Episode 608 – Sven Birkerts

Virtual Memories Show

Virtual Memories Show 608:
Sven Birkerts

“What fascinates me most — what I find most exciting — when I’m writing is when I find the smallest possible thing that will open out into the biggest possible thing.”

Author & essayist Sven Birkerts returns to the show to celebrate his fantastic new essay collection, The Miró Worm and the Mysteries of Writing (Arrowsmith Press). We talk about the estrangement of the everyday, the problem of other minds, how serendipity tells us something about where we are, authors’ photos and self-mythologizing, moving house (& turning 70) during COVID, and the inspiration of Cortazar’s Around the Day in Eighty Worlds. We get into the threat of AI to writing, reading, and thinking, opening up to ambivalence, why people find it so tough to say the word “soul”, Kierkegaard & Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer & being on The Search, and wondering what Bob Dylan is like in the kitchen in the morning. We also discuss writers’ homes & graves and the myth of inspiration, his new Sketches From Memory essays and how they’ve opened him up as a writer, how we build circles of affinity, how his father’s career as an architect influenced his eye (but not his writing), why people find it so tough to say the word “soul”, and more. Give it a listen! And go read The Miró Worm and the Mysteries of Writing!

And go listen to our 2017, lockdown, and 2021 conversations!

“I don’t know if empathy is given, or if it’s something that life teaches us, or something we resist and don’t have.”

“You suddenly see the person through the lens of their absence, looking back, and it’s very different from the lens when they’re sitting there yelling at you.”

“The grave, more than the desk, raises the question of the worth of what has been done. . . .It matters. The fact that you’re there, standing at a writer’s grave, establishes the fact that it was worthwhile for them to do what they did, because they reached someone.”

“The point of writing — and maybe also living — is to achieve a durational sense — of my day, of what I’m doing — to not be interrupted, to embrace solitariness.”

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

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About our Guest

Sven Birkerts is the author of eleven books of essay and memoir, including The Gutenberg Elegies and Changing the Subject: Art and Attention in the Internet Age. He is the former Director of the Bennington Writing Seminars and the co-editor of the journal AGNI. He lives in Amherst with his wife Lynn.

Follow Sven on Instagram and go listen to our 2017, lockdown, and 2021 conversations!

Credits: This episode’s music is Fella by Hal Mayforth, used with permission from the artist. The conversation was recorded at Sven’s home on a pair of Blue enCORE 200 microphones feeding into a Zoom PodTrak P4 digital recorder & interface. I recorded the intro and outro on a Heil PR-40 Dynamic Studio Recording Microphone feeding into a Zoom PodTrak P4. All processing and editing done in Adobe Audition CC. Photo of me & Sven by me. It’s on my instagram.