Hello and I hope you are enjoying the longer days and hopefully warmer temperatures. I’m so happy to announce that:
1. the brand new book cover for my memoir When She Comes Back is here and
2. pre-orders are now open! Click here to pre-order.
When She Comes Back will be available in paperback, hardcover, Kindle, and in audiobook on May 11! This is the story of how each of my parents left in search of themselves–one followed a guru and then one stepped up, what happens when the person your life revolves around can’t stay and how we ultimately reconciled. The guru at the center of my story is Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, the subject of Netflix’s docuseries Wild Wild Country.
I narrated and recorded the audiobook at Cedar House Audio in West Seattle and am emailing copies as a gift for any pre-order of When She Comes Back from an independent bookseller.
If you’d like a copy of the audiobook please pre-order When She Comes Back from your independent bookseller of choice and send me a copy or photo of your transaction. You can direct-message it to me on Instagram @ronitplank or email me at ronit@ronitplank.com and my publisher and I will get you that audiobook lickety split! All pre-orders for my book will be counted as first week’s sales and will help spread the word about this book. Thank you so much for your support!
This week on the podcast author Kim Hooper joins me for episode 70, Life After Pregnancy Losses. Kim is a novelist, mother, and wife who endured many losses prior to having her family. She teamed up with Meredith Resnick LCSW to write the new book All The Love which offers support and guidance for anyone going through this kind of grief and uncertainty. You can listen to our episode here.
Next week on the podcast my guest is Dr. Lynette Louise who helps retrain the brain in the neuro-atypical and autistic. She is a foster mother and survivor of domestic abuse and it’s my privilege to mark Autism Awareness Week with her episode on 3/30. Lynette offers insight, honesty, ingenuity and tough love and I’m thrilled to be able to share our conversation with you.
In “Autobiographical Notes” from the 1984 edition of Notes of a Native Son James Baldwin turns his attention to how “one writes out of one thing only—one’s own experience. “Everything,” he explains, “depends on how relentlessly one forces from this experience the last drop, sweet or bitter, it can possibly give. This is the only real concern of the artist, to recreate out of the disorder of life that order which is art.” And this is why I love creative nonfiction: the invitation to show who we are and what we care about; what addles us and what we don’t understand; what we hope for and what we are determined to change. I have recently become along with Charlotte Hamrick the Creative Nonfiction Editor at The Citron Review and have had the opportunity to read so much good work. The variety of submissions–the point of view, the forms, the approach–reminds me how each of our voices is a key to understanding our experience. If you’d like to read the spring issue including flash fiction and poetry you can here.
If you have any comments, questions, or feedback you’d like to share with me about the podcast, the book, or writing, please reach out to me!
Until next time.
xo,
Ronit