Let’s Talk Memoir with Ronit Plank & Guests

Let’s Talk Memoir is a podcast for memoir lovers, readers and writers, featuring interviews with memoirists about their writing process, their challenges, and what they’ve learned about sharing the most personal of narratives. Hosted by writer, speaker, and memoirist Ronit Plank, each episode of this limited series highlights different aspects of the memoir writing experience, writing tips, and inspiration.

Recently on Let’s Talk Memoir

Episode 196 ft. Gail Eisnitz

Episode 196 ft. Gail Eisnitz

Gail Eisnitz joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about structuring her memoir around her pursuit of answers to a lifelong medical mystery, coming to terms with her own humanness, writing about her career in animal advocacy, exposing the underbelly of the meat...

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About The Host

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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Other Episodes

Episode 195 ft. Alex DiFrancesco

Episode 195 ft. Alex DiFrancesco

Alex DiFrancesco joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about using rituals and tarot as a framework in a manuscript, Italian folk tradition as a spiritual outlet, the sometimes difficult path to publishing, being sued for defamation, finding a publisher brave...

Episode 194 ft. Nina B. Lichtenstein

Episode 194 ft. Nina B. Lichtenstein

Nina B. Lichtenstein joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about writing to metabolize, using body parts as portals, pivoting from academic writing to memoir, discovering an authentic writer’s voice, finding the right form as a neurodivergent writer, allowing...

Episode 193 ft. Sonita Alizada

Episode 193 ft. Sonita Alizada

Sonita Alizada joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about surviving the Taliban in Afghanistan, speaking up against forced child marriage and racism, finding a voice through music, when we have nothing else to help us survive but art, protesting against an...

Episode 192 ft. Maura Casey

Episode 192 ft. Maura Casey

Maura Casey joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about the toll longterm illness has on a family, her sister Ellen’s kidney disease and researching the history of kidney transplants for her memoir, when alcohol is a member of the family, growing up with a...

Episode 191 ft. Linda Trinh

Episode 191 ft. Linda Trinh

Linda Trinh joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about her personal spiritual journey, opening a memoir with a question, sparks of creativity even when we’re not actively writing, focusing on voice, owning our many identities and communities, making meaning from...

Episode 190 ft. Amber Rae

Episode 190 ft. Amber Rae

Amber Rae joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about meeting her soulmate while already married, living a story as you write it, allowing a book to show you what it needs to be, writing for our own growth and delight, slowing scenes down to put readers in our...

Episode 189 ft. Amy Mackin

Episode 189 ft. Amy Mackin

Amy Mackin joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about the disability landscape and advocating for our children, special education and early intervention, struggling to get kids the help they need, parental guilt and shame, mom rage, flexible education programs,...

Episode 188 ft. Natasha Williams

Episode 188 ft. Natasha Williams

Natasha Williams joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about caring for her schizophrenic father and the jeopardy of being in his life, narcissism and her mother’s limited parenting resources, handling misbehaving parents and reckoning with the toll they took on...

Episode 187 ft. Ed Latimore

Episode 187 ft. Ed Latimore

Ed Latimore joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about growing up in an urban warzone and surviving domestic violence, poverty, and limited resources, life in the boxing ring, writing about alcoholism and sobriety, building up the muscle of sharing and being...

Episode 186 ft. Mallory McDuff

Episode 186 ft. Mallory McDuff

Mallory McDuff joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about expanding a project from straight memoir to broaden its accessibility and audience, feedback from editors about what’s marketable, placing an essay to help sell a book, starting a memoir in the middle of...

Episode 185 ft. Katy Grabel

Episode 185 ft. Katy Grabel

Katy Grabel joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about a childhood immersed in professional magic, when a parent’s dream because ours, wanting to be famous, searching hard for self, trying to understand the allure of our parents’ choices, using journals to...

Episode 184 ft. Dr. Stacey Hettes

Episode 184 ft. Dr. Stacey Hettes

Dr. Stacey Hettes joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about therapeutic writing and how she crafted a memoir about childhood sexual abuse without revictimizing herself, metabolizing childhood trauma, inviting readers into our physiological response, the role of...

Episode 183 ft. Deb Miller

Episode 183 ft. Deb Miller

Deb Miller joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about how her memoir began as a family project, being surprised to have become an author, discovering and latching onto a framework, using an “e” structure, what we recognize during the process of writing, focusing...

Episode 182 ft. Kate Gies

Episode 182 ft. Kate Gies

Kate Gies joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about the lasting effects of trauma on the body and mind, taking care of ourselves while writing by remembering our purpose, allowing early drafts to be angry and raw and finding meaning later, body shame and body...

Episode 181 ft. Jennifer Pastiloff

Episode 181 ft. Jennifer Pastiloff

Jennifer Pastiloff joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about getting out of our own way, practicing curiosity, feeling like we have a right to tell our stories and be creative, finding a way into our work, the yes and, tapping into other art forms, not throwing...

Episode 180 ft. Niko Stratis

Episode 180 ft. Niko Stratis

Niko Stratis joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about entertaining the queerest part of her soul, working on a book almost by accident, building a manuscript backwards from a title, arriving at a structure early into the process, making peace with the past,...

Episode 179 ft. Erica Stern

Episode 179 ft. Erica Stern

Erica Stern joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about self-interrogation and taking risks to tell the story we need to, exploring the liminality of a lived experience through the speculative, hybrid memoir and leaning into history and research to illuminate and...

Episode 178 ft. Marty Ross-Dolen

Episode 178 ft. Marty Ross-Dolen

Marty Ross-Dolen joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation discovering the story while writing, inviting the speculative and magical elements into a narrative, rediscovering lost relatives, advocating for our vision and for our books, scaffolding fragmented forms,...

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