Episode 563 - Phillip Lopate

With his new collection, A YEAR AND A DAY: AN EXPERIMENT IN ESSAYS (NYRB), master essayist Phillip Lopate explores the world & himself through the mode of a weekly blog. We get into how he adapted to a short, time-constrained essay form for The American Scholar, how he avoided The Columnist's Curse (limitless curiosity helps!), whether an essayist can truly write about anything, and how he has and hasn't changed since the 2016-17 period in which he wrote these pieces. We talk about Phillip's integration of the private and public self in his writing, how his wife & daughter felt about being included in this book, the question of whether he's fulfilled as a writer, why he hides his journal, and how editing the three Great American Essay collections allowed him to leave something canonical behind for students & readers. We also discuss how it feels when readers thinking they know him from his essays, how his books and essays add up to a fragmentary, lifelong memoir (and why he'll likely never write an actual memoir or autobiography), why his multiple myeloma diagnosis was more of a psychological hit than a physical one, how he found himself working on a biography of Washington Irving, the benefits of a fragmentary unitary self, the career validation of being inducted into theAmerican Academy of Arts & Letters, and a LOT more. • More info at our site • Support The Virtual Memories Show via Patreon or Paypal and via our Substack