Let’s Talk Memoir

Let’s Talk Memoir is a podcast for memoir lovers, readers, and writers, featuring interviews with memoirists about their writing process, their challenges, and what they’ve learned about sharing the most personal of narratives. Hosted by writer, editor, and teacher Ronit Plank, each episode highlights different aspects of the memoir-writing experience, and offers writing tips and inspiration.Ronit is the author of the award-winning story collection Home is a Made-Up Place and the memoir When She Comes Back about the loss of her mother to the guru at the center of Netflix’s docuseries Wild Wild Country and their eventual reconciliation.For more memoir advice, workshops, and encouragement find Let’s Talk Memoir and Ronit on Substack, Instagram, and at ronitplank.com

Let’s Talk Memoir is a arts podcast hosted by Ronit Plank, with 260 episodes on record and a Required Pod Score of 80. PitchCentric scores this show on Booking Probability, Listen Score, and live audience signals refreshed every 24 hours.

Ronit Plank hosts Let’s Talk Memoir, a arts show with 260 episodes published.

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  Episode #75

  255. The Relief That Comes From Sharing the Toughest Thing featuring Dr. Kara Zivin

  Aug 18, 202642 min

  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. Email Ronit after graphics and episode is scheduled: https://www.loom.com/share/7be1c961b881401a9939edc25e34a08e 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: 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

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  Episode #74

  254. Writing the Hard Stuff featuring Nicole Walker

  Aug 11, 202634 min

  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: 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/ - 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: 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/

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  Episode #73

  253. Getting to the Story Beneath the Story featuring D/Annie Liontas

  Aug 4, 202632 min

  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

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  Let’s Talk Memoir

  252. Pulling Readers Inside Our Experience with Specificity and Particularity featuring Rachel Weaver

  Jul 28, 202637 min

  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

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  Let’s Talk Memoir

  251. Mining Opening Pages for Impact featuring Deborah K. Shepherd

  Jul 21, 202635 min

  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 deborahshepherdwrites.com Connect with Deborah: Website: 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

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