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 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...
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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 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...
Episode 26 ft. Beth Kephart
Beth Kephart joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about the crucial differences between a book of essays and a memoir in essays, choosing what to keep and what to cut, the gifts of nonlinear storytelling, the ethics of telling other people’s stories, allowing...
Episode 25 ft. Lori L. Tharps
Lori L. Tharps join Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about why memoirs are not an indulgence, the importance of finding your memoir’s theme, deciding where your book should begin, having a writing life that feeds you and also keeps you fed, and systemic racism in...
Episode 24 ft. Allison K Williams
Literary Citizen of the Year Allison K Williams joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about the importance of plot, structure, and dramatic arc in memoir, the elements that make a story a story, insuring your memoir has a reader takeaway, what being in the circus...
Episode 23 ft. Kathy Curto
Kathy Curto joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about accepting imperfection in our writing, the effect of time and distance in our work, finding beauty even in the painful, what she’s learned through teaching writing to a broad range of students, and her...
Episode 22 ft. Laura Davis
Celebrated author and memoir teacher Laura Davis joins Let’sTalk Memoir for a special holiday episode for a conversation about writing her memoir The Burning Light of Two Stars: A Mother-Daughter Story and how she reconciled with the mother who betrayed her and came...
Episode 21 ft. the Waterfield Sisters
Keema and Tekla Waterfield join Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about being raised by a young single mother in Southeast Alaska after their father left the family. With very little money but a passion for music and art, their mother moved them frequently in...
Episode 20 ft. John Ross Bowie
John Ross Bowie joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about working in Hollywood, mental health, what fatherhood and manhood can mean, the patterns we discover in our lives and write about, incorporating the sensory in our work, grappling with shame, coming to...