Cassette From My Ex

Mixtapes were a part of my high school and college years-as they were for many folks of my generation. So when I found out about Jason Bitner’s book, Cassette from My Ex: Stories and Soundtracks of Lost Loves. As detailed at the book’s website (which features many of the essays as well as the mixtapes as well), the book is described as follows:

“Cassette From My Ex marries confessional culture projects like Mortified, PostSecret, and Six-Word Memoirs with the nostalgia and heartache of Rob Sheffield’s Love Is A Mixtape and gathers these tales of being young, in love, and making mixtapes for your crush.

CFME compiles stories from some amazing writers and musicians: author Rick Moody, The Magnetic Fields’ Claudia Gonson, This American LIfe’s Starlee Kine, The New Yorker’s Ben Greenman, Blender Magazine’s Joe Levy, Improv Everywhere’s Charlie Todd, Mortified’s David Nadelberg– even a new story from the godfather of the genre, Rob Sheffied.

We put a ton of love into the design, too, with 224 full-color pages designed by noted cassetteophile Lissi Erwin, with cover illustrations by the excellent Hope Gangloff.”

Bitner is “the co-creator of FOUND Magazine, and editor of DIRTY FOUND and the FOUND Polaroid Book.” Also, in a follow-up to his 2006 book about LaPorte, Indiana-Bitner is producing a documentary of the same name (directed by Joe Beshenkovsky), set to hopefully have some screenings this summer. We get to discuss that project as well. My thanks to Bitner for his time and I wish him the best of luck with his upcoming production, a baby daughter.

Tim O’Shea: What are some of the biggest logistical challenges when collecting a book like this?

Jason Bitner: You’re the first person to ask me that question, strangely enough. It seems like a pretty simple project, but there’s a lot of work behind the scenes to bring it all together.

The short answer is communication, lots of communication with all sorts of writers, editors, designers, and press folks. A quick look through my inbox shows it took around 5000 emails from the beginning of the project til today to get everything together and out to the world.

And specifically with Cassette From My Ex, we had to get people to track down these old mixtapes. There were many parents searching through attics and basements on the hunt for these dusty tapes.

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