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 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...
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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 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...
Episode 120 ft. Jaclyn Moyer
Jaclyn Moyer joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about excavating what remains unsolved within us, clueing the reader in early in our pages, how each draft leads to a door to the next, leaning into uncomfortable feelings, trusting the writing process,...
Episode 119 ft. Gila Pfeffer
Gila Pfeffer joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about outsmarting genetic destinies and her preventative double mastectomy, remembering what’s at stake in our work, tempering the serious with a satirical lens, honing humor in our work, smart book titles and...
Episode 118 ft. Jessica Buchanan
Jessica Buchanan joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about her capture by pirates in Somalia in 2011 and how her life’s trajectory was irrevocably changed, taking back power, holding space for our stories, showing up for one another as writers, demystifying the...
Episode 117 ft. Myra Sack
Myra Sack joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about losing her very young daughter Havi to Tay-Sachs, a fatal neurodegenerative disease, maternal and parental intuition, compassionate bereavement, how her new memoir is as much a story of extraordinary love as...
Episode 116 ft. Geraldine Deruiter
Geraldine DeRuiter joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about how being okay with yourself has become deeply radical, the role women have in the home and culinary world, our complex personal and societal relationship with food and feminism, body unkindness and...
Episode 115 ft. Jo-Ann Finkelstein
Jo-Ann Finkelstein, PhD joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about dismantling the fear about sharing our stories, finding the freedom to give voice to what we experienced, recognizing when the culture is the problem not us, unexpressed anger and chronic pain,...
Episode 114 ft. Susan Shapiro (Part 2)
Susan Shapiro joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about the smart way to get meaty bylines, how to think like an editor, placing small pieces, getting tough criticism and listening to it, productive writing schedules, taking care of ourselves and setting...
Episode 113 ft. Susan Shapiro
Susan Shapiro joins Let’s Talk Memoir for part one of our conversation about the nature of forgiveness and why she wrote a memoir about it, being a multiple-memoir writer, why she’s glad her latest took 12 years to complete, starting a memoir with a question, the...
Episode 112 ft. Lola Milholland
Lola Milholland joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about communal living and interconnection, writing about food and its impact on our sense of home and culture, writing about loved ones with honesty, not sharing early drafts, exploring material that calls to...
Episode 111 ft. Jessica Fein
Jessica Fein joins Let’s talk Memoir for a conversation about making, loving and losing family, how we go from the desire to fix and control to understanding some things are out our hands, creating a life of meaning, memoir vs. a collection of essays, when the ending...
Episode 110 ft. Danielle M. Bryan
Danielle M. Bryan joins me for a conversation about how she coped with cascading life adversities including multiple sclerosis and divorce, what it was like for her to share deeply emotional experiences on the page, leading with vulnerability, her decision to use a...
Episode 109 ft. Tia Levings
Tia Levings joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about her escape from Christian patriarchy and what she’s experienced firsthand with Christian nationalism and the Religious Right, why her story is a warning and is becoming more relevant by the day, the...
Episode 108 ft. Sonya Huber
Sonya Huber joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about her approach to generating essays, working on many projects at once, writing as exposure therapy, how essays in a collection talk to each other, paying attention to what intrudes on us, living and working in...
Episode 107 ft. Hyeseung Song
Hyeseung Song joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about being raised by a “beautiful but domineering” mother, breaking free from a legacy of self-worth via external achievements, writing complicated mothers, making the switch from memoir-in-essays to linear...
Episode 106 ft. Justin Billmeier
Justin Billmeier joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about his experience directing and producing audiobooks for a major publishing house, recording equipment costs and considerations for the indie memoirist, audiobook coaching and guidance, and the many...
Episode 105 ft. Meg Kissinger
Meg Kissinger joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about losing two siblings to suicide, using her skills as a journalist on her own family, America’s failed mental health system, stripping away prejudice about people with mental illness, the toxicity of shame,...
Episode 104 ft. Joseph Lezza
Joseph Lezza joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about losing loved ones, panic disorder and the stigma around anxiety, anger, shame, and the grieving process, discovering the genre he needed while at an MFA program, lyric essay, how story dictates form, what...