Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast Episode 303 – Interview with Margaret Vandenburg

Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast - Episode 303 - Interview with Margaret Vandenburg - transcript

(Originally aired 2024/12/15 - listen here)

When I set up an interview with Margaret Vandenburg about her novel Craze, I was planning on the sort of short book-release-related interview that I normally include in the On the Shelf episodes. About ten minutes into recording, I realized that we were both having far too much fun to cut the discussion short and decided to make the interview its own episode.

Margaret Vandenburg’s life parallels that of the protagonist of Craze in loose terms. Raised in a western state, she spent time abroad, then settled in New York City. She had an academic career at Barnard College specializing in modernism, postmodernism, and gender studies. Her fiction has covered a range of topics and settings, but today we’ll be focusing on her most recent novel, about an art journalist who returns from time spent in the salons of 1920s Paris to land in the middle of queer New York during the Roaring Twenties.

In the next hour we have a wide- talk about books, the cycles of history, and the meaning of queerness.

[A transcript will be added at some future date.]

Show Notes

In this episode we talk about:

Too many things to list individually
Books and people mentioned
- Magnus Hirschfeld
- Virginia Woolf - A Room of One’s Own
- Margaret Vandenburg - An American in Paris
- Djuna Barnes - Nightwood
- Virginia Woolf - Orlando
- Chappell Roan
- Oscar Wilde
- Emma Donoghue – The Pull of the Stars
- Gertrude Stein
- Michel Foucault - The History of Sexuality
- Golden Crown Literary Society
- Olivia Waite - Feminine Pursuits series