with them, you know, radiating youth and just a certain power of the body. So there's that. Like, I want to kind of do honor to that. I want to praise that, you know? I guess I approach it from a point of view of praise. Like, you know, that's what Homer did. That's what the epic poets did, was praise the warriors, you know? And I don't want to romanticize porn, because I think it's, you know, it's venal. I think there can be a lot of, you know, awful things about it. I think a lot of it is awful. I think that it's pervasiveness and culture today is not a good thing. When I see the young men in my gym and the young women and the way they relate, and I see that, you know, the porn industry, what they see on the internet is informing that in a negative way. So I don't mean to like, yeah, take away from that. But I also think porn stars like boxers are people who put their bodies at risk and on display for our entertainment. You know, they're engaging in something. Very primal and very old in public. You know, they're transgressing taboos. And I like to get close to that power, you know? I think it's almost impossible to write something boring about sex or about a fight. No, Martin Amos could prove you wrong on that. But that's just my judgment. You know, unfortunately, I've gone through way too much of his writing about it. Yeah, Joyce Carolo, it's awesome. Ooh, yeah. Do you find analogs between boxing and writing and the practice of writing yourself? In terms of-- I don't know if maybe they're training or everyone, what do you need to? Absolutely, training, discipline. The fact that for a long, long time, you'll feel like you're making no progress. And then suddenly you'll feel like you jumped up a whole level. And you would have thought that years ago. But suddenly you really feel that. Like you thought you understood how to throw the right hand. But suddenly one day you're like, oh my god. Now I really understand how to throw the right hand. And I think that happens in writing too, especially with time, with the way you handle chronology and transitions. And that suddenly I'll be able to do something in an essay that I didn't have the flexibility to do before. Is it reform you enjoy the most? Yeah, the essay, for sure. Yeah. You should check out the-- you should check out the Philip Lopez one that I did. I thought of giving you one of his books instead. Yeah. Yeah, it's one of those, the way I put it. I've interviewed a lot of people over time. That's the person I think is operating at the highest level of his field. More than anyone else I've spoken to so far. I think what Lopate does with the personal essay, it's like Michael Jordan playing basketball a bit of anyone else does anything else. That's, you know, except now Jordan's old and broken down. And Lopate can keep going. Well, and there's an example also of-- that's another parallel with boxing, I think. Like, if you really want to be a good boxer, you should study fight tapes, study the great fires of the past and pick up tricks. And I think Lopate is tremendously-- I mean, his anthology, the art of the personal essay, it's extraordinary. And the introductions that he writes to each of the people included are so deep, you know? So I think that he's studied the greats also. And it hasn't prevented him from having his own idiosyncratic, beautiful style, you know? It's only enhanced it. And if you thought about publishing or trying to get a collection together if you're-- I would love to, I totally have. You know, I think it's like those things are hard to sell. You know, maybe at some point when I'm a little more established. But I would love to. And I think it'd be fun, you know? Because like, we could have fight pieces, porn pieces, you know, personal memoir stuff. You'd have a wonderful one about jumping out of an airplane. Which, as I mentioned, the only other person-- I have one friend who does it relatively often, but the only person I knew at the time doing it told me that she had no recollection. It's on videotape of her up in the plane getting pushed out in New Zealand and the tandem guy with her. And she doesn't remember anything from the plane lifting off to when they were on the ground again. Interesting. Well, maybe I knew I was going to write about it, so I knew I had to remember the details. But it's really vivid in my mind. No, in her case, we all goofed on it because once they're getting ready to go out, her head just keeps going side to side like, no, no. And the guy's just behind her doing this thrust. And all of a sudden they're out of the plane. That was it. Yeah, we goofed on her for a while about that. But it's only been 10 years. I guess we should just start to let that go. You did complet in college. Who'd you study? What was your general theme or-- Well, French was my language. And I did a semester abroad in Morocco. So I sort of focused on Francophone literature, literature of French-speaking Africa, mostly because it was easy to write about. It's a time-limited period in literature. It had a pretty clear political agenda. So it was easy to write papers. But you knew this wasn't something that was ever going to become your life. No interest in being a professor or anything about it. I didn't really dig college, to be honest. I felt like I got a better education in high school. I went to this really great little, quicker school outside of Philadelphia called Addington Friends. The teachers cared so much about us. And Brown, obviously, is a great school. But I felt a little lost there. A big city like Providence, like-- Yeah, yeah. I'm not sure that I really learned too much in college. And by the time I got out, I just couldn't wait to work in real things. And my first job was as a chef, actually, after college. I just wanted to do things with my hands. Had you ever thought along the lines of a career? I know it sounds like a weird question, and I'm only asking because I'm in the middle of this huge transition. I'm doing myself. But looking over your body of work and the occupations you've had over the years, you're smart, a good writer, et cetera, have that ever been a-- yeah, I just need to buckle down and do this for the next 10, 15 years? Or is it always a sense of a job, like you said? And now you found a personal-fulfilling thing? Yeah, I guess I didn't ever think about a career. It was more like doing things I loved and following the energy. And then pretty quickly, it became clear that certain things weren't viable as a career. I couldn't stay as a chef professionally, much as I love cooking. But I wasn't fast enough and consistent enough. And I realized I loved doing it for people I love in my home. I don't want to really do it as a career. And even with yoga, I got burned out after a while. I was teaching 14 classes a week all over New York City. When they came out with unlimited metric cards, it was like an incredible reduction in my living expenses because I was going, you know, so much. So, yeah. Listeners have actually noticed at this point that I've been talking more about myself and this whole career thing, which I'm assuming is because of my tremendous anxiety about changing my life after 20 years in this field. But who are you reading nowadays? I'm getting ready to write this piece about, so I wrote a profile for Penhouse Forum that's coming out soon about Kelly Shabari, who's this BBW which stands for Big Beautiful Woman, which means, you know, fat. She doesn't line that word, porn star. So anyway, the editor there, Eric Danville, wrote this really fun book, The Complete Linda Lovelace. So I'm going through that and I want to write about that and about Linda was sort of our, she was the first porn star, the first real porn star. So, I'm checking her out and she also wrote this book ordeal about where she sort of recants everything that happened to her in porn, but which also oddly is sort of porn-y itself. Like it's, well, it's like, this was so awful. Let me tell you all about it. Nothing in the little or detail. Exactly, it's sort of one long extended violation fantasy. So I'm checking that out. Let's see, what else? I've got, oh, this was so fun, a golden thread. My husband got this for me for my birthday, my Philip Sandifer, it's about Wonder Woman throughout history and her as an icon and the sort of crazy ideological beliefs of the guy who created Wonder Woman. I had a conversation about that a few months ago with a bunch of comics people. They just, we don't talk about that part of it and all that, the nice hardcover collections of her. Yeah, feminist bondage utopia, that's pretty much the ideological position. Yeah, and I'm slowly reading more boxing stuff, just trying to get more educated. I'm doing some research on, it was just the 50th anniversary of the Ali Liston fight and I want to do a retrospective of that. I'm friends with a writer, Stanley Crouch, and he said he'd watch the fight with me and just talk over it. I have this concept of doing like a sort of mystery science theater type of thing with great fights in the past and I'd love to do that with Stanley and the Ali Liston fights, so I'm reading up on everything I can about Ali. Yeah, until I watched a match, I can't even remember, I was a De La Hoya fight, I saw with Bobby Chez and his brothers, all of whom trained in boxing for years and I realized I had no knowledge of anything in the ring until I sat down and watched a fight with those guys and realized, oh, you were actually seeing everything that's going on, not, ooh, he punched him. You're getting much more out of this and the whole strategy behind it all and what one punch went wrong and why the guy felt like a heap when he got tagged. Yeah, absolutely, you see the narrative in it. I never liked boxing as a kid, I thought I was violent and awful and I couldn't stand. I was really offended by it. So I understand people who have that reaction, but I think it's important to keep an open mind and know that those of us who love it do see beauty within it and we see the narrative and I got my boss, Pat, he gave me and my husband his nicks floor nets, our nets. See, I just went around. Oh, you were in around the corner for me a little while ago. Yeah, and so we watched the game and it was amazing to be that close. It was, you know, we could see JZ, it was super cool, but also I just know nothing about basketball and I was just conscious of the fact that it was somewhat wasted on me because I wasn't seeing the lines, the angles, the skill, the plays that I know a true basketball fan would be seeing, you know. Yeah, it's a nature, again, becoming an aficionado of something or a practitioner as you were also. Have you gone to the Met? Have you seen the Pugilist at Rest statue? Have you ever-- Oh, no, I haven't. You should. Jerry Saltz wrote a wonderful piece in New York Magazine. It's basically just a diagram. It's an image of it with all these little tags and concepts about it and just what makes it one of the greatest pieces of Western art, but it also comes from having a feeling for boxing, I suppose. Yeah, I should bring one of the kids from the gym or something like that would be a fun field trip to bring them to see that. New York Magazine, you said? I think it was in New York Magazine. I'll send you a link after this, but it was one of those. I just-- there was a story by Tom Jones about it that was good, but once you get a true art historian looking at this and really getting at what it meant, and a boxer meant something different back in antiquity, they were treated a lot differently, praised more but also subjected to awful, awful physical treatment, it's something. And I always wonder how that conceptually carries through with what boxing means today and what it means to sort of sacrifice yourself, like you said, for this public spectacle like that. Do you feel the same way about the MMA type stuff, or does that just kind of leave you cold in those-- No, I have some interest in MMA. I've studied a little bit of-- I did Thai kickboxing a bit. I've been to like one Brazilian Jiu Jitsu class. I think that that's a tremendously nuanced sport as well. I think ground fighting is really interesting. And in some ways, it's less violent than boxing, because you can end on submission. But I guess there's a way that the culture surrounding MMA feels less rich to me than that surrounding boxing. And there isn't that rich historical tradition. There's a bit more of this violent bloodlust and-- I was going with the frat boy. Yeah, that fat boy-- Which, of course, there's some of that in boxing, but I feel that it's more so in MMA now. But no, I have a lot of respect for MMA. It's just not my field. I understand. But I want to learn more about it, definitely. And who do you consider your biggest influences, both in writing and, well, the rest of the pursuits you have? Well, Daniel Pinkwater is a really big influence. He writes beautiful, strange, funny books for children, as well as some great essays. There's this essay online about shopping for a new car as a fat guy who needs a car that will accommodate him. And it's a great piece of humor writing. And I love how he writes about the sort of interpenetration between the mundane and the magical, which I think is something that happens to you when you grow up in the suburbs. I did this, like-- A lot. Yeah, right. This kind of like bland backdrop to everything. And you seek that out. You seek magic and strip malls. And so, yeah, him, Roldal, I love-- let's see, who else? For my essays, I really love Jonathan Ames. I relate to him a lot. He's also somebody who writes a lot about shame and about sort of edgy sexuality and about boxing. So I think we share a lot of similarities. Yeah, I don't know if he's an influence, but I really love PG Woodhouse. I think he's so funny. Rhythm is really important to me. And he just perfected his sentences and got it to where he just set you up for the punch. And recently, I was talking to a friend of mine, Sue Johnson, who's this wonderful photographer. We collaborated a lot on covering women's boxing. And we were talking about Adrienne LeBlanc. She wrote Random Family. I don't know it. Yeah. Random Family-- it was a beautiful, beautiful book about Puerto Rican families in the Bronx. And Adrienne spent like 11 years with these women day in day out. And she tells the story like it's a novel. And I was telling Sue how when I read this book, I realized that sometimes in my nonfiction, I insert myself into the story too much. And Adrienne was so-- she kind of faded into the background. And she just let the subjectivities of these women shine through. And therefore, it was so empathic. She was so deeply in their point of view that it read like a novel. And that was the thing that I've read recently that had the most impact on me, where I sometimes stop. And when I'm tempted to make a little snarky insertion of myself, I ask myself, do I really want to right now do that? I mean, sometimes it's the best part of the piece. It's funny. But sometimes it's just the ego wanting to poke through. Look, I'm still here. Exactly. Exactly. Yeah, I've fought that for quite a long time. Before I just gave up in the editorials in my magazine, I just let totally be about me and my wife. It turned out there was an audience for that. It's kind of rare that you can actually find a way to just keep making these little asides without ever actually making a point. But I've kind of cultivated that for 40 years now. What advice would you give to someone at 43 years old who has very little athletic background but would love to be able to survive three rounds in a ring? Well, do you really want to train as a sponsor? I thought about it. I thought just for the-- to go through the process of doing that, yeah. Yeah, we'll come to my gym, ma'am. I'll train you. Sounds like a date. Yeah, I like to expose the kids. Technically, we're a free community gym for youth. But I love to expose the fighters to new people in the community, people doing cool shit. So they could be like, wow, you can make a living doing that. So I bring friends in to train. Yeah, it'd be fun. I guess you just should learn how to stand, how to make a fist, how to throw punches. And you could see where it goes from there. So you would be in the age class of the master's division now. And there's some really good, exciting master's bouts. You wear bigger gloves and fight, I think, two-minute rounds. But I'll put you up against-- do you have a nemesis within the pharma community? No, sadly, everybody loves me. So it's a wonderful world for me, except I want to beat the hell out of somebody. Or just not get beaten up too badly myself. Although I do think of the Jonathan Ames show on HBO where they built everything into a big boxing match from all the lead characters. Yeah, Jonathan trained at Gleason's, I know, because I actually learned about his work first through Harry Kite, this great trainer there who said to me one day, oh, you're a writer. One of my clients is a writer, too, here. And he gave me his book. And I kind of was like, yeah, yeah, yeah. And then I picked it up and I read it. It's like these essays on his like, you know, I don't know. Yeah, I've read some of Ames's fiction and nonfiction. He's all over. And he's crazy, like, you know, trans prostitutes. And I was like, this is fabulous stuff, you know. So-- Did you forget to meet him? I think I've met him briefly at like a book signing or something like that, but-- I figure in this community, there's only so much interaction where somebody's-- Exactly. Yeah, the boxing writer, or the writing boxer. Right, he's not too many of us, yeah. Understood. So maybe I'll show up at the gym in a couple of weeks. And they can all beat up the old white guy. That would be great. That would be lovely. It would be a while before I put you in the ring with somebody. But you'd teach you to, you know, punch. And it's really fun. You learn a lot about yourself. In the two minutes that around lasts, it's like a lifetime. Because everybody has a plan until they get punched in the face. That's right. Cool. Sarah Deming, thank you so much for coming on The Virtual Memory Show. Thank you. It was such a pleasure. [MUSIC PLAYING] [MUSIC PLAYING] And that was Sarah Deming. You can find her writing at her website, sarahdeming.typepad.com. And that's S-A-R-A-H-D-E-M-I-N-G. And while you're there, make sure you check out the essays on skydiving and the one about her being a vodka pusher, colorless, odorless, tasteless. That one just recently got published in Three Penny Review. And it's-- well, both of them are fantastic. She's really a talented essayist. And I want to see more of her work. And she also covers boxing at stiffjab.com. You can find those links from sarahdeming.typepad.com. And that's it for this week's Virtual Memory Show. Thank you so much for listening. We'll be back next week with a conversation with Tova Mervis, author of the new novel, Visible City. Until then, do me a favor and go to our iTunes page and post a review of the show. And also, please head up our website, chimeraobscura.com/vm and make a donation to this podcast. It's ad-free, and I would love to just get an occasional tip from you guys to get a sign that you actually care and think it's worth something. If you can't remember chimeraobscura.com, just search for Gil Roth, G-I-L-R-O-T-H. And you'll find me through most good search engines. And if you've got ideas for guests, drop me a line at Groth, G-R-O-T-H, at chimeraobscura.com, at VMSPod on Twitter, or at our Facebook page, facebook.com/virtualmemoriesshow. Until next time, I am Gil Roth, and you are awesome. Keep it that way. [MUSIC PLAYING] [MUSIC PLAYING] [MUSIC PLAYING] [BLANK_AUDIO]
