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 145 ft. Jarod K. Anderson
Jarod K. Anderson joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about changing our definition of what victory is based on what we can and can’t control, understanding our own minds and contextualizing ourselves in the world, his experience with chronic major depression,...
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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 44 ft. Reed Harkness
Reed Harkness joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about a mother who goes missing, intergenerational trauma, moving into discomfort in service of truth-telling, what’s ours to tell, masculinity and brotherhood, the hero’s journey as a template for story arc,...
Episode 43 ft. Gayle Brandeis
Gayle Brandeis joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about losing her mother to suicide and finding a way to write about it, her work across genres, leaning into what makes us unique on the page, trusting ourselves to discover what our work wants to become, why...
Episode 42 ft. Jennifer Lunden
Jennifer Lunden joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about her experience with ME/CFS and her new braided memoir American Breakdown: Our Ailing Nation, My Body’s Revolt, and the Nineteenth-Century Woman Who Brought Me Back to Life, writing about trauma, the...
Episode 41 ft. Camille T. Dungy
Camille T. Dungy joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about who speaks about the natural world and how, erasure in life and in art, the white gaze, reviewing the cannon of environmental literature with a critical eye, writing about motherhood,...
Episode 40 ft. Sarah Birnbach
Sarah Birnbach joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about grief and the wished-for mother, how Jewish prayer anchored her as she mourned the father she adored, birth order and responsibility, how spirituality has shaped her life, deciding how much to share about...
Episode 39 ft. Candace Cahill
Candace Cahill joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about placing her newborn son for adoption and meeting him as an adult shortly before his death, writing for clarity, negotiating guilt, finding compassion for yourself, writing as a process for grieving, and...
Episode 38 ft. Maggie Smith
Maggie Smith joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about having and holding boundaries in our work and in our lives, trusting our instincts as writers, taking risks, telling the truth as we know it, allowing our material to dictate form, how our work changes over...
Episode 37 ft. Erika Bornman
Erika Bornman joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about her experience escaping from KwaSizabantu and her participation in News24’s exposé that alleging this strict Christian mission is a cult is a cult riddled with abuse, the compassion she found writing about...
Episode 36 ft. Sandi Wisenberg
Sandi Wisenberg joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about finding home, the structure our books need, her career as a journalist, negotiating a legacy of woman shame and Jewish shame, writing what you have to, and her new collection of memoiristic essays, The...
Episode 35 ft. Stacey Freeman
Stacey Freeman joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about how her husband’s infidelity became the impetus for her writing career, single parenthood and the shock of dating after divorce, getting comfortable sharing after a lifetime of keeping the personal under...
Episode 34 ft. Jasmin Faulk-Dickerson
Jasmin Faulk-Dickerson joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about growing up in Saudi Arabia under an oppressive regime, what being a woman of color does and doesn’t mean to her, invisible identities, writing about ethnicity, race, and culture, her advocacy...
Episode 33 ft. Debbie Weiss
Debbie Weiss joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about widowhood and capturing grief and loneliness in ways that keep readers invested, starting scenes in the middle, finding themes in your story, how her blog was a stepping stone to watching her writing take...
Episode 32 ft. Laura Cathcart Robbins
Laura Cathcart Robbins joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about writing Stash, her new memoir that delves into addiction, privilege, and race, what self-care looked like for her while she tackled traumatic material, why she had to let go of controlling the...
Episode 31 ft. Suzanne Roberts
Suzanne Roberts joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about the difficulty of being in a human body – especially a woman’s, the male gaze, deciding how to approach our work, writing about loss, grief, death, and desire, reading widely and deeply, being an...
Episode 30 ft. Felicia Thai Heath
Felicia Thai Heath joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about growing up on the run to help keep her father, a notorious Vietnamese kingpin, safe from capture, the power of dialogue to tell our stories, beginning scenes in the middle, orienting the reader in...
Episode 29 ft. Vincent Paterson and Amy Tofte
Happy Valentine’s Day! In honor of artistic partnership, Vincent Paterson and Amy Tofte join Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation on their experience collaborating on their new book Icons and Instincts, Vincent’s experience working with Madonna, Robin Williams, and...
Episode 28 ft. Maria Giura
Maria Giura joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about which stories define us, avoiding the self-pity trap, the importance of allowing the reader to make decisions about the characters in our memoir for themselves, how we frame childhood and family dynamics,...
Episode 27 ft. Buick Audra
Buick Audra joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about her new album and companion memoir in essays Conversations with My Other Voice, the importance of protecting our work from judgment, being an abuse survivor, how she views regret, and the tool she used when...