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 90 ft. Kathleen Dorothy Blackburn

Episode 90 ft. Kathleen Dorothy Blackburn

Kathleen Dorothy Blackburn joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about listening to and putting our younger selves on the page, recognizing family codes we can no longer adhere to, place as a character in memoir, writing like nobody will ever see our work, how...

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 89 ft. Kate Manne

Episode 89 ft. Kate Manne

Kate Manne joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about coming of age in fatphobic culture, disentangling the threads of weight, health, and diet culture, the racism at the root of anti-fatness, writing ourselves out and then back into our work, the psycho-social...

Episode 88 ft. Suzette Mullen

Episode 88 ft. Suzette Mullen

Suzette Mullen joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about digging to find a deeper story and the question we need to ask in memoir, discovering where to begin by getting to the end of our manuscripts, the revision process as revelatory, the effect our memoirs...

Episode 87 ft. Mimi Zieman

Episode 87 ft. Mimi Zieman

Mimi Zieman joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about thinking of ourselves as characters, hooking readers from the beginning, playing with structure, balancing our reflective narrator, trusting your reader and not overexplaining, the true self and the...

Episode 86 ft. Lisa Cooper Ellison

Episode 86 ft. Lisa Cooper Ellison

Lisa Cooper Ellison joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about therapy vs. memoir, taking care of our nervous systems while working on charged material, writing about trauma without retraumatizing ourselves, developing a robust self-care practice, how to avoid...

Episode 85 ft. Paula Ramón

Episode 85 ft. Paula Ramón

Paula Ramón joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about pivoting from journalism to memoir to tell the story of Venezuela’s collapse, understanding the history of her country before and after Chavez through her mother’s life, guilt, the physical and emotional...

Episode 84 ft. Ellen Weir Casey

Episode 84 ft. Ellen Weir Casey

Ellen Weir Casey joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about infertility and becoming the mother of one of the world’s first IVF babies in the earliest days of assisted reproductive technology, the role guilt plays in women’s lives, being part of medical and...

Episode 83 ft. Karen DeBonis

Episode 83 ft. Karen DeBonis

Karen DeBonis joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about the obstacles and medical gaslighting she faced trying to uncover what ailed her son, postpartum depression, writing about difficult motherhoods, learning how to deal with conflict, sharing our pages with...

Episode 82 ft. Cathy Shields

Episode 82 ft. Cathy Shields

Cathy Shields joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about the role guilt and grief have played in her experience parenting a unique child, how she has navigated her daughter’s diagnosis of severe cognitive disability, writing about complicated mothers and...

Episode 81 ft. Joelle Tamraz

Episode 81 ft. Joelle Tamraz

Joelle Tamraz joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about yoga cults and self-declared spiritual gurus, searching for something outside ourselves, mind control, transcendental meditation, capturing the emotional vulnerability of our memoir characters, the many...

Episode 80 ft. Rona Maynard

Episode 80 ft. Rona Maynard

Rona Maynard joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about allowing ourselves to get lost in our writing, realizing you’ve actually been writing your book, observing our animal companions keenly, embracing surprises in our work, discovering joyful moments, looking...

Episode 79 ft. Ann Batchelder

Episode 79 ft. Ann Batchelder

Ann Batchelder joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about using myth as a jumping point for interpreting ourselves, trusting intuition, the idea of mother failure, regret and letting go, addiction and recovery in loved ones, mental health stigma, deciding when...

Episode 78 ft. Brooke Warner

Episode 78 ft. Brooke Warner

Brooke Warner joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about nontraditional publishing, the massive sea change we’re seeing in memoir, how for authors visibility and marketing work is never done, protecting our memoir worlds, accountability groups, what all memoirs...

Episode 77 ft. Joni B. Cole

Episode 77 ft. Joni B. Cole

Joni B. Cole joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about following our creative hunches, what to look for in workshop groups and writing teachers, the power of positive reinforcement, the magic of revision, the right to tell our stories, her approach to teaching,...

Episode 76 ft. Jane Wong

Episode 76 ft. Jane Wong

Jane Wong joins Let’s Talk memoir for a conversation about the challenge of reflection in memoir, writing that teems with the specific and particular, capturing the experience of being a Chinese American woman on the page, writing about exes and domestic violence,...

Episode 75 ft. Lisa Niver

Episode 75 ft. Lisa Niver

Lisa Niver joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about disagreeing and then agreeing with your agent, her career in travel, accountability groups, working with developmental editors and book and proposal coaches, divorce, all the non-writerly jobs being a...

Episode 74 ft. Rosa Lowinger

Episode 74 ft. Rosa Lowinger

Rosa Lowinger joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about growing up in Cuba, her storied career in art restoration, taking a closer look at the complicated and evolving relationship she’s had with her mother, sending manuscripts to family and exes before they go...

Episode 73 ft. Eileen Vorbach Collins

Episode 73 ft. Eileen Vorbach Collins

Eileen Vorbach Collins joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about losing her young daughter to suicide and the essays she wrote as she contended with her loss, the role of reflection, change, and growth in memoir, calling yourself a writer, finding your people,...

Episode 72 ft. Kelly McMasters

Episode 72 ft. Kelly McMasters

Kelly McMasters joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about the elusiveness of “home”, creating space for our children in our art, questions as writing tools, letting go of what we thought our lives would be, falling in love with narcissists, the critical...

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