With his phenomenal new book, A NATURAL HISTORY OF EMPTY LOTS: Field Notes from Urban Edgelands, Back Alleys and Other Wild Places (Timber Press), Christopher Brown shifts from novels into nature-writing/memoir/nonfiction mode and I am HERE for it. We talk about the eco-cosmos of East Austin, TX, the years of observation that opened him to the hidden pockets of wildness in urban environments, why solitude in nature is a myth, what we have to gain from taking a long walk, Long Time vs. the short presence of Anglos in Texas, how 2020's lockdown turned off global capitalism and showed how society might truly change, and how this book mutated from when we talked about it at Readercon 2023. We get into Bruce Sterling's unforgettable critique of his writing, the process of turning a narrative of colonization into one of decolonization, (eco)psychogeography & the Situationists, why he (begrudgingly) brought the personal/memoiristic into the book and how it helped him come to terms with himself, and what a workshop with horror writers taught him about the truth-telling power of non-redemptive storytelling. We also discuss the design flaws of the agricultural revolution, how his readers in different regions respond to his FIELD NOTES newsletter, the nature of mysticism and writing a narrative about transcending the self, hiking a Massachusetts marsh in summer with Jeff VanderMeer, and plenty more. Follow Christopher on Bluesky, Instagram and Mastodon, and subscribe to his FIELD NOTES newsletter • More info at our site • Support The Virtual Memories Show via Patreon or Paypal and via our e-newsletter
The Virtual Memories Show
Episode 607 - Christopher Brown
(upbeat music) - Welcome to The Virtual Memories Show. I'm your host, Gil Roth, and we're here to preserve and promote culture one weekly conversation at a time. You can subscribe to The Virtual Memories Show through iTunes, Spotify, YouTube, Google Play, and a whole bunch of other venues. Just visit our sites, chimeraobscura.com/vm or vmspod.com to find more information, along with our RSS feed. And follow the show on Twitter and Instagram at VMSPod. Well, I have made it through another week of this minefield of a calendar I set for myself. This time it was a two-day trip to San Diego to give a two-hour presentation, also known as The Gil Show at a client's sales meeting than a red-eye back to New Jersey. So I could land at 6 a.m. and head straight on to a trade show, which is more of a diffuse, more like Gil improv, I guess, than a strict Gil Show. But then I went fine, although I bailed around 130 rather than stay for the whole shebang, finishes a four o'clock, they do a reception after and all this stuff. I just didn't have the energy, did enough schmoozing, and, well, I'd say I didn't have enough energy, but afterwards, I, instead of going home, drove on to Princeton about half an hour away, spent some money at Hilton's, one of my favorite menswear stores. Then I hit Labyrinth Books to actually to pick up this week's guest's book and to catch up with one of the managers. 'Cause I figure I should have some fun while I'm running myself into the ground and menswear and books are pretty much where it's at. And I am, make no mistake, running myself into the ground. I don't sound great right now, which I'm hoping is just the after effects of COVID and flu vaccines, which I did over the weekend and not cold, flu, COVID, whatever. Anyway, discretion being the better part of valor. I decided not to turn around on Friday and head out to Ohio for Cartoon Crossroads Columbus for the weekend because I needed the rest and the vaccinations. And I figured no one was gonna miss me. But this weekend, which is part of why I got shot up, I'm off to Italy for a business trip. There is a huge trade show in Milan next week, like the Super Bowl for the weird pharma sector that I work in. So we're going a few days early, spending a little while in Rome before taking a train up to Milan, at which point I go into heavy duty work mode and my wife goes off and has a good time in Milan and wonders why I'm staring at the wall for half an hour after I get back from the full day at the show. But anyway, all of which is to say, I will not be posting a new episode next week. I have the following week show already recorded. I did that this summer for an upcoming book and that's all ready to go and should have the following week's one in the can after tomorrow. And the week after that, I also recorded already. So in theory, October is all going to be taken care of. But for now, there is too much to do and I really don't want to carry my podcast gear on this trip with me because that bag is about nine pounds on its own and I'm going to have two suits, three shirts, dress shoes, toiletries, underwear, a little casual wear, et cetera in the carry on for seven days. So really bringing the pod gear and doing an intro while I'm sitting in Rome and Milan, not going to happen. I promise I will do the weekly email though. I will send all sorts of neat pictures from the trip. So you'll see that stuff. But that is just the boring aspects of my life, sort of the stuff that goes into helping me make this show, but you're not here for that. You're here for the conversation. So let's get to it. My guest this week is Christopher Brown, who has a fantastic new book out now from Timber Press, a natural history of empty lots, field notes from urban edgelands, back alleys, and other wild places. Chris has been on the show a few times already over the past couple of years, talking mainly around his great speculative fiction novels, Tropic of Kansas, Rule of Capture, and Failed State. This time he is in non-fiction mode, diving into, well, the environmental themes that permeate his novels. Now, I'm going to try and talk about this book, and it's going to be a little tough or weird to get at. I want to tell you, I've had a run of really strong books by guests this year, like books that have really affected me, and sometimes I don't slow down enough to let that sink in and let them really kind of have their way with me. And I will say a natural history of empty lots means it's going to be even tougher for me to pick even my top three when I do the guest list episode this December. This is a fantastic book. It's an exploration of long time and deep roots and the impact of colonization on East Austin, on Texas, on America, on the earth. Chris uses nature writing as a way in to investigate more than just nature, to investigate our ways of life and our relationship to the world, and to nature and to each other. And the ways in which urban sprawl can leave, it can leave behind pockets of wildness that the way he approaches them and brings them to us, it's like other dimensions. And they're right in front of us. And the book has some of his photographs and it largely pros, but you'll get a few examples of what he's seeing and what he's exploring, but it's so much better to just dive into the text of it all. And in the process, Chris also examines his own life, how he came to live in Austin, how he wound up building this gorgeous statement of a house on the site of a former petroleum pipeline. And we've talked about this before on the show. There's a mini documentary, an episode of a documentary series on Apple TV about it. That's a place that I'm dying to see. I hope to get down to Texas sometimes to see him. But I'll see beyond that, the book throughout is, it's just suffused with his observations of the natural world and those deep roots I mentioned. And the narrative shifts in time that he engages in. Sometimes he bypasses the personal for the ecological or the communal or the historical and the theoretical when he starts talking about the situation and psychogiography, something that's completely divorced from, well, from Texas, but of course, plays into every aspect of every city and every gathering of man. Like me, Chris has a non-arts life, at least adjacent to his art's life. For me, this is, well, anyway, Chris has a non-arts life. We'll just put it that way. And the book brings in his history as a lawyer, the work that he's done and the work that he still does and how it helps the community as they're trying to push back on the forces that are just striving for development and growth without end. And that life, the realities of working in business and working as a lawyer gives him enough perspective to know what things you can and can't fight over and why you still need to fight. But the realization that certain things are going to happen, you just have to try to mitigate as best you can. And I'll say beyond all this, I don't want to get just as though it's filled with important things you must know. But the prose is, it's like a companion on a walk in the woods. It brings, it points things out to you. It shows you the world around you and it's a little rye and it's never long winded and it's a guide on a visit to this whole world you never knew was right beside you. It's beautifully written, beautifully constructed, brings together so many threads of Chris's writing in his fiction as well as his newsletter and regular readers of my newsletter know that I often link out to Chris's weekly field notes newsletter. The posts there are sort of a soil for this book and I go on a little bit too much at the beginning of this about differentiating the book from the newsletter but empty lots really stands on its own. I loved this book. In a way, and maybe I'm just too influenced by some of my past guests and other transformational experiences I've had in the past few months, this sort of works for me. This book like those Joe Coleman paintings I talked about in episode 600, all these different zones that evoke different aspects of life and the whole world and the personal within it and it never loses sight of the whole totality. Chris would be happy if I said his writing reminded me of a Joe Coleman painting so I'll leave it at that. A natural history of empty lots is an absolute wonder of a book for all the reasons I've mentioned and more. I hope you'll go get it and that you'll sign up for Chris's field notes newsletter which is at fieldnotesalloneword. Christopher Brown, alloneword.com. I'll put a link to that in the show and episode notes here. And we did this one remotely so audio's a little, this ups and downs and Chris had a squeaky chair. I swear to God it wasn't my chair, it was his chair. And those are the only caveats. Here's Chris's bio. Christopher Brown is the Philip K. Dick World Fantasy and John W. Campbell Award nominated author of the novels Tropic of Kansas, Rule of Capture and Failed State. Also an accomplished lawyer, he has worked on two Supreme Court confirmation hearings, led the technology corporate practice of a major American law firm and been the general counsel of two public companies. And now the 2024 virtual memories conversation with Christopher Brown. (upbeat music) We talked last year at ReaderCon when this book was pretty late in process. Did it mutate from there? Did you know what you had at that point? - Yeah, I mean, it changed a lot, I think. I did, you know, I think if we talked in July, that would have been when I was, I don't know, just kind of waiting on the first round of editorial comments from my editor. And so I had turned it in and had an idea of what I was doing, but I was still kind of figuring out how do we've all the different parts together of what's sort of, you know, from a narrative standpoint, trying to blend a lot of different things. And so yeah, it morphed quite a bit from the first draft, which, you know, it heared pretty closely to the proposal that I had written and had a kind of a little more, was maybe a little bit more conventional in structure, a little bit more kind of episodic or vignette-based. And so the kind of overarching narrative through line really evolved quite a bit. - I'll say that's one of the things I found fascinating. It doesn't feel like a greatest hits collection. I know this is derived from the Field Notes newsletter, but it feels like more than that, especially in terms of that narrative sense you bring in and the memoiristic vibe, which is never heavy-handed, but shows us who the author is. Was that part of the next draft or how things changed from there? - Yeah, absolutely. Well, I mean, I never wanted to write. It's not a, it's a derived part, but yeah, yeah. - No, I mean, when you say derive from Field Notes, I mean, it's sort of based on the same material as Field Notes, sort of derived from the same sources, I would say. But yeah, I didn't want to do a compilation of newsletter posts as much as I love like the old, like when people could just like take their blog and publish the greatest hits from their blog as a book that was a fun era. That's not what I was interested in doing. I'm kind of like, well, it's all already there. I need to do something new. And so I gave a lot of thought to, as I was working on it, to kind of like, yeah, I needed it. I mean, one of the things that my editor, who's also a novelist yourself named McKenna Goodman, who kind of inherited this book when the person acquired it left to undertake another job, she was sort of pressing me a little bit on the memoir aspect, which doesn't come easily to me. I'm sort of like, nobody wants to hear about my so-called problems. - I believe you also phrased it as a pronounced efficiency at making authentic, vulnerable connection with my fellow humans. But however you want to phrase it, this. (laughing) - Yeah, well, yeah, raised by it. Yeah, I felt, I'll just blame my parents about that. So I was thinking a lot about what kind of story it was gonna be in, 'cause it needed, it wanted to combine that nature writing generic style that I had been riffing on in field notes, right? And the beauty of nature writing and the kind of potential for sort of lyrical, explorative, lyrical, descriptive translation of the richness of the world into language. And to do some of the things that like kind of classic American, especially nonfiction does of being like an effective information delivery vehicle of giving you actionable information you can use, right? Not like business book level, but doing that thing that I think a lot of people want their nonfiction reading to do and parting information. And then telling a story in a way that a novel tells a story in a way that a good memoir tells a story and it wanted to be a first person kind of a story. And so, but there's no source for that book that I could, and so I was like, that's just mixing all these different things and then I thought about it and I realized there is a kind of a model for that kind of a book that was really very much the one I had already been thinking about without consciously knowing that was what I was thinking about if that makes sense and that's the sort of narratives of like exploration and colonization and settlement and discovery that we all kind of grow up reading in this country at least. They're told around the dinner table of the stories of the family of where we came from and where we left there and how we got here and what the trip was like and what we found here and how we changed it, how it changed us and all of that. And just stories of exploration like I went to this weird place and this is what I found. And so, playing with those kinds of stories but trying to then like do something different with them to kind of invert them in a science fictional kind of way in a sort of almost ballerian way to like turn narratives of colonization into narratives of, to produce a narrative of decolonization, if you will, of the world around us, of our lives, of the self, maybe of the community and the future, I don't know. So, some of those things, the narrower the actor, the more plausible the ambition, but that was the goal. - Yeah, it felt like that that's, well, knowing you, knowing the novels, having red field notes for so long, finding a different voice in this book. I found kind of thrilling. I go into any one of these books, assuming the Peregrine is going to be the template things are based on, very early on, it was, there are, you know, little Peregrine-esque vibes, Jay Bakerish moments. But yeah, bringing the personal into it, bringing the way the midlife crisis opens up into bigger questions, again, of America and capitalism and decolonization or post-colonial existence. However, you're gonna define it or describe it. The book takes a lot of interesting turns and a pretty amazing journey to go on. - Well, I'm glad you think so, thank you. - And again, that's one of those, like, I went in thinking, am I gonna recognize themes and, you know, individual anecdotes or things like that? And it really just, like you said, threads things together so beautifully. It doesn't feel in any way that it's a, you know, like you said, the compilation vibe. It's much more this, it's own creature. - To what extent was that a real challenge? When your modes before now are fiction, whether short or long in science fiction, particularly, and field notes, which again, has a different mode, you know, was it tough for you? Beyond the Midwestern reticence about human vulnerability and such, just finding that voice and being able to have faith in what you were building. - Yeah, it was hard. It was hard. I mean, it was just, you know, it was challenging. It was like, you know, had to really-- - More challenging to building the house or less challenging. That's, oh, sorry. (laughing) - I would say more challenging or certainly challenging in very different ways. It's not like a project management challenge, you know. It's like a-- - KBL spend a life challenge. - It's a emotional challenge of like, you know, I liked it. I always, I often share with people the, like, Efras and the Bruce Sterling dropped on me in a writer's workshop, you know, early in my career as a science fiction writer, which was, we're kind of a missing out. Saturday workshop, we would do it. If that was called Turkey City. And I remember I brought some story and he would give this kind of like, yeah, this is pretty good, but you know, but I feel like you're not really biting into the copper wire, you know, like out of your like, I love that, I've always loved it. And I was like, yeah, okay, exactly. That's like the perfect provocation to the writer. Are you really biting into the copper wire? Which sort of, when you're pushing somebody on like, you know, tell them by the real story about your life, Mr. I hide behind my characters, right? That's a good provocation 'cause it is, the very provocation itself is a kind of like, tough guy writerly dodge, right? And so, kind of, yeah, wrestling with it. How do you dig into the material? How do you tell the story while being true to your own principles about like, I have it pretty easy. I don't need to be, you know, complaining about my problems. Or, how do you write a memoir that's about, you know, the effort to transcend the self, right? You know, just a lot of things being wrestled with there. And so, I think that task, you know, I think that challenge produced some things that I was happy with in terms of, you know, breaking into kind of new territory. And I think that model I had in mind is a kind of load starter to guide me that I was talking about a minute ago was very helpful. - I will say it's a spoiler alert because it's an episode that's gonna air a month from now, but I recorded with Simon Critchley about his new book on Christian mysticism. And he's got a line in there about how memoir is a pretty dead genre unless it includes a conversion or transcendence of some kind. So, I think you're gonna be okay and I might send him a copy of this book 'cause again, we would go back to the Peregrine. He and I geeked out over that. But we've got a couple of other areas of common literary interest, but that was one of his little assides in the book. And I thought, yeah, yeah. No, I get where he's coming from completely. And the via negativa he brings in the need for that sort of self-annihilation that I think this book captures, your book captures in, you know, the voice is always there, but, you know, you do disappear into what long time is, I feel. But that's-- - Yeah, that's the idea totally. And that's a great point about that you and Simon Critchley make about how memoir is more interesting or more vital perhaps when it's a story of, there's a kind of transformation or sort of, would you say like a religious transformation or like a kind of-- - Yes. It doesn't have to be religion, religion. I mean, we get into that. - Yeah. - He does not consider himself converted even though this book is largely about the transcendent experiences of medieval Christian mystics and how that applies to today's life. Oh, it's gonna be a great episode. You're gonna love that one, but you gotta wait a month. So, you'll-- - Oh, that sounds good. I mean, I was listening, while I was working on this book, I was listening to this LRB podcast with Irina De Metrescu and I think it's Mary Wells Lee, is that her name? And they're these medievalists and they were talking about, they had this series about like female mystics. They did medieval female mystics. - Yeah, that's exactly who he's focusing on in this. Oh, you're gonna love that book. It's just called "Mysticism for My LARB." - Yeah, and like talking about, you know, the "anchorite lady" or "anchorites" or whatever, you know, and stuff like that. And yeah, I mean, so yeah, and like I talk in the book about "Sainte Nofreus" and you know, these kinds of stories of hermets and yeah. There's like, and I talk about the like, the Irish monks that the, you know, Vikings found in the caves of Iceland when I got there, you know? And so yeah, that, there's definitely that kind of thing is lurking in a way that, you know, is, I don't know how kind of, late and late, how completely expressive it is, but it's definitely their subtextually run through the work. - What did you learn about yourself and the process of this? - In the writing of the book? - Yeah. - I don't know, I mean, that's a good question. We'll see if you can draw me out on that. - Everybody says, I don't know, but go on. - You say what? - Everybody says, I don't know, but they know something or they found something, you know. - Yeah, I mean, I found a way into telling, you know, and to apply, I found out how to tell, to kind of adhere to my idea of fidelity to truth telling in the literary sense. And first person's story. And I think a way to try to, yeah, and I think I kind of correct the code upon a, like, maybe somewhat correct the code of how to have that, to, you know, engage in a form of self expression that, you know, is actively working in the process of that self expression to kind of escape from, if not, and obliterate the self, I don't know, but there's like a paradox there that-- - Which is also part of Simon's book. So. - Okay, yeah. - Well, interesting. So, yeah, and then I don't know. And then you just, yeah, you sort of reckon with identity. In a lot of ways, the, like, the story the book tells is about kind of coming to terms with myself over the course of my life. And so the kind of the chronicling of that, the narrative chronicling of that, you don't learn so much as kind of synthesize it and distill it into sort of a truer accounting and with yourself. And so that, I think, yeah, I mean, I definitely think. And so in the kind of the slow and stubborn evolution beyond the view from nowhere you get as a kind of like, somewhat naive and gullible, you know, middle-class white guy from Des Moines to come to see your unique and privileged view on a rich and diverse world, the discovery of a sense of community and of, you know, chasms to be crossed or to be bridged, you know, across the human community and been with the kind of other life around us. And I'll lastly also say, you know, this discovery that I think I really just do, really reckon with, as I was writing the book, this kind of revelation that the idea of solitude and nature, which runs through all these kinds of texts you're talking about which seem on one level to be like the escape from human community, right? And the escape from the noise of human society and especially urbanized society really in its various forums, escape from human civilization, if you will, that solitude and nature is really a myth 'cause what you find when you get into nature is not solitude, it's like a much deeper connection with all this other life around you, but it's a connection that proceeds language and the alienation that's embodied in language. And so that was a revelation I had while writing the book and it's been one that has stuck with me and I've been thinking about a lot. - Yeah, how did you, and this will again, feed back into working on the book and I know you took breaks from field notes in the midst of this, but sort of keeping those selves separate, I know they're both, you know, Chris Brown, ways of nature writing, but, you know, doing the occasional newsletter while you were deep inside the book, you know, finding ways to, let me just keep this in this mode while I, you know, quote unquote, save the good stuff or, you know, a different revelation or realization for the book. Was it a challenge, and where does field notes go from here, I guess, is the side question? - Yeah, totally, yeah. I mean, and yeah, very much like, oh, wait, I need to not, you know. - Do spoilers? - Yeah. - Yeah, no spoilers, but don't waste your good stuff. And I mean, yeah, field notes in one sense is kind of like, it's like an exercise in writing about nothing. But sometimes it's like, it's just like, sometimes it just has to be like extracted from the kind of ambient landscape of a busy normal urban week, right? And so, and it doesn't have a lot of kind of pedagogical structure to it. It's not like trying, it doesn't, I don't have it, like kind of mapped on events. Like this is the stuff I'm gonna cover here or whatever. It's not at all about like actionable information. It's sort of like a letter to friends, as it were. And so, yeah, I do, I need to, I wanna figure out now, I wanna step back and kind of look at the newsletter and think about first things to do with it and first places to take it and maybe some things to do with structure there. And I did play a lot with film photography and like trying to get more into like a different way of like bringing the analog into the digital and thinking about the form that way. And then the book got me to do a paper version of the newsletter. - I was gonna ask about that. - Yeah, yeah, which was really fun to do. And even if I kind of missed the window to do, I wanted to do it sort of offset or go like a letters press printer at least for the cover. And but I kind of ran out of time to do that. But now I wanna, I really wanna start doing like a quarterly print newsletter 'cause I think that's really fun. And that format is intrinsically different because of the temporal issues you're running into. - Right. Just making a couple of issues of a zine, you know, I know about 30 years too late on that, but you know, just just doing a couple of those and trying to plot out the third one and figure out, you know, what to do that's not gonna be either repeating stuff from the first two or, you know, the same stuff that goes into my ridiculous newsletters. It means something though, that's separate. - You're talking about haiku for business travelers? - Yes, yes. The third issue is coming along. There is actually a very, there is a tone poem comic or a lyrical comic in there provided I'm ever able to draw it that you will, you will groove on in the span of maybe 25 words over three pages that has some themes. I think you'll, you'll dig. I just have to learn to draw better. - I mean, yeah, the like, the idea of like this of, you know, that kind of psychogeography of business travel of like the anonymity of business travel of kind of like, you know? - Trust me, there's a whole piece about Frank Stella, Frank Stella plumbing outside of a condo building that I saw while taking the Pacific surf liner Amtrak down to the bio conference in San Diego. So yeah, there's, there's, you know, there's stuff to be seen if you keep your eyes open, which is totally, again, the theme throughout the book for me is that sense of, of, of seeing. You know, you're, I don't know, it's a newsletter also, but you know, in the book, there's all these moments of the hidden oak tree that was in plain sight. You know, all these, these things that are, especially for where you're living in Austin, that are historical, that are a long time and are not, you know, they're camouflaged by the world around us. And, you know, I don't know if you've done, you know, more of those, those ranger classes or if you came up to the Pine Maron's to study with that guy that's mentioned. If you do, let me know, I'll join you next time. But yeah, that sense of learning to see inside the world, you're already, you know, that you've become blind to, I guess. - Yeah, very much so. It's very much a book about learning to see. And, you know, and yeah, and it does so mainly in this text and central text and landscape in around Austin where I've spent most of the, most of my adult life does go elsewhere. But, and here we have the good fortune of living in a place where, you know, agriculture only really arrived, you know. Like a couple hundred years ago, right? You know, 200 years ago, so 1820 or something. And so the erasure of what was here before us is a lot more recent than certainly, and you'd find in Europe or probably in, you know, highly developed parts of Asia and, you know, and even then say in New Jersey or New England or New York. And so by the same token, or on the other hand, I should say we also have in Texas, a really unique kind of culture around the relationship with the land as I've come to learn in my, you know, close to three decades here. You know, one was, you know, read a very extreme emphasis on private property, very few, you know, the kind of the idea of there being parklands, who was a very recent thing here on a relative basis. And in a very like hyper libertarian idea, you know, that the land is there for human beings to take from and to take what they need from. And that leads to a pretty brutalist, you know, industrial approach is evidenced by the kind of the petrochemical infrastructure that kind of covers the landscape of the whole state in a way. And so going into those places where and learning to see how those kinds of spaces simultaneously evidence the worst of our industrial abuses of the world around us. And at the same time, provides zones of exclusion of other human activity that allow a wild nature to kind of sneak back in or define refuge and sort of wrestling with that paradox. That's the kind of key part of the book. And then once you kind of start to see that, it starts to let you see other ways in which, you know, nature expresses its presence in the city in our, you know, most densely developed landscapes like with great trees that happened to be survived, you know, while some metropolis is growing up around them. And then learning to see like the stories, the like day to day, you know, ephemeral stories that the land hides around the movement of wildlife and various sorts and kind of what's just happened there in the 10 seconds before your she showed up and all the animals scattered before you can see them. All those kinds of things that are sort of tracker, tracker stories that, yes, Tom Brown Jr. Who, may he rest in peace, just passed away recently. He was the, yeah, as I call him, a cast in the eight of the pinebabs who... Told the story in his book, The Tracker, about growing up with a buddy who had a grandfather who was an Apache elder who taught them all of his tracking knowledge and they have learned to apply it in the landscape of kind of more rural parts of New Jersey. And then he, I guess he used it to like, help solve a crime. And that's how he wrote originally became famous. And then, yeah, we're at the series of books and started his tracker school where I think his kids are now running out. So that after he passed away. - Yeah, it's, well, again, that weird New Jersey vibe that we have where things are, the far that you get from New York City, things get stranger and stranger, and I'm only 25 miles away, but there's some strange landscape and strange wildlife as far as these things go. I was thinking when you brought up the, I would say the encroachment or the interweaving of wildlife or wildness with the city in its most exaggerated example. And it's something that comes up in the book. We've got the way during lockdown, animals started to figure out pretty quickly, "Hey, we can go into the city now," and started showing up. You see wild boars showing up in Japanese cities and other examples of that sort of stuff. It puts me in mind that because field notes began in February, 2020, just as we were heading into that world, would you have been able to write this book without COVID, without the pandemic, without the lessons that came out of those couple of years? - Definitely, I mean, I think, I mean, I was writing this book in my head the way before, you know, I mean-- - Do they crystallize things? - I think it's kind of living this book. I mean, I think it just made people more interested in this material that I already had the interest. I think that the, I mean, to me, the most dramatic lesson of COVID was not so much how much nature was already out there. Hiding in plain sight, and then able to come out, the kind of nature is healing stuff. I mean, I kind of knew that was there already, but what really opened up to me was the possibility of change. It was so, I mean, when it was just suddenly like, oh! - Officers don't exist anymore, yeah. - Yeah, I mean, just like immediate sudden change and how we live, and we're all like, working at home around our families, and this kind of rediscovery of the hearth, even if it was an electronic and digital, in many respects, right? And yeah, and so the idea that, you know, global capitalism could be like completely turned off for a week or three weeks, or however long it was just in the immediate lockdown, right? And, you know, suddenly like the air got clean, you could feel it. It was just crazy, right? Just like instantaneous, and all of these things that, you know, we had long been taught could never be shut down or the world would break. It's like they all got shut down and everything was fine. And so to me as a like object lesson in the potential of radical change, radical and rapid changes in the way we live, it was really profound. And in showing how making those kinds of changes could enrich our own lives by reconnecting us with each other and the real world in which we live as opposed to the sort of manufactured one of the, you know, production of surplus, where we're forced to spend most of our time and very good, the production of consumption of surplus. And better share the space we occupy with the other species of planetary life. - Has a response been to your work? I mean, this book's only been out for about a week or so. Field Notes has been going on for four plus years. Do, this is a weird one. Do non-U.S. readers respond differently to what you're writing about? - I mean, I think it's a question of first of discovery, right? It's like, and so the response is a function of people knowing it's even better. I have found, I think that there, you know, generally the response to this material, both the newsletter and very much with the book, the response tends to be like just reflexively enthusiastic at the sort of high level kind of teaser invitation the book and it's pressis makes. You know, the sort of invitation to go explore what life is looking in the empty lot or whatever. That kind of, that sort of basic thing that's embedded in the title and in the cover and in the, you know, sort of jacket copy, as you will. People really, it seems to really resonate with people and like everybody from like, you know, drive time, you know, conservative talk radio detox too. You know, sort of esoteric literary types. And I was worried that it's going to not resonate as well with like serious natural scientists. Cause I'm not one and I'm presuming to kind of, you know, the end of their territory. Weigh into their territory, right, which is one, you know, that sort of a zone of professional exclusion of a sword be like them writing about law, right, or science fiction. And so, but I haven't had much of that. I always wondered if I see like, you know, I just took my subscribers after one post and I'll have like a few drop off. I always think there's something going on that or like politics. I've seen if you like, there've been a few online reviews that are like, you know, - This Marxist writer, blah, blah, blah, yeah. - Yeah, there's a, well, yeah, you get a lot of this, like, oh, this guy's going off about, you know, the white colonists, give me a break if off whatever. So there's a little bit. I mean, other countries, I've gotten a really great response from Mexican writers and readers. I've had a number of people reach out and they're like, oh, this like totally resonates with like the Mexican experience, which is really exciting to me. Even like Christina that are you out of Garza was posting about the book on X Twitter, whatever, were allowed to call it yesterday, which I was very excited about. And we have kind of like some mutual friends among writers in Mexico. I don't know how she heard about the book though, but that was nice. And then I don't know. And English readers definitely have an issue. I mean, it's just like, this is very much in conversation with this rich body of English. British, I should say literature about, you know, landscape and urban landscape and edge lens, you know, which is a very specifically English or British term. And so that response has been very positive, I think. And then essentially I've had a number of like, I've seen some online reviews where people are like, oh, I just assumed this was British nature writing. And then it's like, wait, I'm in Texas. It's just sort of from the promise of the book. That's what they say. And then, and I don't know about, you know, I mean, I have a lot of the number of German and kind of Northern European readers. Do, you know, Australian readers, but I don't know. We'll have to see what, yeah, what readership the book finds beyond the kind of core English language readership. Do you know what I'm saying about doing the audio version yourself? Yeah, there's an interesting experience. Yeah. I mean, I've gotten really good at working off scripts, you know, that I write, but, you know, what was it like for you? Um, it was like a lot easier than I expected, to be honest. Um, you know, when we were kind of working on the book, you know, from an editorial standpoint last year, I was sort of like, hey, is anybody thought, or is there going to be an audio version? Um, and it was like, oh, yeah, good question. Yeah, it could be. Yeah. Oh, yeah, definitely. It's still an audio version. I was like, yeah, because it would be artistically interesting to me if it were a possibility. And if the team thought it, you know, it made sense to narrate it because it's a very, you know, it's an intensely personal work. And because I thought the voice of the book is so like personal and so kind of structurally. Um, I mean, it has some elaborate elements in some senses. It's kind of a, it's a sort of complex in some ways. And so I thought that kind of at the sentence level, sort of having an idea of how it ought to read would probably be helpful. And so they, they were, they, they make you do a little tryout. So I was like, yeah, only if you think it will be good because they're like, yeah, you know, it's kind of like, uh, if you've been to a lot of live readings by authors, you know, that, you know, some authors are better at, are more natural at reading their work a lot than others. And I don't know where I fall on that spectrum. But with this one, um, it was, yeah, it was really fun. And so I went to this little studio that mostly does like ADR, you know, after dubbing of, of film and TV productions at the edge of downtown Austin. And, um, yeah, it was four days in the studio, I guess. And, um, you basically read out loud until your cheeks get sore and like you're getting fatigued. And then your tongue starts to get kind of like floppy in your mouth and then it's the time to stop, right? So, um, and, uh, yeah, you know, I found myself over enunciating just a little bit to try to be clear. Like, you know, I did like, you know, community theater when I was in middle school. I was like, you know, a lost boy in Peter Pan or something. And I was, I was in some other similar kind of character in a pippy long stocking production. So some of that, you know, that kind of practice your hard consonant stuff came through. But I remember the, uh, the, uh, director who was on Zoom, um, it was like a professional audiobook reader herself. She was like, where do your o's come from? I was like, I don't know. It was a long story. Yeah. It's kind of, yeah. I was through growing up in the 70s watching movies about California. I don't know. Did you pronounce riparian correctly every time? Cause I, your book has that more than, I think it breaks the record for, for most uses of that, uh, that word, but. The most, I mean, uh, riparian. It's riparian. Cause I actually had to look it up. I had to have Google, uh, pronounce it for me because I was convinced I was going to do it wrong. So it's got riparian. Oh, I probably did it wrong. I think I said riparian. Um, so, um, and, uh, and, uh, and only during the production I learned, I'm supposed to, one should say Appalachia, not Appalachia. That I've heard recently and it always sounds pretentious in the opposite way. But yeah. So. Yeah. The word that I noted in my print version of the newsletter was the most common one that I was worried when I was like reading that. I was like, I'm going to find out all these repetitive uses that I, um, uh, you know, had worked hard to avoid. And it wasn't as bad as I feared. Um, but all a word I used a lot with like variations on the word gnarle. Gnarle gnarly. And, um, which is good. Cause that's like a really cool, like weird Anglo-Saxon word that's tied to trees. So that's okay. It's just a good one. And it's a good like 70s, 80s kid word. You know, especially once we got into using it with, uh, with skateboarders and surfers and such. So. Things better. Yeah. Absolutely. So you've got a line in the book about your, your, I'll quote here, skepticism of redemptive restorationist strategies and, uh, ecological puritanism. Um, can you expand, you know, a bit on, you know, the, the roots of that and how you kind of have to overcome that in the process of, as you show in the book, that sort of community building where you're working with other parties to try to get a good result, but, you know, maybe you have to, um, work with people who aren't exactly coming from the same degree of ideology or the same, uh, set of priors as you. Yeah. That question makes sense. Yeah, well, yeah, I mean, my skepticism of redemptive, uh, thinking comes, it sort of originates in my experience as a writer, and really as a writer of genre of fiction. And I really learned it like doing a workshop. There's a, uh, the, the writers, John Kessel and, uh, Richard Butner, um, are, they host a, uh, a workshop every summer called Sycamore Hill. It's, it was professional with working science fiction fantasy and horror writers. And so I've done that, I don't know, six times or so. And, um, and it's such a week long in the mountains, you know, writerly retreat, doing deep critique of other people's work and to be around. And I learned a lot from the horror writers there about the power, the truth-telling power, that non-redemptive storytelling, has, and that's really what I was like, oh, that's what horror is. Horror is like, at its core, it's non-redemptive storytelling. That's what's scary is it's sort of, there's not, you know, some like hopeful reassurance to kind of, uh, let you take away when you put the story down. And, um, and, and when you read good horror, it's like, yeah, it's like telling, kind of telling maybe through a dark mirror, truth is about how the world works. And so, um, it's not really stuck with me as, uh, in other aspects of my life, and it's how I started to see things. And it really impacted my own novels and, um, how I thought about them and just like, you know, um, to be very suspicious of our tendency, especially in American culture, I think, to like, um, put that kind of redemptive spin on everything. Um, that sort of, um, and it's all over our politics. It's like really framed right now on our politics in this kind of binary choice where people are where people on one side are trying to revive the idea of the hopeful tomorrow. And I, you know, I have some of that. I mean, I'm all about that project, but, um, uh, the kind of hopeful tomorrow that's about bringing back the past, right? That's the one you got to be wary of versus like, a tomorrow that's different than anything we've seen before, right? And so I think you got to look at the natural world the same way and so much of our, um, thinking about, uh, about, uh, our relationship with nature and how to make it more healthy is, um, is about the idea of restoration, which is a really intrinsically kind of conservative idea. It's like bringing back what was here before. Um, and, um, you know, I mean, like bring back the king. Yeah. That's kind of the core idea. It's the origin of the term, right? And, um, I love reading about 17th century England and that part of it. I mean, I was like, huh, was that a good thing? I don't know. Um, and so, um, uh, and so, yeah, when you get into, so, and I've seen the power of restoration firsthand, like my own parents did it. They took a kind of blighted acreage in Southern Iowa. They just burned it every year. My dad burned his eyebrows off the first time they did it. And, you know, doing these so-called controlled burns. Um, and, um, now that's become kind of professionalized and there's like, you know, firefighters do it. Is there kind of an unlighting side gate for extra money? We know the rollers in this anyway. So, yeah. Right. Um, just like, oh, good. That could just like the way the cops and the criminals will have the same personality profiles. Um, uh, if you can believe the shrinks. Um, and so, um, it's, yeah, I'd seen like they burned for, you know, then after they burned it every year that they're like oaks of Anna. And within just a few years, the biodiversity, uh, uh, recovery was astonishing and palpable. You just, it was evident to anybody. And so, and so I'd certainly believe in, in that part of restoration of like, recovering biodiversity, I just think we should interrogate, um, whether the biodiversity, uh, you know, 500 years ago, um, is exactly what we should expect to see and 500 years from now. This is something we brought up in the, or we've discussed in, in past ones. Being a father of a young kid and trying to keep some sense of, uh, we'll say non-pessimism, much less hope, uh, about what the, the future could be for her. Is that, did you find it more challenging now than you did a year ago or less? Oh, I don't find it that hard to, I don't know. I just, I sort of, I try to be clear-eyed about it. And, um, I try to equip my children with the tools to navigate life. Uh, I try to live in the moment and enjoy today and not worry too much about next year. Um, and I think that are that sense of like, you know, preoccupation with planning for the future is a lot of, and like the kind of like, our culture of it's tied up with the things I try to wrestle with in the book, with the, like, the preoccupation with accumulating surplus to survive the season and, um, all of the, um, unhealthy things that, that produces even as it, um, just the core, you know, kind of killer app of our civilization. And so, um, uh, I don't know, I think, and I just, I mean, I see a lot of signs that people kind of wake it up and, um, um, now, sensing what needs to be done, um, in terms of, you know, rewilding the, um, the future, the kind of immediate future. And, um, I can see it and help people respond to the newsletter and to this book, and I can just see it and just like, even just like as the books now, the book is now like bringing more attention to the stuff I've been doing in this area. And I'm seeing these people, you know, just like who kind of show up on my feed is like people, you know, new subscribers to the newsletter or, or, you know, people talking about the book or whatever. There's just all these people out there doing amazing work in these areas. There's things like, I didn't even clue into this, you know, when I was working on the book, but this, um, this sort of happened after, but like in February of this year, the United Kingdom passed new legislation requiring that any new real estate development has to result in a 10% biodiversity net gain. Um, there's like very real things going on to try to combat the biodiversity crisis. And it's really, this is a really, I mean, the statistics are really horrifying. It's like you look at, you know, this site, I quote the World Wildlife Fund's Living Planet Report from 2022, which estimates that, um, or estimated that, uh, the wildlife population of the planet has plummeted by 69% since 1970 when I was a little kid. It's like here a number like that. It's like, oh, we're screwed. Um, and, and you hear it and you know, it resonates with the truth of your own experience. If you're paying attention, it was just things like, huh, why did I just go on a three hour, you know, interstate road trip and there are no bugs splattered on my car. Um, and, um, you know, weird little sort of things, you know, the, the, what, the sad things that pass for our everyday experience of nature like that. Um, and so, um, and when you, but so when you see that and then you see at the same time that there's like, there is a sense of urgency out there among a lot of people that do things about it. It's, it gives you, it gives you, uh, you know, some sense of reassurance that especially with the generation coming up. Um, there's going to be an effort to, uh, achieve real change by the same token. Um, it's like, um, it's, you know, the thing I wrestle with, it also wrestle with in the book about the idea that, um, you can't really deal with these problems in a meaningful way without reckoning with the sort of design flaws of the agricultural revolution. That's sort of, it's sort of, you know, it makes me think that whatever we come up with is going to be sort of compromised and that the, the true or deeper solutions are going to take a lot longer, but I feel like people are coming around and we're getting on that path. And probably because to your earlier question, COVID, I think awakened in people, a record, a realization and the like, yeah, we don't have to live exactly this way. We can make a change and we all have the tools to do it even if it's like, yeah, I'm going to work from home today. You know, I guess these, you know, and yeah, I'm going to take a three hour walk, uh, instead of a 20 minute lunch break. You know, and that's sort of happening unofficially across the board and those are good sides. It's funny to me, like we talked about the instant disruption given that, you know, like when the financial crash happens in 2008, 2009, you know, the occupy people are seen as, um, dillotons as, as privileged white people, et cetera. And it's the now they, they, they saw a level of dissatisfaction and had a lot of anger about where things were going. We've seen multiple shocks and disruptions of the system since. And again, as you put it, a lot of this stuff is a conflict between the forces of control. I'm still on a pension kick from last year when I reread the entire body of work. But yeah, the forces of control and this counter force of, I'll say nature, you know, and human nature in some respects, the ways of, of, you know, just indolence and sloth. Being, you know, something that could actually be a good thing and not just, you know, something has to be weeded out in the name of efficiency at all times. Maybe this is just me extrapolating a little bit, but that's sort of the, the, you know, broader lessons we can take. Just again, the fact that I could spend a Saturday doing this as opposed to, you know, having to either be productive or, you know, doing the, the mandated sort of leisure activities we have. I don't know, I'm going nowhere with this stuff, you know. But, you know, well, yeah, no, the idea, yeah, the idea that like, you know, to be, to be a barbarian is the only way to be, to be a so-called barbarian is the only way to be truly free and that the, you know, people who existed outside of the world of agricultural and that urban and industrial labor had a lot more leisure time. They also didn't, you know, have literature and, you know, cultures. We know it even if it's comprised mostly of, you know, binging seasons of streaming television. But I know there's material there to be, to be reckoned with that's meaningful. I think about how to, how to think about how to build more meaningful lives. So if, if there's one kind of simple takeaway of this book, it's sort of like, yeah, you know, find that 10 minutes to go. Yeah. Go, go connect with wild nature within the fabric of that very urban day. And you might be amazed at how it changes how you experience life and think about the future. Which kills me because that's a perfect place to leave off, but I still have more questions. Which, when did you encounter the situationists? Do you remember? Yeah, I mean, like in the eighties or nineties, it's like, college or grad school. It was sort of, yeah, totally. I mean, I was reading Belard and the cyberpods and a lot of, you know, stuff at that sort of nexus of like technology and culture. And, you know, sort of, do you remember adbusters, magazine, which was, you know, yeah. And so stuff like that, just like looking, and, and yeah, and I'm college. I went to college in the eighties, like peak, you know, French continental philosophy everywhere. And so, and just a lot of the writers I was interested in were interested in, you know, kind of applied psychogography and that kind of led back to the situation. And so I read Gita Board and decided to spectacle and, and yeah, then that eventually, you know, in the nineties started, you know, cloning into sort of the instant Claire and will solve like folks like that. And, and I think, and it already just resonated with me is something I was already kind of doing on my own instinctively of like figuring out ways to hack the city. And that next step from the book of like, okay, how do you like do a kind of eco psychogography that, you know, steps off the pavement completely and into the green. Or whatever. That's the sort of way where this book tries to go. Going to stick with nonfiction. I don't know. I mean, you know, it's asking what's your next project. I don't know. I mean, I'm talking with a colleague about doing a more, a more kind of how to book about rewilding. And, and so that seems like that might might happen. And I really, really enjoy the mining of the what I was able to do in this book of like mining all this diverse material of like material from the observed world with, you know, sort of material accumulated through arcane reading. And I want to do more with that, I think. And I would also, I really want to, you know, my, my, I want to get back to exercising my fiction muscles. And part of me is thinking it would be fun to write some short fiction. And, and, you know, and try to take it in a little bit more literary direction without giving up on the elements of the fantastic, which is kind of where I started as a fiction writer anyway. And, you know me, I'm sticking around for whatever you're right. So I'm, you'll be on the show again. I'm pretty sure. But I should ask, you know, the big final question I always bring up. And it usually comes up in the newsletter, but I'll hit you anyway. What are you reading? I just read a, I was in Dallas in a, in terra bang books on Wednesday night for reading. And I bought three BFI classics that I just immediately started binging. One, the one I first read that night. I'm really basically recovered a cover by, I think the author was Sean Beard. It was about the Terminator. Like a book length monograph about the Terminator, which got me thinking about the future of, to get me thinking about like a version of the Terminator in which the dystopian future is not a wasted landscape denuded of nature. But like one where the AI has like rewilded the future. I think that's kind of there's something there. Sean French by the way. So, so. John Sean French French like John French. I got the first name right. And then I've been reading The Great River by Boyce Uphill, who's a New Orleans based writer. I think originally from the Northeast is a book about the Mississippi as one kind of giant. Edgeline. That's a really amazing book. I've been reading Crossings by Ben Goldfarb, a book about road ecology, which is like exceptionally cool. And I've been reading Wrong Way by Joanne McNeil, a really brilliant novel that came out from McD F.S.G. earlier this year. And, and then enjoying Lost in Austin by Alex Haniford at British Journalist who lived in Austin for several years and recently left. And yeah, those are kind of the top of my reading list. I've also got, I just started reading Richard Christian's Creation Lake, which I think is kind of reckoning with some similar kind of deep time material and interesting way. And I always find her work to be interesting and kind of tuned into the zeitgeist in cool ways. And you've got that Jeff Vandermeer sequel coming out and Richard Powers too, which I assume, you know, you partake in, but I haven't done powers since the 90s. Both books I'm excited about. I haven't started with me. I didn't. Yeah, I suppose I get out of Jeff for a sneak peek, but I think I'll wait. I've been really enjoying his, like, insanely abundant energy he throws into promoting his work. It's, it's fun. He makes it fun. He does it in a really, really cool way. And I've known him for a long time. We've got him better in the last couple years. And yeah, I'm just super impressed with how he just does what is fun for him and found an audience. Some of the other people excited about it. Yeah, that's cool. I saw him at ReaderCon. I guess two years ago, was it last year or two years ago? Yeah, I was there. It was twenty-three years ago and he was there. He was, I think he was the guest. Yeah, one guest of honor. And that was one of those. He's got a lot of people to talk to. I don't need to go up and pitch him right now, but someday I hope we get to sit down and talk. So, yeah, we'll see. Yeah, I mean, I got to, we went for a couple of hikes. It was really fun. We went for one hike and I had found this marsh in Quincy. And we went out and it was just like so many mosquitoes. July and Massachusetts. We can do this. We can do this. And then it was just like, yeah, no, we can't. My wife and her friend have the, the, the sun hats with nets. They, they go out in for their, their hikes during summertime. So, you know, we all have to. Yeah, I mean, he had a nap, but even then it was just like, they were so aggressive. It was insane. It was like Central American. Great. It's good. Anyway, we're going to a different location for reader con next year. So I hope to get you up there and if we do, maybe we'll. Yeah, I would love to get back. I seem to do a reader con every other year. Sounds good to me. Maybe we'll, we'll get to hike together. I'll bring, I would love that. I'll bring good shoes. So, but Chris, thanks so much for coming back on. Thank you for this book. I, you know, from talking with you last year, I had a conception of what it was going to be and what you've written is really, well, to me, it's very special. He made a remarkable book and I'm really glad to have you back on the show, but I'm also, and this will sound terrible. Glad that we're friends. So, you know, thank you for all of this. Thanks, Gil. No, I feel the same way. Thanks so much. And I'm really glad you connected with the book and it's been delightful to hear similar things from other people. And so, yeah, I hope it connects with a lot of people because it's sort of in a way. It's also kind of a, well, it's not redemptive. It's also a book with a mission of kind of turning people on to what's around and then I hope that it achieves some of that. So, thanks for helping me do that. And that was Christopher Brown. Go get his new book, A Natural History of Empty Lots, Field Notes from Urban Edgelands, back alleys and other wild places. It's from Timber Press. It's a remarkable book and deserves a wide readership. And it'll make you see the world, especially the urban world differently. It'll transform things for you. You should also get Chris's three previous novels, A Tropic of Kansas, Rule of Capture, and Failed State. And you should definitely subscribe to his Field Notes newsletter, which is at FieldNotes. ChristopherBrown.com. You can check out a site for more about him and his work at ChristopherBrown.com, spelled, just like you'd imagine, all one word. And follow him on blue sky at ChristopherBrown.bsky.social, Instagram at ebbit.ibit.da and Mastodon at Christopher_Brown. I'll have links to all that in the show and episode notes for this one. You can support the virtual memories show by telling other people about it. Let them know there's as podcast comes out every week. Interesting conversations with fascinating people, except there won't be a show next week because I'll be in Italy, but we'll have that slide. You can also help out the show by telling me what you like and don't like about it or who you'd like to hear me record with or what movie or TV show or book or piece of music or theater or art exhibition or park or weird little urban edge lender, whatever. You think I should check out and turn listeners on to. You can do that by sending me an email, sending a DM if we're connected on Instagram or blue sky. You can send me a postcard or a letter if you get my mailing address from the bottom of the newsletter that I send out twice a week, which you really should be subscribing to. There's a form on my website. And you can also use my Google voice number, which is 973-869-9659. That goes directly to voicemail, so you don't have to worry about getting stuck in an awkward conversation with me. Messages can be up to three minutes long, so go longer than that. You'll just have to call back and leave another message. And let me know if it would be okay to include your message in an upcoming episode of the show. You might have something interesting to share with listeners, but I'd never run something like that without the speaker's permission, so let me know. Now, if you've got money to spare, don't give it to me. I've got plenty. I work hard. I get paid well for what I do. I will ask you for money around the end of this year when I do a Kickstarter for the book that I'm making, but really give to other people, give to institutions in need. With people, you can go through, go fund me, Patreon, Kickstarter, Indiegogo, Crowd Funder, all those crowdfunding platforms. You'll find people who need help with medical bills, or rent, or car payments, or veterinary bills, or getting an artistic project going, or something else that's really important in their lives, where just a couple dollars from you might make a real difference to them. Now, with institutions, I give to my local food bank and World Central Kitchen every month. I make targeted election contributions, but part of my job is being a lobbyist, so I sort of have to, but you can give to freedom funds, to plan parenthood, ecological funds. There are a lot of things you can do to try to help build a better world, so I hope you will. Our music for this episode is "Fella" by Hal Mayforth, used with permission from the artist. You should visit my archives to check out my episode with Hal from the summer of 2018, and learn more about his art and painting. And you can listen to his music at soundcloud.com/mayforth, and that's M-A-Y, the number 4, T-H. And that's it for this week's episode of "The Virtual Memories Show." Thanks so much for listening. We'll be back next week with another great conversation. You can subscribe to "The Virtual Memories Show" and download past episodes at the iTunes Store. You can also find all our episodes and get on our email list at either of our websites, VMSPod.com, or chimeraobscura.com/vm. You can also follow "The Virtual Memories Show" on Twitter and Instagram at VMSPod at virtualmemoriespodcast.tumbler.com and on YouTube, Spotify and TuneIn.com by searching for "Virtual Memories Show." And if you like this podcast, please tell your pals, talk it up on social media, and go to iTunes, look up the virtual memories show, and leave a rating and maybe a review for us. It all goes to helping us build a bigger audience. You've been listening to "The Virtual Memories Show." I'm your host, Gil Roth. Keep reading, keep making art, and keep the conversation going. [MUSIC PLAYING] [BLANK_AUDIO]