Let’s Talk Memoir

150. Writing a Memoir in Three Months featuring Barrie Miskin

Barrie Miskin joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about the rare dissociative disorder she experienced while pregnant and her experience navigating the maternal and mental health care system, the guilt and shame so often connected to motherhood and womanhood, the sweet spot of writing a year into her full recovery, balancing memoir writing with privacy and community, owning who we are and what we need to write, helping people feel seen, protection within the writing process, letting loved ones read our work before publication, writing a memoir in three months, and her new memoir Hell Gate Bridge.
 
Also in this episode:
-maternal mental health crises
-cognitive behavioral therapy
-writing fast
 
Books mentioned in this episode 
-Inferno: A Memoir of Motherhood and Madness by Catherine Cho
-Brain on Fire by Susannah Cahalan
-After the Eclipse: A Mother’s Murder, a Daughter’s Search by Sarah Perry
-Between Two Kingdoms by Suleika Jaouad 
 
Barrie Miskin's writing has appeared in Hobart, Narratively, Expat Press and elsewhere. Her interviews can be found in Write or Die magazine, where she is a regular contributor. Barrie is also a teacher in Astoria, New York, where she lives with her husband and daughter. Hell Gate Bridge is her first book.
Connect with Barrie:
Website: barriemiskin.com
Instagram: @barrie_m
X: @bmcintyre1000
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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

149. Writing Someone Else’s Story featuring Kanya D’Almeida

Kanya D’Almeida joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about how her life changed when a manuscript by Russell "Maroon" Shoatz, a former member of the Black Panther Party and soldier in the Black Liberation Army showed up in an envelope on her doorstep in 2011, the decades he spent in the Pennsylvania prison system, how their experiences with political violence and civil war intersected, becoming his biographer and building comradeship across the bars, Sri Lanka’s history of conflict, channeling complicated feelings into dedication for writing a book, violence as the only language America knows how to speak, and her new book I Am Maroon: The True Story of an American Political Prisoner. 
 
Ronit’s upcoming memoir course: https://www.pce.uw.edu/courses/memoir-writing-finding-your-story
 
 Also in this episode:
-being a diasporic writer 
-being a multi-genre author
-the role of self-criticism
 
Books mentioned in this episode:
On a Move by Mike Africa Jr.
Assata: An Autobiography by Assata Shakur 
 
Russell "Maroon" Shoatz was a dedicated community activist, founding member of the Black Unity Council, former member of the Black Panther Party, and soldier in the Black Liberation Army.
Kanya D’Almeida won the 2021 Commonwealth Short Story Prize, becoming the first Sri Lankan and only the second Asian writer to hold the honor. She was awarded the Society of Authors’ annual short story award in 2022. Her journalism has appeared in Al Jazeera, TruthOut, and The Margins, and her fiction has appeared in Granta. She holds an MFA from Columbia University, where she studied under Victor LaValle.
 
Connect with Kanya:
https://twitter.com/kanyadalmeida
https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/russell-shoatz/i-am-maroon/9781645030492/?lens=bold-type-books
 
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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

148. Shedding False Identities and Being Our Own Best Champion featuring Sari Botton

Sari Botton joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about editing the magazines Adventures in Journalism, Memoir Land, and Oldster, her experience publishing on Substack, editing vs. generating material, putting ourselves in our story, wrestling with what to share, creating safe boundaries, growing into the truest version of ourselves, vomit drafts, leaving the perfectionist out of the room, turning death on its head, shedding false identities, being our own best champion, and her mid-life coming of age memoir in episodes And You May Find Yourself...Confessions of a Late-Blooming Gen-X Weirdo.
 
Also in this episode: 
-lowering standards for an early draft
-finding time for our own writing
-giving ourselves downtime to switch gears
 
Books mentioned in this episode:
-Traveling Mercies by Anne Lamott
-Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott
-Bodywork by Melissa Febos
-The Art of Memoir by Mary Karr
-All books by Abigail Thomas
 
Sari’s audibook is available here: https://www.audible.com/pd/And-You-May-Find-Yourself-Audiobook/B0DVMR3V2M
 
Sari Botton's memoir in essays, And You May Find Yourself...Confessions of a Late-Blooming Gen-X Weirdo, was chosen by Poets & Writers magazine for the 2022 edition of its annual "5 Over 50" feature. An essay from it received notable mention in The Best American Essays 2023, edited by Vivian Gornick. For five years, she was the Essays Editor at Longreads. She edited the bestselling anthologies Goodbye to All That: Writers on Loving and Leaving NewYork and Never Can Say Goodbye: Writers on Their Unshakable Love for New York. She publishes Oldster Magazine, Memoir Land, and Adventures in Journalism. She was the Writer in Residence in the creative writing department at SUNY New Paltz for Spring, 2023. 
 
Connect with Sari:
http://saribotton.com
https://www.facebook.com/sari.botton/
https://www.instagram.com/saribotton/
https://bsky.app/profile/saribotton.bsky.social
http://oldster.substack.com
http://memoirland.substack.com
http://adventuresinjournalism.substack.com
https://www.audible.com/pd/And-You-May-Find-Yourself-Audiobook/B0DVMR3V2M
https://bookshop.org/p/books/and-you-may-find-yourself-sari-botton/18519104
https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/sari-botton/goodbye-to-all-that-revised-edition/9781541675681/?lens=seal-press
https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Never-Can-Say-Goodbye/Sari-Botton/9781476784403
–
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

147. Writing About Your Neurodiverse (ex)Partner featuring Eleanor Vincent

Eleanor Vincent joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about trying to save her challenging high conflict marriage, autism in adults and Cassandra Syndrome, what to leave out of a book, self-revelation and honest grappling, the toll of masking autism, emotional abuse, careful framing of those we write about, using a sensitivity reader, support groups for neurodiverse spouses, our narrating personas, writing fearless first drafts, disguising identities and biographical details to protect those we write about, and her new memoir Disconnected: Portrait of a Neurodiverse Marriage.
 
Ronit’s upcoming memoir course: https://www.pce.uw.edu/courses/memoir-writing-finding-your-story
 
Also in this episode:
-complex trauma
-hyperfocus
-reading unceasingly
 
Books mentioned in this episode:
-The Situation and the Story by Vivian Gornick
-Blow Your House Down by Gina Frangello
-You Could Make This Place Beautiful by Maggie Smith
-This American Ex-Wife by Liz Lenz
-Liars by Sarah Manguso
-Kristin Lavransdatter by Sigrid Undset 
-22 Things a Woman Must Know If She Loves a Man with Asperger’s Syndrome by Rudy Simone 
-Books by Anne Patchett
 
Eleanor Vincent’s new memoir Disconnected: Portrait of a Neurodiverse Marriage is forthcoming from Vine Leaves Press. It tells the story of her gradual discovery that her husband was on the autism spectrum, and of how she tried to save a challenging high-conflict marriage.
Her previous memoir, Swimming with Maya: A Mother’s Story (Dream of Things, 2013) has twice been on the New York Times bestseller list and was nominated for the Independent Publisher of the Year award. Her essays have appeared in anthologies by Creative Nonfiction and This I Believe, the literary magazines 580 Split and Dorothy Parker’s Ashes, as well as shorter pieces in the San Francisco Chronicle, the Sacramento Bee, and Generations Today.
She has an MFA in creative writing from Mills College and is a member of the San Francisco Writers Grotto, Left Margin Lit, and the Author’s Guild. She has taught creative nonfiction seminars at Mills College as a visiting writer and been awarded residencies at Hedgebrook, the Vermont Studio Center, and Writing Between the Vines. She lives in Walnut Creek, California.
Connect with Eleanor:
Website: https://www.eleanorvincent.com/
Book: https://vineleavespress.myshopify.com/products/disconnected-portrait-of-a-neurodiverse-marriage-by-eleanor-vincent
X: https://x.com/eleanorpvincent
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/eleanor.vincent/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/eleanor.vincent/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/eleanorpvincent/
Writing the real world Substack: https://eleanorvincent.substack.com/
 
–
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

146. Permission to Be Ourselves featuring Minelle Mahtani

Minelle Mahtani joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about the grief, love, loss, and repair in losing her mother while finding her voice, noncolonial ways of thinking about stories, writing about her Indian, Iranian, and Canadian identities, what the sound of our voice is worth, paying attention to what we pay attention to, permission to be ourselves, having fun while trying to write precisely about grief, emotional trauma commonalities, her Canadian radio show Sense of Place, how kind we can bear to be to ourselves, listening as a political act, and her new memoir May it Have a Happy Ending. 
 
Ronit’s upcoming 10-week online memoir course: https://www.pce.uw.edu/courses/memoir-writing-finding-your-story
 
Also in this episode:
-sibling approaches to grief and losing parents
-cocooning
-feminist geography
 
Books mentioned in this episode:
Code Noir by Canisia Lubrin 
The Story Game by Shze-Hui Tjoa
Books by Julietta Singh
 
Minelle Mahtani is a Muslim Iranian/Indian/Canadian writer, former TV producer and radio host who teaches at University of British Columbia. Her memoir, “May It Have a Happy Ending” has been called a “magnificent and stunning debut…a gorgeous prism of stories.” She has been nominated for two national magazine awards and won a gold medal for best personal essay in th Digital Publishing Awards. She is the author of the book “Mixed Race Amnesia: Resisting the Romanticization of Multiraciality.” Her work has appeared in Geist, Maisonneuve and is forthcoming in Southeast Review. 
 
Connect with Minelle:
Website: www.minellemahtani.com
X: https://x.com/mminelle
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/minellewrites
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/minelle.mahtani/
–
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

145. Limitation as an Engine for Creativity featuring 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, the stigma around mental illness, the pain of abstraction and the concrete world, his podcast The Cryptonaturalist, privileging enthusiasm over fact, internal landscapes, the paradox of choice, large social media followings, the magic of the natural world around us, limitation as the engine for creativity, and his new memoir Something in the Woods Loves You.
 
Also in this episode:
-fantastical nature
-toxic masculinity
-a sense of service
 
More about Ronit’s UW Writing Class, MEMOIR WRITING: FINDING YOUR STORY: https://www.pce.uw.edu/courses/memoir-writing-finding-your-story
 
Books mentioned in this episode:
On Writing by Stephen King
Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer
Area X by Jeff VanderMeer
 
JAROD K. ANDERSON is a writer, poet, and creator of The CryptoNaturalist podcast -a scripted show about real adoration for fictional wildlife. HIs new book is: SOMETHING IN THE WOODS LOVES YOU. He has built a large audience of social media followers and podcast listeners with his vibrant appreciations of nature. His previous 3 books are all best-sellers: Field Guide to the Haunted Forest, Love Notes from the Hollow Tree, and Leaf Litter. He lives in Ohio between a forest and a cemetery. 
Connect with Jarod:
https://www.jarodkanderson.com/
https://www.instagram.com/cryptonaturalist/
https://x.com/CryptoNature
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCBXHP2Yy5cJwg0tR9VfP8Xw
https://www.facebook.com/JarodKAnderson/
 
–
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

144. Theme as Blueprint for Structure featuring Sarah Gormley

Sarah Gormley joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about unpacking the baggage of self-doubt and imposter syndrome and moving toward self-love, shaping our memoirs into answers to the questions we have about our life, prioritizing pieces and elements of our story that help show readers transformation, the messiness of mother-daughter relationships, including partners and family in our memoir narratives, cutting big chunks of our manuscripts out, themes as blueprints for our structure, trusting our body when we land somewhere right, realizing what our book is actually about, and her new memoir The Order of Things.
 
Also in this episode:
-enjoying the magic of the written word 
-writing as a reader
-including scenes from therapy in our memoirs
 
Books mentioned in this episode: 
While You Were Out by Meg Kissinger
Group by Christie Tate
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by David Eggers
The Tender Bar by J.R. Moehringer
 
Sarah Gormley is a writer and art gallery owner living in Columbus, Ohio. Her undergraduate degree from DePauw University reinforced an early love for literature and writing, while the heavy sprinkling of liberal-arts fairy dust taught her how to analyze and articulate a clear point of view. She rounded out this foundation with concentrations in marketing and operations from the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business.
Her marketing career included work with several global brands, including IMAX, Martha Stewart, Girl Scouts of the USA, and Adobe. Gormley was honored as one of 2015’s Forty Women to Watch over 40, and she has been featured in Forbes and the CMO Club. In June 2019, she was invited to deliver the class address at her DePauw University class reunion and regrets not having her hair blown out. Today, Gormley owns a contemporary art gallery, Sarah Gormley Gallery (SGG), in downtown Columbus, Ohio. 
 
Connect with Sarah:
Website: www.sarahgormley.com
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/scgormley/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/sarah.gormley.3726/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gormleysarah/
–
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

143. Attention, Selectivity, and Deep Curiosity featuring Paula Whyman

Paula Whyman joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about getting out of our comfort zone,  her attempt to restore native meadows in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains, becoming obsessed with subjects and deep diving, writing about science and nature, controlling and selecting details for impact, being attentive to what readers need, writing tangentially, the need for deadlines, when your editor calls you a meanderer, leaning into exploration and not shutting ourselves down, allowing our writing to reflect the way our minds work, and her new memoir Bad Naturalist.
 
Also in this episode:
-jumping from fiction to nonfiction
-talking with experts
-reading work aloud
 
Books mentioned in this episode:
The Leaving Season by Kelly McMasters
H is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald
Late Migrations by Margaret Renkl
A Buzz in the Meadow by Dave Goulson
The Boys of My Youth by Jo Ann Beard
The Sweet Life in Paris by David Lebovitz
The Cost of Living by Deborah Levy 
Things I Don’t Want to Know by Deborah Levy 
Real Estate by Deborah Levy 
 
Paula Whyman’s new book, Bad Naturalist: One Woman’s Ecological Education on a Wild Virginia Mountaintop, is forthcoming from Timber Press/Hachette Book Group in January 2025. It’s a blend of memoir, natural history, and conservation science, a chronicle of her attempts to restore retired farmland to natural habitat and what she discovered along the way. Her first book, the linked short story collection You May See a Stranger, won praise from The New Yorker and a starred review in Publishers Weekly, and won the Towson Prize for Literature. Her stories have appeared in journals including McSweeney’s Quarterly, Virginia Quarterly Review, Ploughshares, The Hudson Review, and The Southampton Review. Her fiction was selected for the anthology Writes of Passage: Coming-of-Age Stories and Memoirs from The Hudson Review. Her nonfiction has been featured on NPR, and in the Washington Post, The American Scholar, and The Rumpus. She is co-founder and editor in chief of the literary journal Scoundrel Time.
 
Whyman has taught in writers-in-schools programs through the Pen/Faulkner Foundation in Washington, DC, and the Hudson Review in Harlem and the Bronx, New York. Her fiction is part of the curriculum at The Young Women’s Leadership School in Harlem.
 
Whyman’s work has been supported by fellowships from MacDowell, Yaddo, The Studios of Key West, and VCCA. She was a Tennessee Williams Scholar in Fiction at the Sewanee Writers Conference. She served two terms as Vice President of the MacDowell Fellows Executive Committee.
 
Whyman is the recipient of grants from the Maryland State Arts Council (MSAC) and the Arts and Humanities Council of Montgomery County. She was awarded an MSAC Creativity Grant and 2023 and 2024 Oak Spring Garden Foundation residencies and grants to support her work on Bad Naturalist. 
Connect with Paula:
Website: paulawhyman.com
Instagram: @paulawhymanauthor
Bluesky: @paulawhym
 Mastodon: @paulawhyman@writing.exchange 
–
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

142. So Woven It’s Whole: Complexly Braiding Science and Memoir featuring Eiren Caffall

Eiren Caffall joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about her generational experience of loss, coming out of the shadows about having an ill body, how polycystic kidney disease (PKD) has shaped her and her family’s life, writing about the collapse of ecosystems in the Atlantic ocean, seamlessly weaving in narrative, historical, lyrical, scientific, and metaphorical threads, allowing our children to weigh in on stories that involve them, feeling all the places we’re still wounded, depicting mother-daughter relationships with complexity, the umpteenth draft, form as key, holding two things in mind at once, reframing and understanding family dynamics, and her new memoir The Mourner’s Bestiary.
 
Also in this episode:
-remembering wonder and beauty in the face of destruction 
-idosyncratic craft structures 
-where we are in our stories
 
Books mentioned in this episode:
-Shapes of Native Nonfiction Edited by Elissa Washuta and Theresa Warbuton
-Meander Spiral Explode: Design and Pattern in Narrative by Jane Allison
-Landmarks by Robert Mcfarlane
 
Eiren Caffall is a writer and musician. Her award-winning memoir, The Mourner’s Bestiary, will be published by Row House Publishing in October 2024. Her novel, All the Water in the World will be published by Saint Martin’s Press in 2025. An excerpt of her memoir will appear in Elementals: Volume IV. Fire forthcoming in 2024 from The Center for Humans and Nature. Her work on loss and nature, oceans and extinction has appeared in Guernica, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Literary Hub, Al Jazeera, The Rumpus, and three record albums. She received a Whiting Foundation Creative Nonfiction Grant in 2023 for The Mourner’s Bestiary, a Social Justice News Nexus fellowship in environmental journalism at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism, and a Frontline: Environmental Reportage residency at the Banff Centre for the Arts. She has been awarded residencies at Millay Colony for the Arts, MacDowell Colony (waitlisted), Hedgebrook, and Ragdale. She has guest lectured at UCLA, University of Chicago, and other universities across America, taught creative writing for The Chicago Humanities Festival, taught a memoir body and place week-long masterclass for Story Studio in Chicago, and mentored graduate students at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her work has been adapted into the award-winning short film Becoming Ocean, which screened at film festivals across the United States and in Amsterdam and Morocco.
 
Connect with Eiren:
Website: www.eirencaffall.com
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/eirencaffall/
X: www.x.com/eirencaffall
Substack: https://eirencaffall.substack.com
Ronit’s Upcoming Online 10-week Memoir Course with the University of Washington:
https://www.pce.uw.edu/courses/memoir-writing-finding-your-story
 
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

141. Tapping Into Our Bodies and Our Subconscious featuring Nadia Colburn

Nadia Colburn joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about tuning into our bodies to discover what we need to say, creating different cultural conversations about surviving trauma, tapping into our subconscious, coming out of secrets, how poetry can help us access material, not needing to share work until we’re ready, what we learn from being in community with other writers, and her signature online course Align Your Story for Women.
 
Also in this episode:
-mitigating shame 
-how our bodies remember
-meditation and dreamwork 
 
Books mentioned in this episode:
-The Diary of Anne Frank by Anne Frank
-The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel van der Kolk 
-Trauma and Recovery by Judith Lewis Herman
-Educated by Tara Westover
-Nothing Holds Back the Night by Delphine de Vigan 
-The work of Annie Ernaux
 
Nadia Colburn is the author of the poetry books "I Say the Sky" and "The High Shelf", and her poetry and prose have appeared in more than eighty publications, including The New Yorker, American Poetry Review, The Kenyon Review, Spirituality & Health, Lion's Roar, Los Angeles Review of Books, and The Yale Review. She holds a Ph.D. in English from Columbia University, is a yoga teacher and serious student of Thich Nhat Hanh and is the founder of Align Your Story Writing School, which brings traditional literary and creative writing studies together with mindfulness, embodied practices, and social and environmental engagement. The school has a community of over 30,000 mindful writers. Nadia is passionate about helping her students reclaim their stories, come out of secrets, listen to their bodies, and embrace and step into their full creative voices, on and off the page. Nadia lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with her husband and two children. She is currently at work on a full-length memoir on pregnancy and early motherhood. Find her at nadiacolburn.com, where she offers meditations and free resources for writers.
Connect with Nadia:
Website: https://nadiacolburn.com/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/alignyourstory
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/nadia.colburn/
Free 5-Day Meditation & Writing Challenge: https://nadiacolburn.com/free-mindful-writing-challenge/
Free Resource Library for Writers: https://nadiacolburn.com/free-resources/
"I Say the Sky" on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Say-Sky-Poems-Contemporary-Poetry/dp/081319864X
"I Say the Sky" from Kentucky Press: https://www.kentuckypress.com/9780813198637/i-say-the-sky/
7-Day "I Say the Sky" Companion Meditation and Writing Challenge (free with book order -- just input book order number): https://nadiacolburn.com/7-day-new-year-practice/
Align Your Story for Women (Nadia's signature online course): https://nadiacolburn.com/align-your-story/
 
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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