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In 1969 when the artist Joe Brainard stumbled upon a simple writing device, he had sleepless nights of frantic writing, charting out his memory in hundreds of fragments – all beginning with the words I Remember – from coldcream on his mother’s face to the experience of falling in love.

In a letter to his friend, the poet Anne Waldman, he reported ecstatically, "I feel very much like God writing the Bible. I mean, I feel like I’m not really writing it, but that it is because of me that it is being written".

Brainard was never driven by nostalgia, but found that the more precisely he described his memories, the deeper the reader could relate. In this process Joe discovered that I Remember was not about him, but about everybody. The book became a classic, used in writing classes across the world and loved by many.

For this montage of memories, radio producer and poet Pejk Malinovski interviewed ten of Brainard’s close friends and admirers - poets and novelists like Ron Padgett, Ann Lauterbach, Edmund White and Anne Waldman, whose own lives have been shaped by Brainard’s masterpiece.

Produced by Pejk Malinovski
A Falling Tree production for ´óÏó´«Ã½ Radio Three