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 204 ft. Ren Cedar Fuller

Episode 204 ft. Ren Cedar Fuller

Ren Cedar Fuller joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about how when we love people we want their world to be bigger, raising a transgender child, having a disability, writing a lot of drafts for the right structure to snap into place, revising for months, not...

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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 203 ft. Gina Tron

Episode 203 ft. Gina Tron

Gina Tron joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about coming of age in the aftermath of the Columbine massacre, the myth of the bullied school shooter, revenge fantasies, her advocacy work, capturing the 1990s, connecting a personal story through journalism and...

Episode 202 ft. Jocelyn Jane Cox

Episode 202 ft. Jocelyn Jane Cox

Jocelyn Jane Cox joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about the challenges and guilt around caretaking, her childhood experience as a competitive figure skater, telling a story in the structure of a day, using the directed “you” in a book, writing about what has...

Episode 201 ft. Gaar Adams

Episode 201 ft. Gaar Adams

Gaar Adams joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about living amongst and depicting queer and migrant communities in the Gulf states, falling in love with Arabic literature and translation, the undeniable parallels between queerness and migration, exploring...

Episode 200 ft. Bridey Thelen-Heidel

Episode 200 ft. Bridey Thelen-Heidel

Bridey Thelen-Heidel joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about growing up with a mom who was addicted to everything including dangerous men, revisiting and writing about a traumatic childhood forty plus decades later, when you have to let go to protect...

Episode 199 ft. Sarah Boon

Episode 199 ft. Sarah Boon

Sarah Boon joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about allowing elements of a memoir to reveal themselves, radical acceptance of what we need as a writer and what we can feasibly accomplish with the resources we have, getting to know who we are as creatives,...

Episode 198 ft. Michael Jamin

Episode 198 ft. Michael Jamin

Michael Jamin joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about his career as a TV writer, moving from mimicking to discovering and trusting our own voice, allowing our style to evolve, making sense of ourselves through art, imposter syndrome and feeling displeased...

Episode 197 ft. Melissa Fraterrigo

Episode 197 ft. Melissa Fraterrigo

Melissa Fraterrigo joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about the personal and emotional toll of being female, becoming a mother and watching her daughters navigate culture, making sense of our world through memoir and essay, discovering a softness for the...

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...

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...

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