Ben Pester

speaker

327 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 4 Jul

Ben Pester’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.

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London Review Bookshop Podcast · Claire-Louise Bennett & Ben Pester: Magic & Mechanics · 4 Jul 2026 podcast

It starts to be something else as soon as you're away from it because it's just your memory and memories are not very reliable and the creative memory especially can be unreliable, I think.

And that sense that what you've written down and remembering exactly and then knowing exactly what words are going to go next sort of stops.

That won't work.

But the kind of...

The benefit of that memory and that cultivation is that kind of like, I don't know, ferments or something like that kind of that idea that it makes the focus of the thing that you're working on, that focus of the whole world, it draws other things into it.

I think that's what I'm trying to say.

To me, it's not the idea of, and I know this isn't what you said, but it's not the idea of kind of shutting out the rest of the world or not thinking about anything except for the thing that's there, because actually it's the other way around.

Like once a piece of work is really on its way, then it becomes a kind of, it has a sort of density to it that draws everything else in.

And maybe you start to see connections with other things that would work there.

And even...

I start sort of putting two things that don't really belong next to each other next to each other and then seeing if through the work they come to belong to one another and just rely on the fact that because I was working on it and because I had the idea at the time that I was working on it, then therefore it is part of the work and not really questioning that.

Do you worry about it being good?

You can go first on that one.

Do I need to refresh that?

No, I think that's what happens afterwards when you're done and you've got no control over it.

So you kind of, you hope that people will like it.

And I think when you, well, when I first started writing, I would, which was ages ago, I spent a long time, a long time just not really getting anywhere, but still enjoying it.

and still being kind of magically optimistic that tomorrow it would be all right.

And I suppose that was a very important part of it.

So I don't think that that was worrying about whether it was bad.

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