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 139 ft. Jennifer Lang

Episode 139 ft. Jennifer Lang

Jennifer Lang joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about asking the right questions, understanding what home means and where it is, being sure to put your story in the narrative you’re sharing, her sense of self on and off the yoga mat, answers to mid-life...

Merch! Let’s Talk Memoir Swag now available for your favorite memoir lover.

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 138 ft. Anne Cheng

Episode 138 ft. Anne Cheng

Anne Cheng joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about pivoting from writing scholarly works on race and gender to writing in first person and quite personally, teaching herself how to say the things that had remained unspoken in her life, her cancer diagnosis...

Episode 137 ft. David Tereshchuk

Episode 137 ft. David Tereshchuk

David Tereshchuk joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about being drawn to journalism to help him cure the matter of unanswered questions in his own life, his early years living in the rural borderlands of Scotland, how he turned to alcohol at a very early age,...

Episode 136 ft. Rachel Zimmerman

Episode 136 ft. Rachel Zimmerman

Rachel Zimmerman joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about rebuilding her family’s life after her husband’s death by suicide, the physical toll of grief, feeling like a doomed family, finding joy and pleasure after terrible loss, how her career in journalism...

Episode 135 ft. Sarah LaBrie

Episode 135 ft. Sarah LaBrie

Sarah LaBrie joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about the year her mom was diagnosed with schizophrenia and the legacy of mental illness in her family, rethinking ambitions in light of tragedy and grief, releasing emotional pressure with writing, when fiction...

Episode 134 ft. Steve Hoffman

Episode 134 ft. Steve Hoffman

Steve Hoffman joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about not getting sidetracked from the story you want to tell, the difference between accuracy and truth, coming to terms with who you are, how screenwriting classes improved his memoir, leaning into weaknesses...

Episode 133 ft. Seth Lorinczi

Episode 133 ft. Seth Lorinczi

Seth Lorinczi joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about going from a state of deep hiding to deep sharing, untangling the scars of the Holocaust and world wars through psychedelics, how ancestral trauma can warp relationships with the people we love, when your...

Episode 132 ft. Naomi Cohn

Episode 132 ft. Naomi Cohn

Naomi Cohn joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about becoming legally blind in mid-life and how that changed her writing process, going from poetry to lyric essay, falling in love with Braille, being sure something is done and also realizing there’s more,...

Episode 131 ft. Anne Pinkerton

Episode 131 ft. Anne Pinkerton

Anne Pinkerton joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about processing the loss of her older brother David, how brothers and sisters get short shrift when it comes to grief in our culture, her Writing Through Loss workshops, disenfranchised grief, when family...

Episode 130 ft. Dorothy and Rachel Leland

Episode 130 ft. Dorothy and Rachel Leland

Dorothy and Rachel Leland join Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about Rachel’s battle with Lyme disease beginning at 13 years old, controversial medical diagnoses, advocating for treatment, living with chronic illness, keeping a journal, collaborating on a story,...

Episode 129 ft. Gina Troisi

Episode 129 ft. Gina Troisi

Gina Troisi joins Lets Talk Memoir for a conversation about searching for home and belonging, writing difficult stories and releasing them into the world, feeling too close to our manuscripts and taking breaks, why memoir is sometimes misunderstood, when material...

Episode 128 ft. Jennifer Selig

Episode 128 ft. Jennifer Selig

Jennifer Selig joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about how our narratives are both unique and universal, archetypical strategies to connect with readers, writing ourselves into meaning, assuaging the fear the world might not need our memoir, following our...

Episode 127 ft. Jay Baron Nicorvo

Episode 127 ft. Jay Baron Nicorvo

Jay Baron Nicorvo joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about his mother’s violent rape and how that event coincided with his sexual abuse at the hands of his babysitter, the pervasiveness of sexual abuse for boys and men, how crucial scenes are in memoir and...

Episode 126 ft. Lilly Dancyger

Episode 126 ft. Lilly Dancyger

Lilly Dancyger joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about the challenges of existing in the world as a woman, approaching the writing process with a sense of exploration and curiosity, discovering what's really essential and what can we let go of, the...

Episode 125 ft. Brooke Champagne

Episode 125 ft. Brooke Champagne

Brooke Champagne joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about rejecting and accepting identity, growing up in New Orleans and feeling bifurcated by race, language, and class, knowing you’re a writer, humor on the page, selecting work for a collection, why we...

Episode 124 ft. Deborah Kasdan

Episode 124 ft. Deborah Kasdan

Deborah Kasdan joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about her older sister’s schizophrenia diagnosis, the decision to commit a child, family dynamics and epigenetics, what it is to be marginalized and hidden away, writing expressively, thematic and chronological...

Episode 123 ft. Katya Cengel

Episode 123 ft. Katya Cengel

Katya Cengel joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about the three months she spent as a child in a psychosomatic ward, her career in journalism, institutionalization and treating kids with mental illness, working with case files, using the journalist persona,...

Episode 122 ft. Margaret Juhae Lee

Episode 122 ft. Margaret Juhae Lee

Margaret Juhae Lee joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about searching for her family’s lost history, growing up as a first generation Korean American living in Houston, archival work and interviewing relatives, capturing family voice, why we search to...

Episode 121 ft. Becky Ellis

Episode 121 ft. Becky Ellis

Becky Ellis joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about growing up in the shadow of a father’s war trauma, what happens when soldiers come home, the power of secrets, the divided self and why memoirists need to be clear about their psychology, strategies for...

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