Let’s Talk Memoir

How to Capture a Feeling: the Specific and Particular featuring 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, keeping ourselves safe while creating, constellations in our lives, avoiding sentimentality, and her new memoir which she calls a love song to her mother, Meet Me Tonight in Atlantic City.
Also in this episode:
-how she’s never funny in poems
-the super secret Jane Wong’s been keeping
-finding your people
 
Books mentioned in this episode:
Seeing Ghosts by Kat Chow
Tastes like War by Grace M. Cho
Crying in H Mart by Michelle Zauner
Dictee by Theresa Hak Kyung Cha
The Grave on the Wall by Brandon Shimoda 
Jane Wong is the author of the debut memoir, Meet Me Tonight in Atlantic City, out now from Tin House (2023). She is also the author of two books of poetry: How to Not Be Afraid of Everything from Alice James (2021) and Overpour from Action Books (2016). 
 
She holds an M.F.A. in Poetry from the University of Iowa and a Ph.D. in English from the University of Washington and is an Associate Professor of Creative Writing at Western Washington University. Her poems can be found in places such as Best American Nonrequired Reading 2019, Best American Poetry 2015, The New York Times, American Poetry Review, POETRY, The Kenyon Review, New England Review, and others. Her essays have appeared in places such as McSweeney's, Black Warrior Review, Ecotone, The Common, The Georgia Review, Shenandoah, and Want: Women Writing About Desire (Catapult).
 
A Kundiman fellow, she is the recipient of a Pushcart Prize and fellowships and residencies from the U.S. Fulbright Program, Artist Trust, Harvard’s Woodberry Poetry Room, 4Culture, the Fine Arts Work Center, Bread Loaf, Hedgebrook, Willapa Bay, the Jentel Foundation, UCross, Mineral School, the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund, Loghaven, and others. She grew up in a Chinese American restaurant on the Jersey shore and lives in Seattle.
 
Connect with Jane:
Website: https://janewongwriter.com/
Get Jane’s Book: https://tinhouse.com/book/meet-me-tonight-in-atlantic-city/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/paradeofcats
 
—
Ronit’s writing has appeared in The Atlantic, The Rumpus, The New York Times, 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 lives in Seattle with her family where she teaches memoir workshops and is working on her next book.
More about Ronit: https://ronitplank.com
Sign up for monthly podcast and writing updates: https://bit.ly/33nyTKd
 
Follow Ronit:
https://www.instagram.com/ronitplank/
https://twitter.com/RonitPlank
https://www.facebook.com/RonitPlank
 
Background photo credit: Photo by Patrick Tomasso on Unsplash
Headshot photo credit: Sarah Anne Photography
Theme music: Isaac Joel, Dead Moll’s Fingers

Working with Developmental Editors and Book and Proposal Coaches featuring 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 published memoirist requires, and her new book Brave-ish: One Breakup, Six Continents and Feeling Fearless After Fifty.
 
Also in this episode:
-taking time to rest
-switching where our memoirs begin
-asking for help
 
Books mentioned in this episode:
Getting Stones with the Savages by Maarten Troost
The Henna Artist by Alka Joshi
Super Survivors by David B, Feldman and  Lee Daniel Kravetz
Group by Christie Tate
BFF by Christie Tate
Maybe You Should Talk With Someone by Lori Gottlieb
 
Lisa Niver is an award-winning travel expert who has explored 102 countries on six continents. This University of Pennsylvania graduate sailed across the seas for seven years with Princess Cruises, Royal Caribbean, and Renaissance Cruises and spent three years backpacking across Asia. Discover her articles in publications from AARP: The Magazine and AAA Explorer to WIRED and Wharton Magazine, as well as her site WeSaidGoTravel.
 
On her award nominated global podcast, Make Your Own Map, Niver has interviewed Deepak Chopra, Olympic medalists, and numerous bestselling authors, and as a journalist has been invited to both the Oscars and the United Nations. For her print and digital stories as well as her television segments, she has been awarded three Southern California Journalism Awards and two National Arts and Entertainment Journalism Awards and been a finalist twenty-two times.
 
Named a #3 travel influencer for 2023, Niver talks travel on broadcast television at KTLA TV Los Angeles, her YouTube channel with over 2 million views, and in her memoir, Brave-ish, One Breakup, Six Continents and Feeling Fearless After Fifty.
 
Connect with Lisa:
Website: https://lisaniver.com/braveish/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lisaniver
Tiktok: https://www.tiktok.com/@lisaniver
Twitter: https://twitter.com/lisaniver
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/lisa.niver
Pinterest: https://www.pinterest.com/wesaidgotravel/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lisaellenniver/
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@LisaNiver
We Said Go Travel: http://wesaidgotravel.com/
Lisa’s Series of articles:
Navigating Book Promotion: Expert Tips from PR Pros
https://www.wesaidgotravel.com/book-promotion/
Unlocking Book Promotion Success: Insider Strategies from PR Experts (Part 2)
https://www.wesaidgotravel.com/book-promotion-2/
Mastering Book Promotion Strategies: Proven Insights from PR Experts (Part 3)
https://www.wesaidgotravel.com/book-promotion-3/
 
—
Ronit’s writing has appeared in The Atlantic, The Rumpus, The New York Times, 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 lives in Seattle with her family where she teaches memoir workshops and is working on her next book.
More about Ronit: https://ronitplank.com
Sign up for monthly podcast and writing updates: https://bit.ly/33nyTKd
 
Follow Ronit:
https://www.instagram.com/ronitplank/
https://twitter.com/RonitPlank
https://www.facebook.com/RonitPlank
 
Background photo credit: Photo by Patrick Tomasso on Unsplash
Headshot photo credit: Sarah Anne Photography
Theme music: Isaac Joel, Dead Moll’s Fingers

Depicting Complex Relationships and Calibrating Metaphor in Memoir featuring 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 to press, protecting loved ones in our work, how much metaphor is too much, and her new memoir Dwell Time.
 
Also in this episode:
-finding community
-working with book coaches
-approaching writing like a job
Books mentioned in this episode:
Educated by Tara Westover
Born a Crime by Trevor Noah
Blow Your House Down by Gina Frangelo
Little Failure by Gary Shteyngart
The Year of Magical Thinking by Jon Didion
H is for Hawk by Helen MacDonald
Liar by Rob Roberge
The Distance Between Us by Rayna Grande
Avid Reader by Robert Gottlieb
When She Comes Back by Ronit Plank
 
Rosa Lowinger is a Cuban-born American art conservator and founder of RLA Conservation of
Art + Architecture, LLC. (www.rlaconservation.com), the U.S.’s largest woman-owned materials
conservation practice. She is also a published author, most well-known for Tropicana Nights:
The Life and Times of the Legendary Cuban Nightclub (Harcourt, 2005), a book on Havana’s
pre-Castro nightclub era. Other fictional works by Rosa include The Encanto File, a play produced off-Broadway by the Women’s Project and Productions and published in Rowing to America and Sixteen Other Short Plays, edited by Julia Miles (Smith & Kraus, 2002), and The Empress of the Waves, a short story published in the anthology Island in the Light/Isla en la Luz (Trapublishing, 2019).
 
Rosa’s academic and professional distinctions include the 2008-09 Rome Prize at the American Academy in Rome, where she researched the history of vandalism, graffiti, and street art; and Fellow status in the American Institute for Conservation and the Association for Preservation Technology. She holds an M.A. in Art History and Conservation from NYU’s Institute of Fine Arts, lectures regularly at numerous universities around the country, and serves on the boards of the Amigos of the Cuban Heritage Collection at University of Miami, Florida Association of Museums, the Partnership for Sacred Places, and the Florida Association of Public Art Professionals. Rosa co-curated the exhibits Promising Paradise: Cuban Allure American Seduction (Wolfsonian Museum, 2016) and Concrete Paradise: Miami Marine Stadium (Coral Gables Museum, 2013). She writes regularly for academic and popular media about conservation, the arts, and Cuba. Her 1999 cover story on Havana for Preservation spawned a career in cultural travel that has taken her to Cuba over 100 times since 1992. She lives in Los Angeles and Miami and is married to Todd Kessler.
 
Connect with Rosa:
Rosa’s Website:www.rosalowinger.com
Instagram:https://www.instagram.com/rosa_Lowinger
RLA Conservation’s Website: www.rlaconservation.com
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/rlaconservation
Purchase Dwell Time: https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/dwell-time-rosa-lowinger/1143192800
https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Dwell-Time/Rosa-Lowinger/9781955905275
 
—
Ronit’s writing has appeared in The Atlantic, The Rumpus, The New York Times, 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 lives in Seattle with her family where she teaches memoir workshops and is working on her next book.
More about Ronit: https://ronitplank.com
Sign up for monthly podcast and writing updates: https://bit.ly/33nyTKd
 
Follow Ronit:
https://www.instagram.com/ronitplank/
https://twitter.com/RonitPlank
https://www.facebook.com/RonitPlank
 
Background photo credit: Photo by Patrick Tomasso on Unsplash
Headshot photo credit: Sarah Anne Photography
Theme music: Isaac Joel, Dead Moll’s Fingers

Putting Child Loss into Words featuring 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, choosing what stays in essay collections and what goes, and her memoir Love in the Archives.
 
Also in this episode:
-bad writing groups
-titling our work
-finding homes for our essays in literary magazines
 
Books mentioned in this episode:
Broken in the Best Possible Way by Jenny Lawson
Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim by David Sedaris
The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd
 
Eileen Vorbach Collins writes true stories she wishes were fiction and fairy tales she wishes were true. Her essays have been widely published and received several prestigious awards. Two have been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Eileen's essay collection, Love in the Archives: A Patchwork of True Stories About Suicide Loss, is forthcoming with Apprentice House Press in October. 
 
Connect with Eileen:
Website: https://www.eileenvorbachcollins.com/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/EileenVorbachCollins/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/evorbachcollins/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/evorbachcollins
—
Ronit’s writing has appeared in The Atlantic, The Rumpus, The New York Times, 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 lives in Seattle with her family where she teaches memoir workshops and is working on her next book.
More about Ronit: https://ronitplank.com
Sign up for monthly podcast and writing updates: https://bit.ly/33nyTKd
 
Follow Ronit:
https://www.instagram.com/ronitplank/
https://twitter.com/RonitPlank
https://www.facebook.com/RonitPlank
 
Background photo credit: Photo by Patrick Tomasso on Unsplash
Headshot photo credit: Sarah Anne Photography
Theme music: Isaac Joel, Dead Moll’s Fingers

The Leaving Season featuring 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 distance necessary to our work, writing about exes, landscape as a foil, and her memoir in essays The Leaving Season.
 
-Visit the Let's Talk Memoir Merch store: https://www.zazzle.com/store/letstalkmemoir
-Take the Let's Talk Memoir survey: https://forms.gle/mctvsv9MGvzDRn8D6
 
Help shape upcoming Let’s Talk Memoir content - a brief survey:  https://forms.gle/ueQVu8YyaHNKui2Z9
Also in this episode:
-stealing with intention
-curiosity and self-reflection in memoir
-approaching an essay
 
Books mentioned in this episode:
Dakota: A Spiritual Geography by Kathleen Norris
The Ecology of a Cracker Childhood by Janisse Ray
Soil:The Story of a Black Mother’s Garden by Camille Dungy
Omega Farm by Martha Mcphee
The Suicide Index: Putting My Father's Death in Order by Joan Wickersham
History of Suicide: My Sister's Unfinished Life by Jill Bialosky
 
 
Kelly McMasters is an essayist, professor, mother, and former bookshop owner. She is the author of the Zibby Book Club pick The Leaving Season: A Memoir-in-Essays (WW Norton, 2023) and co-editor of the ABA national bestseller Wanting: Women Writing About Desire (Catapult, 2023). Her first book, Welcome to Shirley: A Memoir from an Atomic Town, was listed as one of Oprah's top 5 summer memoirs and is the basis for the documentary film ‘The Atomic States of America,’ a 2012 Sundance selection, and the anthology she co-edited with Margot Kahn, This Is the Place: Women Writing About Home (Seal Press, 2017), was a New York Times Editor’s Choice. Her essays, reviews, and articles have appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic Monthly, The Washington Post Magazine, The Paris Review, The American Scholar, River Teeth: A Journal of Narrative Nonfiction, Tin House, Newsday, and Time Out New York, among others. She holds a BA from Vassar College and an MFA in nonfiction writing from Columbia's School of the Arts and is the recipient of a Pushcart nomination and an Orion Book Award nomination. Kelly has spoken about creative nonfiction at TEDx, authors@google, and more, and has taught at mediabistro.com, Franklin & Marshall College, and in the undergraduate writing program and Journalism Graduate School at Columbia University, among others. She is currently an Associate Professor of English and Director of Publishing Studies at Hofstra University in NY. 
 
Connect with Kelly:
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/kelly_mc_masters
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/kelly.mcmasters.3/
Website: www.kellymcmasters.com
 
—
About Ronit
Subscribe to Ronit's Memoir Substack: https://substack.com/@ronitplank?utm_source=profile-page
Ronit’s writing has appeared in The Atlantic, The Rumpus, The New York Times, 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 lives in Seattle with her family where she teaches memoir workshops and is working on her next book.
More about Ronit: https://ronitplank.com
Sign up for monthly podcast and writing updates: https://bit.ly/33nyTKd
 
Follow Ronit:
https://www.instagram.com/ronitplank/
https://twitter.com/RonitPlank
https://www.facebook.com/RonitPlank
 
Background photo credit: Photo by Patrick Tomasso on Unsplash
Headshot photo credit: Sarah Anne Photography
Theme music: Isaac Joel, Dead Moll’s Fingers

Memoir on Stage featuring Jamie Brickhouse

Jamie Brickhouse joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about writing and teaching memoir, performing and telling stories, alcoholism and life as a sober artist, being a 5-time Moth StorySLAM winner, his Texas tornado of a mother, why we don't need good a memory to write a memoir, and his memoir Dangerous When Wet.
 
-Visit the Let's Talk Memoir Merch store: https://www.zazzle.com/store/letstalkmemoir
-Take the Let's Talk Memoir survey: https://forms.gle/mctvsv9MGvzDRn8D6
Help shape upcoming Let’s Talk Memoir content - a brief survey:  https://forms.gle/ueQVu8YyaHNKui2Z9
 
Also in this episode: 
-why we share stories
-the generosity of wondering
-what all memoirs are ultimately about
 
Books mentioned in this episode:
The Liar’s Club by Mary Karr
Cherry by Mary Karr
Lit by Mary Karr
Before Night Falls by Reinaldo Arenas
The Night of the Gun by David Carr
The Situation and the Story by VIvian Gornick
The Art of Memoir by Mary Karr
Braving the Fire: A Guide to Writing About Grief and Loss  by Jessica Handler
 
Called a natural raconteur by the Washington Post, Jamie Brickhouse is a writer, comedic storyteller, TikTok sensation, podcast host, and public speaker. He’s the author of the critically acclaimed Dangerous When Wet: A Memoir of Booze Sex and My Mother (St. Martin's Press). It’s “Required Reading” in Mary Karr’s The Art of Memoir; an Amazon Editors’ Pick (Biographies & Memoirs), an Amazon “Best Book of May 2015,” and a Book Chase “2015 Nonfiction Top 10.” His essays and articles have been published in the New York Times (multiple times), International Herald Tribune, Washington Post, The Daily Beast, Salon, Interview, Out, Huffington Post, POZ, Amtrak’s Arrive, Lambda Literary Review, Publishers Weekly, and Shelf Awareness. His recent HuffPost Personal essay, adapted from his memoir in progress, I Favor My Daddy: A Tale of Two Sissies, has over 500,000 views, and Merriam-Webster featured a sentence from the piece in its “Word of the Day” as a perfect usage example of the word effulgence. 
Brickhouse’s daily TikTok #storiesinheels videos in which he tells a true story have over 5 million views, nearly a million likes, and over 75,000 followers. He is the host of the weekly podcast, Sober Podcast, part of Sober Network, and is an award-winning storyteller who tours two solo shows based on his memoirs, Dangerous When Wet and I Favor My Daddy.
Brickhouse has taught memoir, personal essay, creativity, and book marketing at the Columbia Publishing Course (17 years), San Miguel Writers’ Conference (San Miguel de Allende, Mexico), HippoCamp: A Conference for Creative Nonfiction, Creative Nonfiction Writers’ Conference, the Northern California Writers’ StoryTellers Conference & Expo, and Cape Cod Writers’ Conference. 
Connect with Jamie:
Website: https://www.jamiebrickhouse.com/
TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@jamie_brickhouse 
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/jamiebrickhouse
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/JamieBrickhouseRedBrickAgency
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@jamiebrickhouse
Dangerous When Wet: A Memoir of Booze, Sex, and My Mother Ebook & audiobook read by the author: https://amzn.to/2YxvMNl 
 
—
Ronit’s writing has appeared in The Atlantic, The Rumpus, The New York Times, 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 lives in Seattle with her family where she teaches memoir workshops and is working on her next book.
More about Ronit: https://ronitplank.com
Sign up for monthly podcast and writing updates: https://bit.ly/33nyTKd
 
Follow Ronit:
https://www.instagram.com/ronitplank/
https://twitter.com/RonitPlank
https://www.facebook.com/RonitPlank
 
Background photo credit: Photo by Patrick Tomasso on Unsplash
Headshot photo credit: Sarah Anne Photography
Theme music: Isaac Joel, Dead Moll’s Fingers

Saying Goodbye and Why We Write About the Hard Things featuring Morgan Baker

Morgan Baker joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about motherhood and identity, giving back to ourselves and creating boundaries, confronting depression, worrying about our memoir’s structure later, juggling our jobs as writers, why we write about hard things, and her new memoir Emptying the Nest.
-Visit the Let's Talk Memoir Merch store: https://www.zazzle.com/store/letstalkmemoir
-Take the Let's Talk Memoir survey: https://forms.gle/mctvsv9MGvzDRn8D6
Help shape upcoming Let’s Talk Memoir content - a brief survey:  https://forms.gle/ueQVu8YyaHNKui2Z9
 
Also in this episode:
-perceiving ourselves in new ways
-the gifts of teaching 
-letting go
 
Books mentioned in this episode:
A Three Dog Life by Abigail Thomas
Growing Up by Russell Baker
By the Iowa Sea by Joe Blair
In Love by Amy Bloom
The Suicide Index byJoan Wickersham
How to Make a Slave by Jerald Walker
Surviving the White Gaze by Rebecca Carroll
 
Morgan Baker is an award-winning writer and professor at Emerson College. Her work is featured in The New York Times Magazine, The Boston Globe Magazine, The Brevity Blog, Talking Writing, The Boston Parents’ Paper, The Martha’s Vineyard Times, The Bark, Modern Dog, Cognoscenti, and Hippocampus, among many regional and national publications. She is managing editor of The Bucket. She is the mother of two adult daughters and lives with her husband and two dogs in Cambridge, where she also quilts and bakes. Visit her at bymorganbaker.com.
 
Connect with Morgan:
Website: https://www.bymorganbaker.com
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/mmorgbb
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/morgan.baker.737/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/morgan-baker-01446aa/
Get her book here: https://www.ten16press.com/shop 
Write Your Way with Morgan will be starting two 8-week workshops
 
—
Ronit’s writing has appeared in The Atlantic, The Rumpus, The New York Times, 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 lives in Seattle with her family where she teaches memoir workshops and is working on her next book.
More about Ronit: https://ronitplank.com
Sign up for monthly podcast and writing updates: https://bit.ly/33nyTKd
 
Follow Ronit:
https://www.instagram.com/ronitplank/
https://twitter.com/RonitPlank
https://www.facebook.com/RonitPlank
 
Background photo credit: Photo by Patrick Tomasso on Unsplash
Headshot photo credit: Sarah Anne Photography
Theme music: Isaac Joel, Dead Moll’s Fingers

Complicated Family Legacies and Heaps of Material featuring Gretchen Cherington

Gretchen Cherington joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about complicated family legacies and processing sexual abuse, confronting the public view of a loved one we’re writing about, protecting manuscripts before we have book contracts, corralling information and organizing heaps of material, reading broadly, building relationships and being above board with sources, and her true crime, investigative, family memoir The Butcher, the Embezzler, and the Fall Guy.
 
-Visit the Let's Talk Memoir Merch store: https://www.zazzle.com/store/letstalkmemoir
-Take the Let's Talk Memoir survey: https://forms.gle/mctvsv9MGvzDRn8D6
 
Help shape upcoming Let’s Talk Memoir content - a brief survey:  https://forms.gle/ueQVu8YyaHNKui2Z9
 
Also in this episode:
-discovering an organizing principle
-knowing what material to cut
-reading like a memoirist
 
Books mentioned in this episode:
Searching for Mercy Street by Linda Gray Sexton
Home Before Dark by Susan Cheever
Small Fry by Lisa Jobs
Another Bullshit Night in Suck City by Nick Flynn
Just Kids by Patti Smith
Heavy by Kiese Laymon
Sigh, Gone by Phuc Tran
Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal by Jeanette Winterson
Are You My Mother by Alison Bechdel
Queen of Snails: A Graphic Memoir by Maureen Burdock
Gretchen Cherington grew up the daughter of Pulitzer Prize–winning and U.S. poet laureate, Richard Eberhart. Her childhood homes were filled with literary greats from Robert Frost to Anne Sexton to James Dickey, a life she captured in her award-winning memoir, Poetic License. But like the paternal grandfather she never knew, Cherington chose a career in business where she coached hundreds of powerful men on how to change their companies and themselves. Her second book, The Butcher, the Embezzler, and the Fall Guy – a true crime, investigative, family memoir – is an exploration of the first twenty years of the meatpacking giant, Hormel Foods, as she pieces together her grandfather’s role—if he had one?—in a national embezzlement scandal that nearly brought the company to its knees in 1921. Cherington served as adjunct faculty in executive programs at Harvard, Dartmouth, and Columbia and on twenty boards of directors including a multibillion-dollar B-corporation bank. Cherington’s essays have appeared widely, in Huffington Post, Covey Club, Lit Hub, The Millions, Yankee, Electric Lit, Hippocampus, Quartz, and others. Her essay “Maine Roustabout” was nominated for a 2012 Pushcart Prize. Gretchen splits her time between Portland, Maine, and an eighty-year old cottage on Penobscot Bay.  
 
Connect with Gretchen:
Website: www.gretchencherington.com 
X: https://twitter.com/ge_cherington
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/gretchencheringtonauthor/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/gretchencheringtonauthor/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gretchen-cherington-612b3b7/
Get Gretchen’s Book: https://www.amazon.com/Butcher-Embezzler-Fall-Guy-Industry/dp/1647420830/ref=sr_1_1?crid=3QYT2DHA753BP&keywords=the+butcher%2C+the+embezzler%2C+and+the+fall+guy&qid=1673298988&sprefix=The+Butcher%2C+the+Embezz%2Caps%2C81&sr=8-1
Huffington Post: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/richard-eberhart-father-me-too_n_64068645e4b0c78bb74484e6 
 
—
Ronit’s writing has appeared in The Atlantic, The Rumpus, The New York Times, 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 lives in Seattle with her family where she teaches memoir workshops and is working on her next book.
More about Ronit: https://ronitplank.com
Sign up for monthly podcast and writing updates: https://bit.ly/33nyTKd
 
Follow Ronit:
https://www.instagram.com/ronitplank/
https://twitter.com/RonitPlank
https://www.facebook.com/RonitPlank
 
Background photo credit: Photo by Patrick Tomasso on Unsplash
Headshot photo credit: Sarah Anne Photography
Theme music: Isaac Joel, Dead Moll’s Fingers

Building Bylines, Crafting Book Proposals, and Pursuing Editors featuring Dina Gachman

Dina Gachman joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about ambiguous loss, taking risks on the page, writing about family, connecting with and pursuing editors, her approach to building bylines and writing book proposals, pushing past our fear of judgment in service of our stories, and her new memoir So Sorry for Your Loss.
-Visit the Let's Talk Memoir Merch store: https://www.zazzle.com/store/letstalkmemoir
-Take the Let's Talk Memoir survey: https://forms.gle/mctvsv9MGvzDRn8D6
 
Also in this episode:
-her work as a ghostwriter
-narrative reporting in memoir
-pushing past fear
 
Books mentioned in this episode:
Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life by William Finnegan
Leaving Isn’t the Hardest Thing by Lauren Hough
I Feel Bad About My Neck by Nora Ephron
Here For It by R. Eric Thomas
 
Dina Gachman is a Pulitzer Center Grantee, an award winning journalist, and a frequent contributor to The New York Times, Vox, Texas Monthly, Teen Vogue and more. She also writes a monthly movie column for The New York Times. She’s a bestselling ghostwriter, and her first book, BROKENOMICS, was published by Hachette/Seal Press. Her new book of essays about grief, SO SORRY FOR YOUR LOSS, was published April 2023 by Union Square & Co.
She spent three years as head copywriter on Clio award winning content for UPROXX Studios.
She has appeared on ABC's 20/20, CBS We are Austin, Chicago’s WGN and Texas Standard. She’s written two comic books for Bluewater Comics, about legendary superheroes Marilyn Monroe and Elizabeth Taylor. She lives near Austin, Texas, with her husband and son.
 
Connect with Dina:
Website: https://www.dinagachmanwrites.com/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/dgachman/
X: https://twitter.com/dinagachman
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dina-gachman-10abb018/
Get SO SORRY FOR YOUR LOSS: https://www.unionsquareandco.com/9781454947608/so-sorry-for-your-loss-by-dina-gachman/
 
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Ronit’s writing has appeared in The Atlantic, The Rumpus, The New York Times, 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 lives in Seattle with her family where she teaches memoir workshops and is working on her next book.
More about Ronit: https://ronitplank.com
Sign up for monthly podcast and writing updates: https://bit.ly/33nyTKd
 
Follow Ronit:
https://www.instagram.com/ronitplank/
https://twitter.com/RonitPlank
https://www.facebook.com/RonitPlank
 
Background photo credit: Photo by Patrick Tomasso on Unsplash
Headshot photo credit: Sarah Anne Photography
Theme music: Isaac Joel, Dead Moll’s Fingers
 

The Stories Landscapes Hold and the Presence of Absence featuring Pamela Petro

Pamela Petro joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about the stories landscapes hold, why she resisted memoir and how she ultimately put herself on the page despite trying hard not to, pushing ourselves to keep asking questions, writing a braided memoir and the responsibility of incorporating research, deep time, the presence of absence, and her newest book The Long Field.
 
-Visit the Let's Talk Memoir Merch store: https://www.zazzle.com/store/letstalkmemoir
-Take the Let's Talk Memoir survey: https://forms.gle/mctvsv9MGvzDRn8D6
 
Also in this episode:
-the best way to learn writing
-how language holds mysteries
-revising for meaning
 
Books mentioned in this episode:
The Architecture of Desire: Beauty and danger in the Stanford White Family by Suzannah Lessard
 
Pamela Petro is an author, artist, and educator living in Northampton, MA, with her partner, Marguerite, and Pembroke Welsh Corgi, Topaz. She has written four books of creative nonfiction including her latest, The Long Field – Wales and the Presence of Absence, a Memoir, as well as Travels in an Old Tongue, also about Wales; Sitting up with the Dead, about the American South; and The Slow Breath of Stone, about Southwest France. Her articles and essays have appeared in The New York Times, The Guardian, The Sunday Telegraph, The Atlantic, Granta, Guernica, The Paris Review, and others. The Long Field was shortlisted for The Wales Book of the Year Award and was named to Top Ten Travel Book lists by The Financial Times and The Sunday Telegraph. Pamela teaches creative writing at Smith College and on Lesley University’s MFA in Creative Writing Program, and is co-Director of the Dylan Thomas Summer School at the University of Wales, Trinity St Davids, where she is also a Fellow. She has widely exhibited her photography and has also created an artist book, AfterShadows - A Grand Canyon Narrative, and a graphic script, Under Paradise Valley. 
Connect with Pamela:
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/petropamela
www.pamelapetro.com
Email: ppetro@smith.edu
Course links: 
Lesley MFA in Creative Writing Program: https://lesley.edu/academics/graduate/creative-writing/
Dylan Thomas Summer School in Creative Writing, University of Wales: https://www.uwtsd.ac.uk/dylanthomas/summerschool/
Arcade Book: https://www.skyhorsepublishing.com/9781956763676/the-long-field/
 
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Ronit’s writing has appeared in The Atlantic, The Rumpus, The New York Times, 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 lives in Seattle with her family where she teaches memoir workshops and is working on her next book.
More about Ronit: https://ronitplank.com
Sign up for monthly podcast and writing updates: https://bit.ly/33nyTKd
 
Follow Ronit:
https://www.instagram.com/ronitplank/
https://twitter.com/RonitPlank
https://www.facebook.com/RonitPlank
 
Background photo credit: Photo by Patrick Tomasso on Unsplash
Headshot photo credit: Sarah Anne Photography
Theme music: Isaac Joel, Dead Moll’s Fingers