Let’s Talk Memoir

Amy Irvine joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about maternal lineage and what gets handed down to us, exploring the impact of our women ancestors, feeling trapped by motherhood, reckoning with and disrupting deep cultural conditioning, living a remote life and how much of that world is not good for women, coping with undiagnosed postpartum depression, making meaning without appropriating other cultures, carrying stories of harm in our bodies, fearing we’ve passed trauma down to our children, writing the natural world, capturing wildness, rewilding ourselves, widening the lens on our story, and her new memoir Almost Animal: A Memoir of Motherhood, Wildness, and the American West.

Also in this episode:

-plural marriage

-reframing history

-feeling stalked by Mormon ancestors

Books mentioned in this episode:

-What My Bones Know by Stephanie Foo

-Soil: The Story of a Black Mother’s Garden by Camille Dungy

-The Bear River Massacre: A Shoshone History by Darren Parry

-In the Eye of the Wild by Natsassja Martin

Amy Irvine is a sixth-generation Utahn who descends from the first Mormons to occupy the West. Her memoir Trespass: Living at the Edge of the Promised Land received the Orion Book Award and the Colorado Book Award. Her second book, Desert Cabal: A New Season in the Wilderness, is a feminist response to Edward Abbey’s Desert Solitaire, and during lockdown, Pam Houston and Irvine coauthored the epistolary Air Mail: Letters of Politics, Pandemics, and Place. Irvine’s essays have appeared in both The Best American Science & Nature Writing and The Best American Food Writing, as well as Orion, Outside, High Country News, Lit Hub, and Backpacker. She lives and writes on a remote mesa in southwest Colorado. Her memoir, ALMOST ANIMAL: MOTHERHOOD, WILDNESS AND THE AMERICAN WEST will be released on November 10th by Spiegel & Grau.

Connect with Amy:
Website: https://www.amyirvine.com/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/amy.irvine.90295

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/junipergirl44/

Get the book: https://bookshop.org/p/books/almost-animal-a-memoir-of-motherhood-wildness-and-the-american-west-amy-irvine/b60f8eb9877eec31?ean=9781966302384

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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

Karson Brown joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about crossing the Atlantic ocean on a 34-foot sailboat from Portugal when she was 29 years old, the 13 years it took to put her story into book form, the learning process of becoming a writer, offering a little more for readers and less for ourselves, staying focused on our throughline and honoring what memoir is, not sacrificing and abandoning our intuition, getting offers from 3 indie publishers, discovering how to slow down and sit with ourselves during the writing process, and her new memoir 48 Days to Barbados.

Also in this episode:

- not giving up

- memoir as opposed to journaling

- when our tactic becomes silence

Books mentioned in this episode:

Bird by Bird by Anne Lammott

West with the Night by Beryl Markham

The Bean Trees Barbara Kingsolver

Books by Joyce Maynard

Books by Alexandra Fuller

Books by Joan Didion

Karson Brown grew up sailing and living aboard boats in the Pacific Northwest. She turned twenty-one on a fishing vessel in the Bering Sea and crossed the Atlantic Ocean before turning thirty. Karson raised her two children along the shores of Vashon Island surrounded by a menagerie of critters. She is a writer, photographer, artist, and lifelong devotee of water. Karson is an alumna of Joyce Maynards, “Write By The Lake Workshop,” in Guatemala. She has four stories included in the Vine Leaves Press 50 Give or Take anthologies. She currently resides in the Pacific Northwest. 48 Days to Barbados is her debut memoir and will be released by Red Fern Press October 20, 2026.

Connect with Karson:

Website: http://karsonbrownarts.com

Instagram @ekarsonbrown

Facebook: Karson Brown

TikTok: @karsonbrown71

Purchase Book:

https://bookshop.org/beta-search?bkshp-astro=t&keywords=48+days+to+Barbados

– 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

Jo-Anne Berelowitz joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about cultural displacement and longing for home, exploring the experience of Jews in South Africa, struggling with heritage, having origins in a country drawn along racist lines, feeling you need to be exportable to survive, dislodging a parent from a pedestal, establishing dynamics and patterns early in a memoir, developing the skills to tell an extended narrative, writing about ourselves in the third person, diving into a history she had once suppressed, and her new memoir Somewhere I Belong: A Story of Country, Family, Home, and Jewish Identity.

Also in this episode:

- going with an independent publisher

- trying to leave siblings out of a memoir

- prejudice in the publishing world about Jewish writers

Books mentioned in this episode:

Middlemarch by George Eliot

Daniel Deronda by Geroge Eliot

Zakhor by Yosef Yerushalmi

Reading Writing and Leaving Home by Lynn Freed

Jo-Anne Berelowitz is a writer and art historian whose work explores identity, family, cultural displacement, and longing for home. Born and raised in Durban, South Africa, she emigrated to California in 1977, earned her MA in Art History from Stanford University, her PhD from the University of California at Los Angeles, and her MFA in Creative Writing with an emphasis on nonfiction from the Rainier Writing Workshop. She was, for many years, senior art historian at San Diego State University. Her art history essays have appeared in Genders, Society and Space, The Oxford Art Journal, The Journal of Modern Jewish Studies, The Canadian Journal of Comparative Literature, and elsewhere. In 2018, she was awarded the Wabash Prize for Literary Nonfiction. She now resides in Austin, Texas.

Connect with Jo-Ann:

Website: https://www.joanneberelowitz.com

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/joanne_berelowitz/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/jberelow

– 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

Matt Fogelson joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about coming to grips with the death of his father, the struggle to not pass down the emotional distance he grew up with to his own son, grabbing emotions from scenes and seeing what germinates, finding the forward momentum and narrative drive for our memoirs, when clarity comes later, putting a parent on a pedestal, recognizing our behavior and changing the dynamic, trying to be emotionally present when we’re physically present, living without self-imposed constraints, searching for universal kernels in our work, using core themes as guideposts and touchstones, and his new memoir Restrung: Fatherhood in a Different Key.

Also mentioned in this episode:
- writing during the pandemic
- fatherhood and emotional intimacy
- creating a memoir from a collection of essays

Books mentioned in this episode:
- Angelea’s Ashes by Frank McCourt
- Wild by Cheryl Strayed
- Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls
- The Liars Club by Mary Karr
- Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry

Matt Fogelson is the author of the memoir Restrung: Fatherhood in a Different Key. His work has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, and TIME. He writes the Substack newsletter Fine Tuning, about music, memory, and parenting.

Connect with Matt:
Website: https://www.mattfogelson.com/

Substack: https://mattfogelson.substack.com/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/mattfogelson/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/matt-fogelson-94200895/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/finetuningfan

– 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

Kate Jackson joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about discovering the family you were raised in was not what you thought, mourning the life we didn’t get a chance to live, writing about the missing, if wholeness is possible, longing for family, how unknowing can be bewildering and shame inducing, when our identity flips, genetic privilege, untangling threads, writing like no one is reading, facing repercussions for telling our story, what we have permission to say, feeling we can own our story, and her new collection of 28 literary essays by adoptees, donor-conceived people, others who’ve learned about misattributed parentage Relative Strangers: Inheritance, Identity, and the Meaning of Kinship.

October 2026 book events for Relative Strangers: https://bkjacksonwriter.com/events/

Also in this episode:

-untangling threads

-when agents ghost

-simultaneously working on two projects

Books mentioned in this episode:

-On Writing by Stephen King

-Still Writing by Dani Shapiro

-Thinking About Memoir by Abigail Thomas

-Permission by Elissa Altmen

-Mothers of Sparta by Dawn Davies

-This Boys Life by Tobias Flynn

-And When Did You Last See Your Father by Blake Morrison

-Nick Flynn’s memoirs

B.K. (Kate) Jackson is an author; a developmental editor and certified book coach; and a journalist with bylines in HuffPost, The Los Angeles Times, The Sun, SurvivorLit, Whale Road Review, Hippocampus Magazine, WIRED, and more. She earned a BA and an MA from UCLA. Kate is the founder and editor of Severance (severancemag.com)—a magazine and community for adoptees and individuals who’ve discovered misattributed parentage. She’s the editor of the anthology Relative Strangers: Inheritance, Identity, and the Meaning of Kinship, and she's revising a memoir about maternal abandonment and family secrets. She lives in Milford, Pennsylvania. Find her at www.bkjacksonwriter.com; creativelyadhd.substack.com; and http://halfasorrow.substack.com.

Connect with Kate:

Website: http://www.bkjacksonwriter.com

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/b.k.jackson/

X: https://x.com/jaxbkjax

Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/bkjackson.bsky.social

Threads: https://www.threads.com/@b.k.jackson

Substack: https://substack.com/@bkjackson877028

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/kate.b.jackson/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/b-k-kate-jackson-50a6571b0/

Purchase Book:

http://www.bkjacksonwriter.com/book

– 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

Suzanne Roberts joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about why writing prompts are so powerful, images that haunt us, avoiding revenge prose, revising to create a rounded character, writing our truth, getting better at dialogue, how to navigate AI, the joy of creating something from start to finish, writing about family and friends, writing about our bodies, building writing community, how reading time is writing time, enjoying exploration, essay as immediate gratification while writing memoir, making stories from shame, and her new multi-genre craft book divided by theme 52 Writing Prompts: Inspiration for Writers.

Suzanne’s first Let’s Talk Memoir interview:

https://ronitplank.com/2023/02/28/lets-talk-memoir-season-2-episode-16-ft-suzanne-roberts/

Camille Dungy’s Let’s Talk Memoir interview: https://ronitplank.com/2023/05/02/lets-talk-memoir-episode-41-ft-camille-t-dungy/

Also in this episode:

-reading broadly and deeply

-memoir as a gift to the universe

-writing for hands and hearts you cannot see

Books mentioned in this episode:

- The Art of Death by Edwidge Danticat

- The Art of Description by Mark Doty

- The Art of Time in Memoir by Sven Birkerts

- Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott

- Imaginative Writing: The Elements of Craft by Janet Burroway

- The Situation and the Story by Vivian Gornick

- The Triggering Town by Richard Hugo

- I Would Die if I Were You by Emily Rapp Black

- The Art of Memoir by Mary Karr

- Big Magic by Elizabeth Gilbert

- Tell it Slant by Brenda Miller

- Negotiating with the Dead: A Writer on Writing by Margaret Atwood

- The Writing Life by Annie Dillard

Suzanne Roberts is the author of the essay collection Animal Bodies: On Death, Desire, and Other Difficulties, the memoir-in-essays Bad Tourist: Misadventures in Love and Travel, and the memoir Almost Somewhere: Twenty-Eight Days on the John Muir Trail, four full-length poetry collections, and a creative writing craft book: 52 Writing Prompts: Inspiration for the Creative Writer (October 2026, The University of Nebraska Press). Named “The Next Great Travel Writer” by National Geographic’s Traveler, Suzanne’s work has been listed as notable in Best American Essays and included in The Best Women’s Travel Writing. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, CNN, National Geographic Traveler, Ploughshares, Creative Nonfiction, Brevity, The Rumpus, The Fourth Genre, and elsewhere. She holds a doctorate in literature and the environment from the University of Nevada-Reno and lives in South Lake Tahoe, California. More information may be found on her website: http://www.suzanneroberts.net

Website: http://www.suzanneroberts.net

IG: @suzanneroberts28

X: suzannneroberts

FB: https://www.facebook.com/suzanne.roberts.798/

BSky: @suzanneroberts

Here are the links Suzanne’s books:

https://www.nebraskapress.unl.edu/nebraska/9781496239563/52-writing-prompts/

https://www.nebraskapress.unl.edu/nebraska/9781496231024/animal-bodies/

https://www.nebraskapress.unl.edu/bison-books/9781496236920/almost-somewhere/

https://www.nebraskapress.unl.edu/nebraska/9781496222848/bad-tourist/

– 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

Jamie Leigh Lorente joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about not getting to know her biological father who emigrated from Cuba during the Cold War from Cuba as an unaccompanied minor until the end of his life, how we learn to understand and accept one another despite our cultural differences, evolving as a writer and human as we write memoir, being able to comfort and repair the different versions of ourselves, coming of age and being safe, experimenting with alternating points of view to increase compassion and empathy, discovering a softening toward men, feeling too vulnerable to share a story, the existential fear of exile from our communities, loving each other despite our conflicts, the memoir writing process allowing us to get closer to loved ones, returning to and forgiving our authentic selves, and her new memoir My Three Fathers.

Also in this episode:

-complex trauma

-Jungian empty chair exercise

-mentally preparing to let a story out into the world

Books mentioned in this episode:

Clam Down by Anelise Chen

Family Trouble: Memoirists on the Hazards and Rewards of Revealing Family edited by Joy Castro

Writing Down the Bones by Natalie Goldberg

Her by Christa Parravani

Jamie Leigh Lorente is a Cuban-American writer, veteran, and advocate. She writes to reclaim the body and reframe the narrative of survival. Her work appears in My Teeth Don’t Chew on Shrapnel, the Anthology of Veterans Writing, Afterwords: The Real Me, and Poetic Prosthesis: Trauma and Language in Contemporary Veterans’ Writing (Edinburgh University Press, 2022). She teaches writing at San Francisco Film School and facilitates veteran writing workshops. Her short documentary, My Body Is explores the healing power of poetry. https://vimeo.com/1013310340?share=copy

Connect with Jamie:

Website: www.jamieleighlorente.com. (not live yet)

Instagram: jamie_leigh_lorente

Substack: Jamie Leigh Lorente @jamieleighlorente

– 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

Deborah Derrickson Kossmann joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about how complicated family dynamics culminated in her mother’s severe hoarding disorder, grieving what you didn’t get as a child, going back to rescue the past, sharing family secrets, recognizing shame in loved ones, telling a story in a fair way, how anger is a shortcut, waiting until someone has passed to write about them, how editing makes us better writers, recognizing when there is an emotional piece missing, wanting a memoir to read propulsively, keeping narrative arc in mine, and her memoir LOST FOUND KEPT.

Also in this episode:

-trying to be fair and accurate

-thinking about your book as a reader

-the important work of publishing and promotion

Books mentioned in this episode:

-The Memory Police by Yoko Ogawa

-Writers and Lovers by Lily King

Deborah Derrickson Kossmann won Trio House Press's inaugural 2023 Aurora Polaris Creative Nonfiction Award for LOST FOUND KEPT: A MEMOIR (January 2025). Book Pages named it one of the Best Memoirs of 2025. She is currently working on a new book COMPLICATIONS OF CAPTIVITY.

Deb’s humorous essays have appeared several times as “Modern Love” columns in The New York Times and her story about her relationship with the world’s oldest captive gorilla appeared in the “Opinionator” section of that newspaper. Her poetry, essays and feature articles have been published in Bellevue Literary Review, Nashville Review, Memoir Monday, Rhino, Tiferet, Psychotherapy Networker, and PSYCHE, to name a few. She was the winner of the Short Memoir Competition at the Philadelphia First Person Arts Festival and has received a Poetry Fellowship from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts.

A clinical psychologist in private practice, she lives in Havertown with her husband and Sofia Carmela, a cat with a whole lot of “tortitude.”

Connect with Deborah:

Website: http://lostfoundkept.com

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/drdebkossmann/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/people/Deb-Derrickson-Kossmann/61562692720716/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/deb.derricksonkossmann

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/deb_derrickson_kossmann/

Substack: https://debderricksonkossmann.substack.com/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/drdebkossmann/

– 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

Deborah Sosin joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about writing 70 micro memoirs of 70 words each to mark her 70th birthday, her love of compression and concision, working in themes, sitting with the memory of a scene and understanding its emotional truth, being clear on your quest as a memoirist, growing up in an overly close knit family, emotional and physical intrusion, forging a separate self, having no desire to write a memoir about her family, playing with constraints and form, feeling freedom to break the rules, and her new memoir Escape Velocity: How One 70-Year-Old Push-Pulled Her Way Out of Her Too-Much-Not-Enough Family.

Also in this episode:

-distilling a scene

-working in themes

-the push-pull of the writing process

Books mentioned in this episode:

Place Envy: Essays in Search of Orientation by Michael Lowenthal

The Situation and the Story by Vivian Gornick

Safekeeping by Abigail Thomas

Three Dog Life by Abigail Thomas

What Comes Next and How to Like It by Abigail Thomas

Still Life at Eighty by Abigail Thomas

Heating and Cooling by Beth Ann Fennelly

The Irish Goodbye by Beth Ann Fennelly

Allegiance by Darien Hsu Gee

Deborah Sosin is a writer, editor, psychotherapist, and GrubStreet instructor. Her essays have appeared in the New York Times, Boston Globe Magazine, Salon, Cognoscenti, Brevity Blog, Oldster Magazine, Short Reads, The Manifest-Station, two anthologies, and numerous other publications. She is a reader for In Short: A Journal of Flash Nonfiction. Debbie is the author of Escape Velocity: How One 70-Year-Old Push-Pulled Her Way Out Her Too-Much-Not-Enough Family (70 Micro-Memoirs, 70 Words Each). She also authored the picture book Charlotte and the Quiet Place, which won a Gold INDIEFAB and Silver IPPY award; and a clinical workbook, Sober Starting Today. Debbie has an MFA from Lesley University and an MSW from Smith College School for Social Work. She lives outside of Boston. More at: www.deborahsosin.com and Write It Like It Is Substack.

Connect with Deborah:

Write It Like It Is Substack: https://deborahs27.substack.com/

Website: http://www.deborahsosin.com

Purchase book directly:

https://shop.ingramspark.com/b/084?params=RyWUrsfZlvtY9WuizGbq9ER8EtLO1eq9Kx4SC4T0pGE

Darien Gee’s Substack: https://substack.com/@dariengee

– 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

Kim Murphy joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about unburdening herself from decades of shame, her often absent and unpredictable mother, what we owe or don’t owe our parents at the end of their lives, gaining a level of remove from the character versions of ourselves, the push and pull of dependence and disappointment, hoping our parents will be different, getting raw and vulnerable on the page, molding lived experience into a narrative arc, depicting the younger versions of ourselves, the motivation and accountability of a writing partner, making art from a messy childhood, working with vulnerable and difficult material, creating her own imprint and becoming an indie author, and her new memoir Unmothered: A Memoir of Parental Neglect and the Search for Love and Belonging.

Ronit's upcoming workshop: Writing Dynamic Memoir: From Lived Experience to Gripping Story https://www.lmcmurtrylitcenter.org/workshops/writing-dynamic-memoir-from-lived-experience-to-gripping-story

Also in this episode:

- the divided self

- writing with metaphor

- having your family’s blessing

Books mentioned in this episode:

The Memoir Project by Marian Roach Smith

Deep Memoir by Jennifer Selig

Kim Murphy is the author of Unmothered, a memoir that explores the long shadow of maternal absence, the quiet work of self-parenting, and the ways women learn to survive--and eventually soften--without the care they needed. Her writing traces the intersections of trauma, identity, resilience, and healing, with particular attention to the enduring impact of childhood emotional neglect and abuse.

A longtime writer and communications strategist, Kim spent more than three decades as an independent contractor crafting narratives for government agencies, nonprofits, and Fortune 500 organizations, translating complex material into clear, easy-to-understand content.

She is the author of The Vietnam Veterans Memorial: 25 Years of Healing and Educating and co-author of The Best Friends' Guide to Getting Fit. Her work has also appeared in Ritz-Carlton Magazine.

When she's not writing or hanging out with her husband, Kim plays Mahjong, pulls weeds from her flower garden, and walks the beach while listening to podcasts and audiobooks.

Connect with Kim:

Website: https://kestrelhousepress.com/

On Instagram: @kma_copy

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kim-murphy-593b01/

Purchase Book:

https://books.by/kestrelhousepress

– 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

Jason Allen joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about growing up working poor on Eastern Long Island with an alcoholic father, the threat of different types of violence, his father’s quickness to anger, trying to get sober, the difficulty of committing to recovery, his brother’s hard drug addiction, rethinking a memoir a million times, finding a narrative focus, the querying process, how writing memoir can feel cathartic, knowing what to cut and what to keep in our manuscripts, balancing our vision of what we know to be true with what other people say about our work, finding hope, and his new memoir Boys Without Fathers.

Ronit's upcoming workshop: Writing Dynamic Memoir: From Lived Experience to Gripping Story https://www.lmcmurtrylitcenter.org/workshops/writing-dynamic-memoir-from-lived-experience-to-gripping-story

Also in this episode:

-writing and publishing in different genres

-choosing a small indie press for our work

-incorporating stand-alone pieces into memoir

Books mentioned in this episode:

The Glass Castle by Jeanette Walls

The Liar’s Club by Mary Karr

The Art of Memoir by Mary Karr

Wild by Cheryl Strayed

Jason Allen writes fiction, creative nonfiction, and poetry. For his novel, The East End, Bonnie Jo Campbell provided the cover blurb: “Every page is filled with wise insights about social class and the human heart.” Jason has since been nominated for an Edgar Award and the Georgia Author of the Year Award, and recently completed his memoir, Boys Without Fathers, which will be released September 1st, 2026. His poetry collection, A Meditation on Fire, is now with Black Lawrence Press, and he has published essays with Salon, Literary Hub, and The Strand Magazine. Jason teaches creative writing in the MFA program at Wichita State University and lives in Kansas with his sweet rescue dog, Luna.

Website: https://www.jasonallenauthor.com/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/jason.allen.908132/

Instagram: Jason_Allen_Books

Preorder link for Boys Without Fathers:

https://square.link/u/URHWk0x0

Dr. Kara Zivin joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about maternal mental health and her own her mental health crisis during pregnancy and postpartum, how she became a patient and professor in the same health system, navigating shame and guilt around sharing a personal story, taking risks with our professional life, incorporating medical records and journal entries into a memoir narrative, grounding memoir in our own story, supporting women and families, the relief that comes from sharing the hard thing, increasing awareness and helping women to feel less alone, and her new memoir Persevered: A Maternal Mental Health Memoir.

Ronit's upcoming workshop: Writing Dynamic Memoir: From Lived Experience to Gripping Story https://www.lmcmurtrylitcenter.org/workshops/writing-dynamic-memoir-from-lived-experience-to-gripping-story

Also in this episode:
- claiming our stories
- letting go of an initial structure
- maternal mental health and mortality

Books mentioned in this episode:
- The Two Kinds of Decay by Sarah Manguso
- Tell Me Everything You Don’t Remember by Christine Hyung-Oak Lee
- The Suicide Index by Joan Wickersham
- You Could Make This Place Beautiful by Maggie Smith
- The Braille Encyclopedia by Naomi Cohn
- Hell Gate Bridge by Barrie Miskin

Kara Zivin, PhD, MS, MA, MFA, is a professor of psychiatry, obstetrics and gynecology, and health management and policy. She aims to increase public awareness about mental health conditions and to influence policy addressing them by combining research expertise (data) and personal narrative (story).

Longer: https://karazivin.com/about/

Connect with Dr. Kara Zivin

Website: http://www.karazivin.com

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/kzivin
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kara-zivin-ann-arbor/
Blue Sky: https://bsky.app/profile/kzivin.bsky.social
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/karazivin/

Purchase book:

https://www.ohioswallow.com/9780804012645/persevered/

https://www.amazon.com/Persevered-Maternal-Mental-Health-Memoir/dp/0804012644/

https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/persevered-kara-zivin/1148516116

https://bookshop.org/p/books/persevered-a-maternal-mental-health-memoir-kara-zivin/0f1698b9c560969c

https://www.booksamillion.com/p/Persevered/Kara-Zivin/9780804012645

– 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

Nicole Walker joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about how we talk about current traumas and past traumas in ways that don’t retraumatize us, making our work matter to others, giving ourselves agency over the hard stuff we’re writing about, conveying interiority and emotion, making our experience fundamental to our writing process, exploring our stories through research, asking readers not to look away, disassociation vs distance, metaphors as entry points for readers, experimenting with the speculative, becoming more expansive, and her new book Writing the Hard Stuff.

Ronit's upcoming workshop: Writing Dynamic Memoir: From Lived Experience to Gripping Story https://www.lmcmurtrylitcenter.org/workshops/writing-dynamic-memoir-from-lived-experience-to-gripping-story

Also in this episode:

- revising life paths

- encapsulating our experience

- the narrator voice and perspective in our work

Books mentioned in this episode:

Constellation of Ghosts: A Speculative Memoir with Ravens by Laraine Herring

Frontier: A Memoir and a Ghost Story by Erica Stern

A Braided Heart: Essays on Writing and Form by Brenda Miller

How to Plant a Billion Trees by Nicole Walker

NICOLE WALKER is the author of several books including How to Plant a Billion Trees and Writing the Hard Stuff. She has written pieces for The New York Times and is a noted author in several editions of Best American Essays. She edits Crux, the literary nonfiction series at University of Georgia Press and teaches creative writing at Northern Arizona University where she serves as Writer-in-Residence for the Center for Ecosystem Science and Society.

Connect with Nicole:

Website: http://nikwalk.com

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/nicole.walker.18041 @nikwalk.bsky.social

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/nikwalker28/ ‭https://nikwalk.substack.com/

Purchase Book:

https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/writing-the-hard-stuff-9781350518650/

https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/how-to-plant-a-billion-trees-9798216278894/

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Ronit Plank bio and links:
Ronit Plank is a writer, teacher, and editor whose work has appeared in The Atlantic, Poets & Writers, River Teeth’s Beautiful Things, The Rumpus, Salon, Hippocampus, The New York Times, and elsewhere, earning Best of the Net, Best Microfiction, and multiple Pushcart Prize nominations. Her memoir When She Comes Back was a Book Riot Best True Crime Book and Kirkus Reviews calls it, “An intimate, intuitive, emotionally vivid family account that finds hope in reconciliation". Ronit is also the author of the award-winning short story collection Home is a Made-Up Place, and her work has been anthologized in Selected Memories, Vol. 2: 15 Years of Hippocampus Magazine and Manna Songs: Stories of Jewish Culture and Heritage. Ronit is the Creative Nonfiction Editor at The Citron Review, teaches memoir at a host of venues including the University of Washington’s Continuum Program, Antioch University, and 92NY’s Roundtable, and is host of the podcast Let’s Talk Memoir and the Substack Let’s Talk Memoir. Find her on social media @ronitplank

Website: http://www.ronitplank.com
Substack: https://substack.com/@ronitplank
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ronitplank/
When She Comes Back: https://ronitplank.com/when-she-comes-back/

D/Annie Liontas joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about suffering 3 brain injuries in one year and how that changed their relationship to their body and to the world, post-concussive syndrome, how science is delayed around all things female body, gender and selfhood, being a reluctant nonfiction writer and how memoir was the last thing on their mind, understanding the external and internal forces that we have to reckon with to live, the narratives around women and queer people, interrogating our own patterns, knowing when we’re sidestepping a thing, the cascading problem of vulnerability, considering how you protect the people you love in a memoir, what stories need to be told, and doing so on our own terms, the lonely condition of being inside the human body, how memoir has its own timeline, getting to the story beneath the story and their new memoir Sex with a Brain Injury: On Concussion and Recovery.

Ronit's upcoming workshop: Writing Dynamic Memoir: From Lived Experience to Gripping Story https://www.lmcmurtrylitcenter.org/workshops/writing-dynamic-memoir-from-lived-experience-to-gripping-story

Also in this episode:

- redacting text

- knowing when we’re hiding

- finding comfort in the telling

Books mentioned in this episode

- Fit Into Me by Molly Gaudry

- Decade of the Brain by Janine Joseph

- The Long Game: Notes on Writing Fiction by Elizabeth McCracken

- The Writing Life by Annie Dillard

- Bone Black by bell hooks

- Wounds of Passion: A Writing Life by bell hooks

- Mad Eden by Morgan Thomas

- Clam Down by Anelise Chen

Essay: “Against Catharsis: Writing is Not Therapy” by Essay by T Kira Madden https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/litfriends-podcast/id1717357361

D/ANNIE LIONTAS is the trans-genderqueer author of the crip-queer memoir Sex with a Brain Injury: On Concussion and Recovery, which won the ALA’s 2025 Stonewall Award for Nonfiction and was shortlisted for The Athenaeum of Philadelphia's Literary Award. They are a recipient of the 2025 Lambda Literary Córdova prize, and their debut novel, Let Me Explain You, was selected as New York Times Editors Choice. They co-edited the anthology A Manner of Being: Writers on their Mentors, and their work has appeared in The Atlantic, The New York Times, BOMB, McSweeney’s, The New Review, Oprah Daily, and elsewhere. An Associate Professor at George Washington University, LIONTAS helped secure a Mellon Foundation grant on Disability Justice to bring storytelling to communities in the criminal justice system. They write the Most Anticipated Queer Books list at Electric Literature and live in Philadelphia with their wife, dog, and Email the rabbit.

Connect With D/Annie Liontas:

• https://www.instagram.com/aliontas/
• https://www.annieliontas.com/
• (currently being updated)

Purchase Book:

• https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Sex-with-a-Brain-Injury/Annie-Liontas/9781668085561
• https://www.theshipmanagency.com/annie-liontas
• Lit Friends Podcast https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/litfriends-podcast/id1717357361

-
Ronit Plank bio and links:
Ronit Plank is a writer, teacher, and editor whose work has appeared in The Atlantic, Poets & Writers, River Teeth’s Beautiful Things, The Rumpus, Salon, Hippocampus, The New York Times, and elsewhere, earning Best of the Net, Best Microfiction, and multiple Pushcart Prize nominations. Her memoir When She Comes Back was a Book Riot Best True Crime Book and Kirkus Reviews calls it, “An intimate, intuitive, emotionally vivid family account that finds hope in reconciliation". Ronit is also the author of the award-winning short story collection Home is a Made-Up Place, and her work has been anthologized in Selected Memories, Vol. 2: 15 Years of Hippocampus Magazine and Manna Songs: Stories of Jewish Culture and Heritage. Ronit is the Creative Nonfiction Editor at The Citron Review, teaches memoir at a host of venues including the University of Washington’s Continuum Program, Antioch University, and 92NY’s Roundtable, and is host of the podcast Let’s Talk Memoir and the Substack Let’s Talk Memoir. Find her on social media @ronitplank

Website: http://www.ronitplank.com
Substack: https://substack.com/@ronitplank
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ronitplank/
When She Comes Back: https://ronitplank.com/when-she-comes-back/

Rachel Weaver joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about the mysterious illness she lived with for nearly two decades, seeing 30-40 doctors and spending 18 years in the medical system, the toll of dwelling in the kingdom of the sick, writing as a process of distillation, writing as refuge, raising tension without wearing the reader out, making narrative threads work together, the fluidity of memoir manuscripts, endings that resonate with beginnings, avoiding vindictiveness after the first draft, pulling readers inside our experience with specificity and particularity, and her new memoir Dizzy.

Also in this episode:

-narrative medicine

-the power dynamics of the medical system

-staying in our physical experience to write

Books mentioned in this episode:

-How to be Sick Toni Bernhard

Rachel Weaver’s novel Point of Direction was named a Top Ten Book To Pick Up Now by Oprah Magazine and won the Willa Cather Award for Fiction. Rachel’s newest book, Dizzy, an “arresting new memoir” according to Maureen Corrigan on NPR’s Fresh Air, published in February of 2026. Her second novel The Last Run, is forthcoming in June 2026 with Lake Union Publishing. Prior to earning her MFA in Writing and Poetics at Naropa University, Rachel worked for the Forest Service in Alaska studying bears, raptors and songbirds. She teaches at Wilkes University and Lighthouse Writers Workshop and holds a CPA in Narrative Medicine from Columbia University. For more information visit https://rachelweaver.net/

Connect with Rachel:

Website: https://rachelweaver.net/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=61587520026172

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/rachelweaver2222/?hl=en

Dizzy on NPR: https://www.npr.org/2026/02/09/nx-s1-5704301/dizzy-book-review-rachel-weaver

Course: Save Yourself Years of Drafting: https://www.rachelweaver.net/save-yourself-years-of-drafting-course

Book Purchase: https://www.amazon.com/Dizzy-Memoir-Connective-Rachel-Weaver/dp/1959000748

Book Purchase https://bookshop.org/p/books/dizzy-a-memoir-rachel-susan-weaver/dd0268049e6165a1

– 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

Deborah Shepherd joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about the large age gap in her first marriage and having mixed feelings about the love story of her youth, the titillation of secrecy and huge risks she took in her personal life, how women were seen, feeling protective of our younger selves, power imbalances in relationships, complicated mother-daughter dynamics, not being sure she could write this book, asking a lot of questions of herself and on the page, thinking about the reader, and her new memoir An Old Man’s Darling.

Ronit's upcoming workshop: Writing Dynamic Memoir: From Lived Experience to Gripping Story https://www.lmcmurtrylitcenter.org/workshops/writing-dynamic-memoir-from-lived-experience-to-gripping-story

Also in this episode:

- opting for a prologue

- finding a community of memoirists

- working with a developmental editor

Books mentioned in this episode:

- Writing Hard Stories by Melanie Brooks

- Motherland by Elissa Altman

- Fierce Attachments by Vivian Gornick

Deborah K. Shepherd's memoir about her age-gap first marriage, An Old Man's Darling, has just been published by Heliotrope Books. Her first novel, So Happy Together, came out in 2021, when she was 74. Her essays have appeared in Oldster Magazine; Motherwell ; Herstry; InShort Journal; FauxMoir ; Eat, Darling, Eat, and more. She earned a Master of Social Worker degree in 1992 and spent much of her career focused on the prevention of domestic violence and sexual assault and the provision of services to survivors. The mother of two and grandmother of two, Deborah lives in Maine with one husband and one sweet, jaunty rescue dog. You can find her at http://deborahshepherdwrites.com

Connect with Deborah:

Website: http://deborahshepherdwrites.com

Facebook: Deborah K. Shepherd Author

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/dkshdw74/?hl=en

–
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

Samina Najmi joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about growing up under a military dictatorship in Pakistan, the colonial legacy in South Asia, writing about migration, race, and gender, teaching as a secular Muslim woman in the aftermath of 911, living displaced lives, leaning into bursts of memory, anchoring ourselves in moments, writing an essay collection over 10 years, learning from realistic fiction, lyrical essays grounded in research, allowing our writing to spill over into different categories, embracing an expansive literary community, how home is less a place than a moment in time, willing to be vulnerable on the page, building trust with readers, and her new memoir Sing Me a Circle: Love, Loss, and a Home in Time.

Ronit's upcoming workshop: Writing Dynamic Memoir: From Lived Experience to Gripping Story https://www.lmcmurtrylitcenter.org/workshops/writing-dynamic-memoir-from-lived-experience-to-gripping-story

Also in this episode:

- entering writing contests

- our expansive literary community

- the different kinds of displacement

- fragments that come together later

Books mentioned in this episode:

- Brown Girl, Brownstones by Paule Marshall

- The Names by N. Scott Momaday

- The Woman Warrior by Maxine Hong Kingston

- You and Yours by Naomi Shihab Nye

Samina Najmi teaches multiethnic US literature at California State University, Fresno. Her memoir-in-essays, Sing Me a Circle: Love, Loss, and a Home in Time, won the Aurora Polaris Award in Creative Nonfiction and was published by Trio House Press in Oct, 2025. It has received a starred review from Publishers Weekly and is featured among Poets & Writers’ five nonfiction debuts of the year and Debutiful’s Best Nonfiction Debuts of 2025. The Community of Literary Magazines and Presses (CLMP) includes it among notable 2025 nonfiction debuts and its recommended reading lists for Asian/Pacific American Heritage Month 2025 and Women’s History Month 2026. Daughter of multiple migrations, Samina grew up in Pakistan and England, began her American life in Boston, and has called Fresno home since 2006.

Connect with Samina:

Website: http://saminanajmi.com

Instagram: samina.najmi

Facebook: Samina Najmi

Purchase book:

https://www.triohousepress.org/samina-najmi

–
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

Jenny Lisk joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about losing her husband to an aggressive brain cancer and becoming a widowed parent, learning how to do a job she never asked for, being a resource for widowed parents, feeling like you're doing grieving wrong, better understanding grieving children, launching a podcast to learn more about widowhood, incorporating a Caring Bridge blog into memoir, utilizing storytelling principles to flesh out a story and transform it into memoir, fear of vulnerability, defining book marketing broadly, assisting writers in self-publishing, memoir as an act of service, and her memoir Future Widow.

Ronit's upcoming workshop: Writing Dynamic Memoir: From Lived Experience to Gripping Story https://www.lmcmurtrylitcenter.org/workshops/writing-dynamic-memoir-from-lived-experience-to-gripping-story

Also in this episode:
- knowing where to end a memoir
- instrumental and intuitive grievers
- early marketing and building relationships

Books mentioned in this episode:
- The Anatomy of Story by John Truby
- Real American Julie by Lythcott-Haims
The Chicago Manual of Style from University of Chicago Press

Jenny Lisk is the founder of the Widowed Parent Institute. She is an award-winning author and widowed mom who is dedicated to helping widowed parents increase their family's well-being. Jenny’s books, Future Widow and Widowed Parents Unite, and her show, The Widowed Parent Podcast, guide the journey of solo parenting after loss.

Jenny’s work has been featured in The Washington Post, Katie Couric Media, Yahoo Life, ParentMap, and more. She lives in Redmond, Washington, with her two college-age kids.

Connect with Jenny:
Website: https://jennylisk.com
https://jennyliskllc.com/
https://widowedparentinstitute.com/

-
Ronit Plank bio and links:
Ronit Plank is a writer, teacher, and editor whose work has appeared in The Atlantic, Poets & Writers, River Teeth’s Beautiful Things, The Rumpus, Salon, Hippocampus, The New York Times, and elsewhere, earning Best of the Net, Best Microfiction, and multiple Pushcart Prize nominations. Her memoir When She Comes Back was a Book Riot Best True Crime Book and Kirkus Reviews calls it, “An intimate, intuitive, emotionally vivid family account that finds hope in reconciliation". Ronit is also the author of the award-winning short story collection Home is a Made-Up Place, and her work has been anthologized in Selected Memories, Vol. 2: 15 Years of Hippocampus Magazine and Manna Songs: Stories of Jewish Culture and Heritage. Ronit is the Creative Nonfiction Editor at The Citron Review, teaches memoir at a host of venues including the University of Washington’s Continuum Program, Antioch University, and 92NY’s Roundtable, and is host of the podcast Let’s Talk Memoir and the Substack Let’s Talk Memoir. Find her on social media @ronitplank

Website: http://www.ronitplank.com
Substack: https://substack.com/@ronitplank
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ronitplank/
When She Comes Back: https://ronitplank.com/when-she-comes-back/

Courtney Kocak joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about her Hollywood misadventures, facing coercion and exploitation as a young woman, systemic structures we bump up against, fighting the patriarchy, having compassion for the girl she was, landing on essays as a place to stretch out on the page, not terrorizing the people we write about, making dialogue feel alive, book incubators, engaging with other writers and finding community, writing as a means to create opportunities for ourselves, forgiving our younger selves, writing our own rules, taking power back, and her new memoir Girl Gone Wild.

Ronit's upcoming workshop: Writing Dynamic Memoir: From Lived Experience to Gripping Story https://www.lmcmurtrylitcenter.org/workshops/writing-dynamic-memoir-from-lived-experience-to-gripping-story

Also in this episode:
- being objectified
- deadlines and accountability
- small presses as champions for innovative memoir

Books mentioned in this episode:
- Draft Number 4 by John Mcphee
- Finger Exercises for Poets by Dorianne Laux
- Wild by Cheryl Strayed
- Tiny Beautiful Things by Cheryl Stayed
- The Wager by David Grann

Courtney Kocak is a writer, podcaster, and comedian who splits time between Austin and Los Angeles. She wrote for Amazon’s Emmy-winning animated series Danger & Eggs and Netflix’s Know It All. She’s produced a slew of highly-ranked podcasts and currently hosts three of her own with over two million downloads to date: Private Parts Unknown, about love and sexuality around the world, The Bleeders, about book writing and publishing, and Podcast Bestie, a best friend to podcasters trying to grow and monetize their shows (and a popular Substack). As a writer, her bylines include The New York Times, The Cut, The Washington Post, LA Times, Cosmopolitan, Slate, HuffPost, and more. Her debut memoir, Girl Gone Wild, with Trio House Press, is out now!

Connect with Courtney:

Website: https://www.courtneykocak.com/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/courtneykocak/
Threads: https://www.threads.com/@courtneykocak
Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/courtneykocak.bsky.social
Twitter: https://x.com/courtneykocak

Purchase Book via Bookshop:

Girl Gone Wild on Bookshop.org: https://bookshop.org/a/85623/9781949487541
Teaching: https://www.courtneykocak.com/teaching

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Ronit Plank bio and links:
Ronit Plank is a writer, teacher, and editor whose work has appeared in The Atlantic, Poets & Writers, River Teeth’s Beautiful Things, The Rumpus, Salon, Hippocampus, The New York Times, and elsewhere, earning Best of the Net, Best Microfiction, and multiple Pushcart Prize nominations. Her memoir When She Comes Back was a Book Riot Best True Crime Book and Kirkus Reviews calls it, “An intimate, intuitive, emotionally vivid family account that finds hope in reconciliation". Ronit is also the author of the award-winning short story collection Home is a Made-Up Place, and her work has been anthologized in Selected Memories, Vol. 2: 15 Years of Hippocampus Magazine and Manna Songs: Stories of Jewish Culture and Heritage. Ronit is the Creative Nonfiction Editor at The Citron Review, teaches memoir at a host of venues including the University of Washington’s Continuum Program, Antioch University, and 92NY’s Roundtable, and is host of the podcast Let’s Talk Memoir and the Substack Let’s Talk Memoir. Find her on social media @ronitplank

Website: http://www.ronitplank.com
Substack: https://substack.com/@ronitplank
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ronitplank/
When She Comes Back: https://ronitplank.com/when-she-comes-back/

Carol Odell joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about being methodically sexually groomed as a girl during her time working at a stable, sexual grooming as a slow desensitization process, interrupting the patterns created from unprocessed trauma, including her experience as a therapist in her pages, trying to trace our behavior and thread the story in the narrative, taking risks and doing deeper work, the divisions within ourselves, writing self back into scenes we’ve emotionally splintered off from, recognizing ourselves as victims, hybrid publishing through She Writes Press, turning down the volume on critical self-talk, and her new memoir Girl Groomed: A Therapist’s Memoir of Trauma.

Ronit's upcoming workshop: Writing Dynamic Memoir: From Lived Experience to Gripping Story https://www.lmcmurtrylitcenter.org/workshops/writing-dynamic-memoir-from-lived-experience-to-gripping-story

Also in this episode:
- vulnerability
- practicing good self-care
- being compassionate with ourselves

Books mentioned in this episode:
- Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls
- Educated by Tara Westover
- Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott
- Writing Down the Bones by Natalie Goldberg

Carol Odell, LICSW, grew up riding horses on the show jumping circuit in Virginia. She has been a practicing psychotherapist facilitating groups and working with couples and individuals since 1984. Married for thirty-eight years and the mother of a grown son, her other passions include: squash, pickleball, partner-dancing, mosaics, writing, traveling and being in community with friends and family. She and her husband currently split their time between Seattle and Cle Elum, Washington.

Connect with Carol:
Website and newsletter: http://www.carolodellmsw.com

Instagram: mosaicofthoughts_
Professional FB page: http://www.facebook.com/cfodellmsw

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Ronit Plank bio and links:
Ronit Plank is a writer, teacher, and editor whose work has appeared in The Atlantic, Poets & Writers, River Teeth’s Beautiful Things, The Rumpus, Salon, Hippocampus, The New York Times, and elsewhere, earning Best of the Net, Best Microfiction, and multiple Pushcart Prize nominations. Her memoir When She Comes Back was a Book Riot Best True Crime Book and Kirkus Reviews calls it, “An intimate, intuitive, emotionally vivid family account that finds hope in reconciliation". Ronit is also the author of the award-winning short story collection Home is a Made-Up Place, and her work has been anthologized in Selected Memories, Vol. 2: 15 Years of Hippocampus Magazine and Manna Songs: Stories of Jewish Culture and Heritage. Ronit is the Creative Nonfiction Editor at The Citron Review, teaches memoir at a host of venues including the University of Washington’s Continuum Program, Antioch University, and 92NY’s Roundtable, and is host of the podcast Let’s Talk Memoir and the Substack Let’s Talk Memoir. Find her on social media @ronitplank

Website: http://www.ronitplank.com
Substack: https://substack.com/@ronitplank
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ronitplank/
When She Comes Back: https://ronitplank.com/when-she-comes-back/