Paulette Perhach joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about why it’s okay to see writing as a business, balancing both grace and accountability in our work, the importance of a writing community, overcoming imposter syndrome, nurturing ourselves, and what happened when her essay “The F*ck Off Fund went super viral.
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Paulette Perhach’s writing has been published in the New York Times, Elle, Slate, Cosmopolitan, Marie Claire, Yoga Journal, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, and Vice. She’s worked for Health and Coastal Living magazines, as well as various newspapers. Hugo House, a nationally recognized writing center in Seattle, awarded her the Made at Hugo House fellowship in 2013. In 2016, she was nominated for the BlogHer Voices of the Year award for her essay, “A Story of a F**k Off Fund,” which is anthologized in The Future is Feminist from Chronicle Books, along with work by Roxane Gay, Mindy Kaling, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Caitlin Moran, and Audre Lorde.
She became interested in adult education while serving as a Peace Corps volunteer in South America, and in 2015 she created the Writer’s Welcome Kit, an online course for writers that includes a 55,000-word workbook. Her book, inspired by the course, was published in August 2018 by Sasquatch Books, part of the Penguin Random House publishing family. Welcome to the Writer’s Life was selected as one of Poets & Writers’ Best Books for Writers. She blogs about a writer’s craft, business, personal finance, and joy at welcometothewriterslife.com and keeps a casual podcast called Can We Talk About Money?
Ronit’s essays and fiction have been featured in The Atlantic, The Rumpus, The New York Times, The Iowa Review, The Washington Post, Writer’s Digest, American Literary Review, and elsewhere. Her memoir WHEN SHE COMES BACK about the loss of her mother to the guru Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh and their eventual reconciliation was named Finalist in both the 2021 Best Book Awards and the 2021 Book of the Year Award and a 2021 Best True Crime Book by Book Riot. Her short story collection HOME IS A MADE-UP PLACE won Hidden River Arts’ 2020 Eludia Award and will be published in 2022. She is host and producer of the podcasts And Then Everything Changed and The Body Myth.
More about WHEN SHE COMES BACK, a memoir.
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I’m thrilled to announce my memoir When She Comes Back (Motina Books 2021) is now available for purchase. 𝙒𝙝𝙚𝙣 𝙎𝙝𝙚 𝘾𝙤𝙢𝙚𝙨 𝘽𝙖𝙘𝙠 is a coming-of-age memoir set in the 70s and 80s about losing my mother to a guru in India, giving up power, growing up too fast, and what happens when the person your life revolves around can’t stay.
Learn more about Ronit Plank’s story here.
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