Let’s Talk Memoir

169. Boat Baby featuring Vicky Nguyen

Vicky Nguyen joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about growing up Vietnamese in America and what this country has meant for someone like her, writing memoir as a public figure, pivoting as a writer, not being too quick to self-edit, managing backstory to keep a memoir propulsive, having conversations with loved ones about shared family history, connecting through vulnerability, book promotion as a whole other job, exhausting every marketing channel, writing about people who don’t necessarily want to be in our memoirs, how we “rememoir” things, digging deep, and her new memoir Boat Baby.
Also in this episode:
-when family remembers things differently 
-writing in our voice
-anti-immigrant sentiment in the U.S.
 
Books mentioned in this episode:
-Born a Crime by Trevor Noah
-Owner of a Lonely Heart by Beth Nguyen
-The Manicurist’s Daughter by Susan Lieu
-Sigh, Gone by Phuc Tran
-The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls
-The Writer by James Patterson
 
Vicky is an NBC News senior consumer investigative correspondent and anchor of NBC News Daily. She reports for the Today show, Nightly News with Lester Holt and NBC News Now. She graduated as valedictorian from the University of San Francisco. Vicky lives in New York with her husband and three daughters. Her parents are always nearby.
Connect with Vicky:
Website: https://www.vickynguyen.com/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/vickynguyentv
Get Boat Baby: https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Boat-Baby/Vicky-Nguyen/9781668025567
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Ronit’s writing has appeared in The Atlantic, The Rumpus, The New York Times, Poets & Writers, The Iowa Review, Hippocampus, 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 the 2021 Housatonic Awards Awards, the 2021 Indie Excellence Awards, and was a 2021 Book Riot Best True Crime Book. Her short story collection HOME IS A MADE-UP PLACE won Hidden River Arts’ 2020 Eludia Award and the 2023 Page Turner Awards for Short Stories. 
She earned an MFA in Nonfiction Writing at Pacific University, is Creative Nonfiction Editor at The Citron Review, and teaches memoir through the University of Washington's Online Continuum Program and also independently. She launched Let's Talk Memoir in 2022, lives in Seattle with her family of people and dogs, and is at work on her next book.
More about Ronit: https://ronitplank.com
Subscribe to Ronit’s Substack: https://substack.com/@ronitplank
Follow Ronit:
https://www.instagram.com/ronitplank/
https://www.facebook.com/RonitPlank
https://bsky.app/profile/ronitplank.bsky.social
 
Background photo credit: Photo by Patrick Tomasso on Unsplash
Headshot photo credit: Sarah Anne Photography
Theme music: Isaac Joel, Dead Moll’s Fingers

168. Resisting Erasure and Crystallizing Our Lived Experience Through Memoir featuring KB Brookins

KB Brookins joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about transness, masculinity, and race, how how being a writer has crystalized their experience and made it legible to an audience and to themselves, turning to prose to say the hard things, the tenacity of memoir, resisting erasure and pushing back on toxic systems, coming at creative nonfiction from a poetic impulse, having patience with ourselves, what we might need to let go of as writers, looking at our work with kinder eyes, the way we treat people because of gender, and their multi-themed memoir Pretty.
Also in this episode:
-stages of grief
-permission to have anger
-when lines for genre aren’t as helpful
 
Books mentioned in this episode:
-Asatta: An Autobiography by Asatta Shakur
-Black Boy by Richard Wright
-Heavy by Kiese Laymon
KB Brookins is a Black queer and trans writer, cultural worker, and visual artist from Texas. KB’s chapbook How To Identify Yourself with a Wound won the Saguaro Poetry Prize, a Writer’s League of Texas Discovery Prize, and a Stonewall Honor Book Award. Their debut poetry collection Freedom House won the American Library Association Barbara Gittings Literature Award and the Texas Institute of Letters Award for the Best First Book of Poetry. KB’s debut memoir Pretty, released in May 2024 with Alfred A. Knopf, won the Great Lakes Colleges Association Award in Creative Non-Fiction.
 
Connect with KB:
Website: https://earthtokb.com/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/earthtokb
TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@earthtokb
Substack: https://substack.com/@earthtokb
Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/earthtokb.bsky.social
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/earthtokb
Get the book: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/724994/pretty-by-kb-brookins/
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Ronit’s writing has appeared in The Atlantic, The Rumpus, The New York Times, Poets & Writers, The Iowa Review, Hippocampus, 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 the 2021 Housatonic Awards Awards, the 2021 Indie Excellence Awards, and was a 2021 Book Riot Best True Crime Book. Her short story collection HOME IS A MADE-UP PLACE won Hidden River Arts’ 2020 Eludia Award and the 2023 Page Turner Awards for Short Stories. 
She earned an MFA in Nonfiction Writing at Pacific University, is Creative Nonfiction Editor at The Citron Review, and teaches memoir through the University of Washington's Online Continuum Program and also independently. She launched Let's Talk Memoir in 2022, lives in Seattle with her family of people and dogs, and is at work on her next book.
More about Ronit: https://ronitplank.com
Subscribe to Ronit’s Substack: https://substack.com/@ronitplank
Follow Ronit:
https://www.instagram.com/ronitplank/
https://www.facebook.com/RonitPlank
https://bsky.app/profile/ronitplank.bsky.social
 
Background photo credit: Photo by Patrick Tomasso on Unsplash
Headshot photo credit: Sarah Anne Photography
Theme music: Isaac Joel, Dead Moll’s Fingers

167. Keeping the Reader in Mind and Protecting Ourselves When Writing About Pain featuring Michelle Yang

Michelle Yang joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about her bipolar diagnosis and becoming a mental health advocate, immigrating to the U.S. as a young child, writing at the intersection of body image, mental health, and Asian American identity, building an author platform, revisiting old family dynamics and patterns, grieving a family of origin, mourning make-believe mothers, doing a lot of processing before writing about trauma, keeping the reader in mind, removing societal stigma around serious mental health diagnoses, how she survived and found hope, and her new memoir Phoenix Girl: How a Fat Asian with Bipolar Found Love.
 
Also in this episode:
-keeping strict boundaries
-writing in short digestible chapters
-revising a manuscript from past to present tense
 
Books mentioned in this episode: 
-Relative Strangers by A.H. Kim
-Educated by Tara Westover
-Marbles: Mania, Depression, Michelangelo and Me by Ellen Forney
-Rock Steady by Ellen Forney 
-I’m Telling the Truth But I’m Lying by Bassey Ikpi
-The Body Papers by Grace Talusan
-Hunger by Roxane Gay
-What My Bones Know by Stephanie Foo
 
Michelle Yang is an advocate whose writings on the intersection of Asian American identity, body image, and mental health have been featured in NBC News, CNN, InStyle, and Reader’s Digest. Michelle has also been featured on NPR, Washington Post, and The Seattle Times for her advocacy. She loves exploring new parts of her new home state of Michigan with her family and smoking up the kitchen with spicy recipes. Her new memoir is Phoenix Girl: How a Fat Asian with Bipolar Found Love. You can find her on michelleyangwriter.com or on Instagram @michelleyangwriter.
Connect with Michelle:
Website: michelleyangwriter.com
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/michelleyangwriter/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/michelleyangwriter
 
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Ronit’s writing has appeared in The Atlantic, The Rumpus, The New York Times, Poets & Writers, The Iowa Review, Hippocampus, 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 the 2021 Housatonic Awards Awards, the 2021 Indie Excellence Awards, and was a 2021 Book Riot Best True Crime Book. Her short story collection HOME IS A MADE-UP PLACE won Hidden River Arts’ 2020 Eludia Award and the 2023 Page Turner Awards for Short Stories. 
She earned an MFA in Nonfiction Writing at Pacific University, is Creative Nonfiction Editor at The Citron Review, and teaches memoir through the University of Washington's Online Continuum Program and also independently. She launched Let's Talk Memoir in 2022, lives in Seattle with her family of people and dogs, and is at work on her next book.
More about Ronit: https://ronitplank.com
Subscribe to Ronit’s Substack: https://substack.com/@ronitplank
Follow Ronit:
https://www.instagram.com/ronitplank/
https://www.facebook.com/RonitPlank
https://bsky.app/profile/ronitplank.bsky.social
 
Background photo credit: Photo by Patrick Tomasso on Unsplash
Headshot photo credit: Sarah Anne Photography
Theme music: Isaac Joel, Dead Moll’s Fingers

166. What’s Ours to Tell featuring Julie Brill

Julie Brill joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about growing up the daughter of a Holocaust survivor and her journey to understand the unexamined childhood stories she grew up with, being a reluctant memoirist and leaning into telling the story of an ordinary person figuring things out, the Holocaust and the history of the Jews of Serbia, inherited memories, making ourselves the central character, when our parents’  foundational stories become ours, finding our place, permission to tell a story if you didn’t live through it, and her new memoir HIdden in Plain Sight: A Family Memoir and the Untold Story of the Holocaust in Serbia.
 
Also in this episode:
-the missing missing
-the unthought known
-making research readable
 
Books mentioned in this episode:
Three Minutes in Poland by Glenn Kertz
Paper Love by Sarah Wildman
Plunder by Menachem Kaiser
Big Magic by Liz Gilbert
The Creative Process by Twyla Tharp
 
As a child, Julie Brill held two conflicting beliefs. She knew Germans had murdered her Jewish grandfather in occupied Yugoslavia, yet she somehow believed the Holocaust had never come to his hometown of Belgrade. The family anecdotes her father passed down, a blend of his early memories and what his mother told him, didn’t match what Julie had heard about Germany, Poland, and Anne Frank in Holland during World War II.
Even frequent readers of Holocaust history likely do not understand the Serbian story. Destruction there came early and fast. Without cattle cars, gas chambers, or distant camps, the Nazis murdered almost the entire Jewish population before the plan for the Final Solution was even set.
With so few Jewish survivors and descendants from Serbia, the story of the Shoah there has gone untold. Julie’s quest to understand and share what she learned led to Hidden in Plain Sight: A Family Memoir and the Untold Story of the Holocaust in Serbia.
Julie has written for Haaretz, the Forward, Kveller, The Times of Israel, Balkan Insight, and elsewhere. She shares her family’s experiences in the Holocaust in middle and high school classrooms through Living Links. 
Additionally, Julie is a lactation consultant, doula, childbirth educator, and the author of the anthology Round the Circle: Doulas Share Their Experiences. She began attending births and teaching childbirth classes in 1992 and has supported thousands of families in the childbearing year. She graduated from Tufts University with a degree in Sociology and Gender Studies and completed the Massachusetts Midwifery Alliance Apprenticeship Course. She is the mother of two adult daughters.
 
Connect with Julie:
Website: https://juliebrill.com/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/juliesbrill/
Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/juliebrill.bsky.social
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/julie.brill1
X: https://www.Twitter.com/juliebrill8
Get her book: https://mybook.to/irl0
 
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Ronit’s writing has appeared in The Atlantic, The Rumpus, The New York Times, Poets & Writers, The Iowa Review, Hippocampus, 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 the 2021 Housatonic Awards Awards, the 2021 Indie Excellence Awards, and was a 2021 Book Riot Best True Crime Book. Her short story collection HOME IS A MADE-UP PLACE won Hidden River Arts’ 2020 Eludia Award and the 2023 Page Turner Awards for Short Stories. 
She earned an MFA in Nonfiction Writing at Pacific University, is Creative Nonfiction Editor at The Citron Review, and teaches memoir through the University of Washington's Online Continuum Program and also independently. She launched Let's Talk Memoir in 2022, lives in Seattle with her family of people and dogs, and is at work on her next book.
More about Ronit: https://ronitplank.com
Subscribe to Ronit’s Substack: https://substack.com/@ronitplank
Follow Ronit:
https://www.instagram.com/ronitplank/
https://www.facebook.com/RonitPlank
https://bsky.app/profile/ronitplank.bsky.social
 
Background photo credit: Photo by Patrick Tomasso on Unsplash
Headshot photo credit: Sarah Anne Photography
Theme music: Isaac Joel, Dead Moll’s Fingers

165. Writing About Disability on a Granular Level featuring Margaret Anne Mary Moore

Margaret Anne Mary Moore joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about her realization at an early age that she wanted to be a nonfiction writer and memoirist, facing severe discrimination as a child with disabilities, how she wrote about her disability experience on a granular level, using a communication device, taking breaks to work on other aspects of a project when the writing process grows tiresome, devoting chapters to a single theme, striving to make characterizations rich in detail, looking at rejection juxtaposed against life circumstances, how traumatic memories get seared into our memory, compassion and acceptance, and her memoir Bold, Brave, and Breathless: Reveling in Childhood's Splendiferous Glories While Facing Disability and Loss.
 
Margaret’s Brevity blog article link: https://brevity.wordpress.com/2024/12/23/who-gets-a-spot-on-the-river/
 
Also in this episode:
-hermit crab forms
-writing sharp scenes
-embodied writing
 
Books mentioned in this episode:
The Mindful Writer by Dinty W. Moore
The Shell Game by Kim Adrian
Congratulations, Who Are You Again? by Harrison Scott Key
 
Margaret Anne Mary Moore is the author of the bestselling disability memoir Bold, Brave, and Breathless: Reveling in Childhood's Splendiferous Glories While Facing Disability and Loss (Woodhall Press, 2023) and is currently writing the sequel. She is a summer 2022 graduate of Fairfield University’s Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing Program, where she earned a degree in creative nonfiction and poetry. Margaret is an editor and the marketing coordinator at Woodhall Press and an ambassador for PRC-Saltillo. A featured book on the AWP Bookshelf, Bold, Brave, and Breathless is her debut book. She is a contributor to Gina Barreca’s book Fast Famous Women: 75 Essays of Flash Nonfiction (Woodhall Press, 2025). Her writing has appeared in America Magazine, Brevity’s Nonfiction Blog, and Kairos: A Journal of Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy, Independent Catholic News among other publications. 
 
Connect with Margaret:
Website: margaretannemarymoore.comFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/margaretannemarymooreauthor/X: https://x.com/mooreofawriterInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/margaretannemarymoore_authorLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/margaret-moore-m-f-a-86835312a/Good Reads: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/29567595.Margaret_Anne_Mary_MooreBook: https://a.co/d/b0VZ8Mk
 
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Ronit’s writing has appeared in The Atlantic, The Rumpus, The New York Times, Poets & Writers, The Iowa Review, Hippocampus, 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 the 2021 Housatonic Awards Awards, the 2021 Indie Excellence Awards, and was a 2021 Book Riot Best True Crime Book. Her short story collection HOME IS A MADE-UP PLACE won Hidden River Arts’ 2020 Eludia Award and the 2023 Page Turner Awards for Short Stories. 
She earned an MFA in Nonfiction Writing at Pacific University, is Creative Nonfiction Editor at The Citron Review, and teaches memoir through the University of Washington's Online Continuum Program and also independently. She launched Let's Talk Memoir in 2022, lives in Seattle with her family of people and dogs, and is at work on her next book.
More about Ronit: https://ronitplank.com
Subscribe to Ronit’s Substack: https://substack.com/@ronitplank
Follow Ronit:
https://www.instagram.com/ronitplank/
https://www.facebook.com/RonitPlank
https://bsky.app/profile/ronitplank.bsky.social
 
Background photo credit: Photo by Patrick Tomasso on Unsplash
Headshot photo credit: Sarah Anne Photography
Theme music: Isaac Joel, Dead Moll’s Fingers

164. A Memoir with Reflection and Prompts featuring Diana Raab

Diana Raab joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about connecting with ancestors and tuning into their guidance, books that need to be written, when publisher requests don’t resonate with us, adding prompts for readers, unwanted daughters and intergenerational trauma, how books we don’t like help us, adding prompts for readers, tapping into authentic voice, and her new book Hummingbird: Messages from My Ancestors.
 
Also in this episode: 
-reading broadly 
-surviving cancer multiple times
-how trauma manifests later in life
 
Book mentioned in this episode:
This Boys Life by Tobias Wolff
Paula by Isabel Allende
Fierce Attachments by Vivian Gornick 
Crazy Brave by Joy Harjo 
Poet Warrior by Joy Harjo
 
Diana Raab, MFA, PhD, is a poet, memoirist, workshop leader, thought-leader and award-winning author of fourteen books. Her work has been widely published and anthologized. Her poems have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and The Best of the Net. She frequently speaks and writes on writing for healing and transformation. Her 14th and newest book is Hummingbird: Messages from My Ancestors, A memoir with reflection and writing prompts (2024).Raab writes for Psychology Today, The Good Men Project, Sixty and Me, Thrive Global, and is a guest writer for many others. 
 
Connect with Diana:
Website: https://www.dianaraab.com
Forthcoming poetry anthology:
https://gunpowderpress.com/product/women-in-a-golden-state/
 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/dianaraab/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/diana-raab-phd-a1850911/
Facebook (Author): https://www.facebook.com/DianaRaab.Author/
Facebook (Diana M Raab): https://www.facebook.com/diana.m.raab/
Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/512931.Diana_Raab
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/user/dianaraab1
Diana’s monthly newsletter: https://dianaraab.com/signup/
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Ronit’s writing has appeared in The Atlantic, The Rumpus, The New York Times, Poets & Writers, The Iowa Review, Hippocampus, 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 the 2021 Housatonic Awards Awards, the 2021 Indie Excellence Awards, and was a 2021 Book Riot Best True Crime Book. Her short story collection HOME IS A MADE-UP PLACE won Hidden River Arts’ 2020 Eludia Award and the 2023 Page Turner Awards for Short Stories. 
She earned an MFA in Nonfiction Writing at Pacific University, is Creative Nonfiction Editor at The Citron Review, and teaches memoir through the University of Washington's Online Continuum Program and also independently. She launched Let's Talk Memoir in 2022, lives in Seattle with her family of people and dogs, and is at work on her next book.
More about Ronit: https://ronitplank.com
Subscribe to Ronit’s Substack: https://substack.com/@ronitplank
Follow Ronit:
https://www.instagram.com/ronitplank/
https://www.facebook.com/RonitPlank
https://bsky.app/profile/ronitplank.bsky.social
 
Background photo credit: Photo by Patrick Tomasso on Unsplash
Headshot photo credit: Sarah Anne Photography
Theme music: Isaac Joel, Dead Moll’s Fingers

163. Losing Mothers and Finding Them Again Through Memoir featuring Rebe Huntman

Rebe Huntman joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about who are we as women and what holds us together as a culture, following questions to their conclusions and changing in the process, running away from grief,  magical thinking, reinventing ourselves, Afro-Cuban traditions and relationships to the dead, hungering for answers, permission to be more than one thing, losing mothers and finding them again through memoir, spiritual mothers and keeping the dead close, and her new memoir My Mother in Havana: A Memoir of Magic & Miracle.
Also in this episode:
-getting a do over
-trusting the writing process
-including the beautiful and the terrible
Books mentioned in this episode:
When Women Were Dragons by Kelly Barnhill
The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern
Poetry by Richard Blanco
Poetry by Aracelis Girmay
REBE HUNTMAN is the author of My Mother in Havana: A Memoir of Magic & Miracle (February 2025, Monkfish Books), a memoir that traces her search to connect with her mother—thirty years after her death—among the gods and saints of Cuba. A former professional Latin and Afro-Cuban dancer and choreographer, for over a decade Rebe directed Chicago’s award-winning Danza Viva Center for World Dance, Art & Music and its resident dance company, One World Dance Theater. She collaborates with native artists in Cuba and South America, and has been featured in LATINA Magazine, Chicago Magazine, and the Chicago Tribune, and on Fox and ABC. Rebe’s essays, stories, and poems appear or are forthcoming in such places as The Southern Review, The Missouri Review, Parabola, Ninth Letter, The Cincinnati Review, and the PINCH, and have earned her an Ohio Individual Excellence Award as well as fellowships from the Macondo Writers' Conference, Virginia Center for Creative Arts, Ragdale Foundation, PLAYA Residency, Hambidge Center, and Brush Creek Foundation. She holds an MFA in creative nonfiction from The Ohio State University and lives in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, and Delaware, Ohio. Both e’s in her name are long. Find her at www. rebehuntman.com and on Instagram at @rebehuntman.
Connect with Rebe:
Website: www.rebehuntman.com
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/rebehuntman
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/rebehuntmanauthor
Links to purchase the book at www.rebehuntman.com/mymotherinhavana
 
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Ronit’s writing has appeared in The Atlantic, The Rumpus, The New York Times, Poets & Writers, The Iowa Review, Hippocampus, 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 the 2021 Housatonic Awards Awards, the 2021 Indie Excellence Awards, and was a 2021 Book Riot Best True Crime Book. Her short story collection HOME IS A MADE-UP PLACE won Hidden River Arts’ 2020 Eludia Award and the 2023 Page Turner Awards for Short Stories. 
She earned an MFA in Nonfiction Writing at Pacific University, is Creative Nonfiction Editor at The Citron Review, and teaches memoir through the University of Washington's Online Continuum Program and also independently. She launched Let's Talk Memoir in 2022, lives in Seattle with her family of people and dogs, and is at work on her next book.
More about Ronit: https://ronitplank.com
Subscribe to Ronit’s Substack: https://substack.com/@ronitplank
Follow Ronit:
https://www.instagram.com/ronitplank/
https://www.facebook.com/RonitPlank
https://bsky.app/profile/ronitplank.bsky.social
 
Background photo credit: Photo by Patrick Tomasso on Unsplash
Headshot photo credit: Sarah Anne Photography
Theme music: Isaac Joel, Dead Moll’s Fingers

162. Finding Patterns and Switching Lenses featuring Bridgett M. Davis

Bridgett M. Davis joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about the effect of trauma and weathering on Black lives, the unique bond between sisters, showing relationships in action and dialogue, homing in on a throughline, giving our books and writing the space they need,finding patterns and switching lenses, exploring varying lived experiences within family structures, shedding light on Lupus, the physiological effects of systemic racism, Black maternal mortality, moments of heartbreak, asking important narrative questions early on, the letters her sister wrote to her, and her new memoir Love, Rita.
 
Also in this episode:
-birth order
-getting a book optioned or film
-shifting points of view
 
Books mentioned in this episode:
-The Situations and the Story by Vivian Gornick
-Inventing the Truth by William Zisner
-The Yellow House by Sarah 
-Memorial Drive by Natasha Tretheway
-The Invisible Kingdom by Megan O’Rourke
-Fairy Land by Alisha Abbott
-Gather Me by Glory Adams
 
Bridgett M. Davis (pronounced Brih-jet) is the author of the memoir, Love, Rita, published by Harper Books in spring 2025.Her first memoir, The World According To Fannie Davis: My Mother’s Life In The Detroit Numbers, was a New York Times Editors’ Choice, a 2020 Michigan Notable Book, named a Best Book of 2019 by Kirkus Reviews, BuzzFeed, NBC News and Parade Magazine, and featured as a clue on the quiz show Jeopardy! The upcoming film adaptation will be produced by Plan B Entertainment and released by Searchlight Pictures.
She is author of two novels, Into the Go-Slow, named a Best Book of 2014 by The San Francisco Chronicle, and Shifting Through Neutral, shortlisted for the Zora Neale Hurston/Richard Wright Legacy Award. Davis is also writer/director of the 1996 award-winning feature film Naked Acts, newly restored and released to critical acclaim, screening in theaters across the US and globally and now available on DVD, Blu Ray and select streaming services.
Davis is Professor Emerita in the journalism department at Baruch College and the CUNY Graduate Center, where she has taught creative, narrative and film writing. Her essays have appeared most recently in The New York Times, the LA Times and The Washington Post, among other publications. A graduate of Spelman College and Columbia Journalism School, she lives in Brooklyn with her family. Visit her website at www.bridgettdavis.com.\
Connect with Bridgett:
Website: bridgettdavis.com
Facebook: bridgettdavis
Bluesky: bridgettmdavis.bsky.social
IG: https://www.instagram.com/bridgett_d
substack: bridgettmdavis.substack.com
Links for book purchase: https://www.harpercollins.com/products/love-rita-bridgett-m-davis?variant=43263953174562
Bookshop: https://bookshop.org/p/books/love-rita-a-sister-s-story-bridgett-m-davis/21696108
 
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Ronit’s writing has appeared in The Atlantic, The Rumpus, The New York Times, Poets & Writers, The Iowa Review, Hippocampus, 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 the 2021 Housatonic Awards Awards, the 2021 Indie Excellence Awards, and was a 2021 Book Riot Best True Crime Book. Her short story collection HOME IS A MADE-UP PLACE won Hidden River Arts’ 2020 Eludia Award and the 2023 Page Turner Awards for Short Stories. 
She earned an MFA in Nonfiction Writing at Pacific University, is Creative Nonfiction Editor at The Citron Review, and teaches memoir through the University of Washington's Online Continuum Program and also independently. She launched Let's Talk Memoir in 2022, lives in Seattle with her family of people and dogs, and is at work on her next book.
More about Ronit: https://ronitplank.com
Subscribe to Ronit’s Substack: https://substack.com/@ronitplank
Follow Ronit:
https://www.instagram.com/ronitplank/
https://www.facebook.com/RonitPlank
https://bsky.app/profile/ronitplank.bsky.social
 
Background photo credit: Photo by Patrick Tomasso on Unsplash
Headshot photo credit: Sarah Anne Photography
Theme music: Isaac Joel, Dead Moll’s Fingers

161. Writing to Our Past Self featuring Megan Williams

Megan Williams joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about being a new mother while training at the police academy, looking for validation, resisting the urge to punish ourselves, pushing back against the voice of patriarchal culture, writing to our past self, going too far and not going far enough, the loneliness of motherhood, setting boundaries in memoir, testing ourselves, what motherhood feels like now, moving elegantly through time in memoir, surrounding yourself with talented writers, frontloading a manuscript, and her memoir One Bad Mother: A Mother’s Search for Meaning in the Police Academy.
Also in this episode:
-thinking as a form of writing
-writing community
-writing conferences  
 
Books mentioned in this episode:
Crossing the River by Carol Smith 
Starry Field by Margaret Juhae Lee
Bastard Out of Carolina by Dorothy Alliosn
You Could Make This Place Beautiful by Maggie Smith
A Well-Trained Wife by Tia Levings
 
Megan Williams is the author of One Bad Mother: A Mother’s Search for Meaning in the Police Academy. After graduating from Haverford College, Megan received her Ph.D. in English from Temple University and taught at Lafayette College and Santa Clara University. She has moved across the country—never landing in the middle—three times in twenty years. She now lives in Bellingham with her husband, who runs Blue Dog Bakery and keeps their teenage twins, rescued cat, horse, and mastiff full of treats.
Connect with Megan Williams:
Website: www.meganwilliamsauthor.com
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=1347114175
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ottoisking/
Tiktok: @one.bad.mother
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/megan-williams-6585844a/
Get the book: https://bookshop.org/p/books/one-bad-mother-a-woman-s-search-for-meaning-in-motherhood-and-the-philadelphia-police-academy-megan-williams/20964845?ean=9781960573858
 
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Ronit’s writing has appeared in The Atlantic, The Rumpus, The New York Times, Poets & Writers, The Iowa Review, Hippocampus, 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 the 2021 Housatonic Awards Awards, the 2021 Indie Excellence Awards, and was a 2021 Book Riot Best True Crime Book. Her short story collection HOME IS A MADE-UP PLACE won Hidden River Arts’ 2020 Eludia Award and the 2023 Page Turner Awards for Short Stories. 
She earned an MFA in Nonfiction Writing at Pacific University, is Creative Nonfiction Editor at The Citron Review, and teaches memoir through the University of Washington's Online Continuum Program and also independently. She launched Let's Talk Memoir in 2022, lives in Seattle with her family of people and dogs, and is at work on her next book.
More about Ronit: https://ronitplank.com
Subscribe to Ronit’s Substack: https://substack.com/@ronitplank
Follow Ronit:
https://www.instagram.com/ronitplank/
https://www.facebook.com/RonitPlank
https://bsky.app/profile/ronitplank.bsky.social
 
Background photo credit: Photo by Patrick Tomasso on Unsplash
Headshot photo credit: Sarah Anne Photography
Theme music: Isaac Joel, Dead Moll’s Fingers

160. Falling Outside the Containers of What’s Expected featuring Paul Lisicky

Paul Lisicky joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about how his appreciation for Joni Mitchell  and love of her work shaped his life as a musician and a writer, vulnerability and uncertainty on the page, falling outside the containers of what’s expected, the singular and universal in our work, vulnerability and uncertainty in our creative process, corralling ourselves back to our 5 senses, feeling structure in our bodies, writing for the reader, developing ourselves as artists, being tenacious in pursuing our vision, writing about our idols, and his new book Song So Wild and Blue.
 
Also in this episode:
-image-based writing
-writing a proposal for the first time
-how structure can help liberate our work
 
Books/Authors mentioned in this episode:
Sigrid Nunez
Elizabeth McCracken
Sarah Manguso
Mary Gaitskill 
Joy Williams
Barry Lopez
Annie Liontis
E.J. Koh
All Fours by Miranda July
 
Paul Lisicky is the author of seven books including Song So Wild and Blue: A Life with the Music of Joni Mitchell, Later: My Life at the Edge of the World, The Narrow Door: A Memoir of Friendship. A recipient of Fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the NEA, he is a professor of English in the MFA Program in Creative Writing at Rutgers University-Camden. He lives in Brooklyn.
Website: http://www.paullisicky.net/
Connect with Paul: https://bsky.app/profile/paullisicky.bsky.social
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/paul_lisicky/
Get the book: https://bookshop.org/p/books/song-so-wild-and-blue-a-life-with-the-music-of-joni-mitchell-paul-lisicky/21517908?ean=9780063280373
–
Ronit’s writing has appeared in The Atlantic, The Rumpus, The New York Times, Poets & Writers, The Iowa Review, Hippocampus, 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 the 2021 Housatonic Awards Awards, the 2021 Indie Excellence Awards, and was a 2021 Book Riot Best True Crime Book. Her short story collection HOME IS A MADE-UP PLACE won Hidden River Arts’ 2020 Eludia Award and the 2023 Page Turner Awards for Short Stories. 
She earned an MFA in Nonfiction Writing at Pacific University, is Creative Nonfiction Editor at The Citron Review, and teaches memoir through the University of Washington's Online Continuum Program and also independently. She launched Let's Talk Memoir in 2022, lives in Seattle with her family of people and dogs, and is at work on her next book.
More about Ronit: https://ronitplank.com
Subscribe to Ronit’s Substack: https://substack.com/@ronitplank
Follow Ronit:
https://www.instagram.com/ronitplank/
https://www.facebook.com/RonitPlank
https://bsky.app/profile/ronitplank.bsky.social
 
Background photo credit: Photo by Patrick Tomasso on Unsplash
Headshot photo credit: Sarah Anne Photography
Theme music: Isaac Joel, Dead Moll’s Fingers