Jennifer Pastiloff joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about getting out of our own way, practicing curiosity, feeling like we have a right to tell our stories and be creative, finding a way into our work, the yes and, tapping into other art forms, not throwing people under the bus, harnessing the mental space to write, accepting change as a necessary part of living, when “fine” is not fine, putting ourselves out there, sharing deeply, refusing to hide in shame, leaving her marriage, and ...
Jul 01, 2025•36 min
Niko Stratis joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about entertaining the queerest part of her soul, working on a book almost by accident, building a manuscript backwards from a title, arriving at a structure early into the process, making peace with the past, being in a safe place to write, processing adolescence, the performance of masculinity, giving humanity to even the difficult people, making a writing habit to hit deadlines, working with a small academic press, her time as a music an...
Jun 26, 2025•29 min
Erica Stern joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about self-interrogation and taking risks to tell the story we need to, exploring the liminality of a lived experience through the speculative, hybrid memoir and leaning into history and research to illuminate and deepen understanding, the unexpected complications she experienced in childbirth, the historical misogyny in U.S. medical system, the male takeover of birth, how trauma can stunt empathy, trusting the work will go where it needs to...
Jun 24, 2025•34 min
Marty Ross-Dolen joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation discovering the story while writing, inviting the speculative and magical elements into a narrative, rediscovering lost relatives, advocating for our vision and for our books, scaffolding fragmented forms, being raised by a mother in protracted mourning, incorporating letters, photographs, and erasure poetry, when people tell you what your book is supposed to be, living with an inherited sense of grief, unspoken family pacts, when struc...
Jun 19, 2025•34 min
Alyson Shelton and Lynn Shattuck join Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about writing about sibling loss, creating an essay anthology as means to advocate for grief, taking care of ourselves while crafting work about loss, helping people tell their stories, laughter and making space for the rest of our lives, coping with rejection, creating a mosaic with essays, feeling empowered, self-acceptance building community, independently publishing as an act of defiance, and their new anthology The L...
Jun 17, 2025•44 min•Ep. 70
Maureen Stanton joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about her writing beginnings in fiction and using the scenic and immersive to move readers, falling in love with creative nonfiction, revisiting and recreating a love story, discovering the question behind her book, facing the blank page, bad first drafts, writing an illness narrative, placing an essay in Modern Love, authenticity on the page, the long winding path to publishing, not thinking your book will ever get published, working on...
Jun 10, 2025•43 min
Leah Paulos of Press Shop PR joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about 2 things writers can do right now to help launch their book successfully, how to find your targeted readers and effectively reach them through media, the dedicated focus required to promote a book,tapping into your storytelling chops to help you with marketing, tools for positioning your book with media and journalists, the lead time we need to promote our books and when to pitch, selling journalists on covering your b...
Jun 05, 2025•44 min
Jill Damatac joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about growing up undocumented in the US and how she ultimately self-deported, weaving Filipino food, mythology, history, and culture in her narrative, opting for a hybridized memoir to mitigate the fear of talking about her experience, American exceptionalism, internalized doubt and unworthiness, contextualizing the self within a broader set of stories, when fear is a defining container for our lives, being willing to announce our lived exp...
Jun 03, 2025•35 min
Ruthie Ackerman joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about maternal ambivalence and coming from a long line of women who abandoned their children, taking motherhood on from different angles, feeling ashamed of shame, illuminating what we need to about ourselves, listening to our inner voice, breaking cycles, focusing our work on the memoirist’s journey and search for understanding, when family members read our memoir, a close look at the trajectory of her book deal, finding another angle t...
May 29, 2025•38 min
Daria Burke joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about sharing her journey out of Detroit where she was raised in poverty and the question that inspired her memoir, writing well and being well while writing, running away from the past, writing deeply and with courage, refusing to believe in inevitability, doing the unfinished business of raising ourselves, surviving the retelling of our story, holding space for each of the versions of ourselves, how she delivered the investigative reportin...
May 27, 2025•38 min
Tom McAllister joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about finding the right container for our work trusting our writing to speak for itself, giving ourselves homework, writing constraints as guiding principles, his approach to teaching nonfiction, the challenge of self-promotion, strategies for creating companion pieces, stating things boldly and with confidence, the podcast Book Fight he co-hosts, and how he wrote a short essay for every year of his life and turned it into his new book It...
May 22, 2025•36 min
Bonny Reichert joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about not knowing if she’d find a way to tell the story that weighed on her, growing up in the shadow of traumatic family history, selling on proposal and working out the boundaries of a book, her background as a food journalist, hammering out the details of the narrative arc, eliminating the squishy middle, reverse outlining for emotional resonance, creating composite characters, telling a story through food, crafting the self as a chara...
May 20, 2025•46 min
Vicky Nguyen joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about growing up Vietnamese in America and what this country has meant for someone like her, writing memoir as a public figure, pivoting as a writer, not being too quick to self-edit, managing backstory to keep a memoir propulsive, having conversations with loved ones about shared family history, connecting through vulnerability, book promotion as a whole other job, exhausting every marketing channel, writing about people who don’t necessar...
May 15, 2025•41 min
KB Brookins joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about transness, masculinity, and race, how how being a writer has crystalized their experience and made it legible to an audience and to themselves, turning to prose to say the hard things, the tenacity of memoir, resisting erasure and pushing back on toxic systems, coming at creative nonfiction from a poetic impulse, having patience with ourselves, what we might need to let go of as writers, looking at our work with kinder eyes, the way we...
May 13, 2025•41 min
Michelle Yang joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about her bipolar diagnosis and becoming a mental health advocate, immigrating to the U.S. as a young child, writing at the intersection of body image, mental health, and Asian American identity, building an author platform, revisiting old family dynamics and patterns, grieving a family of origin, mourning make-believe mothers, doing a lot of processing before writing about trauma, keeping the reader in mind, removing societal stigma aroun...
May 06, 2025•52 min•Ep. 69
Julie Brill joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about growing up the daughter of a Holocaust survivor and her journey to understand the unexamined childhood stories she grew up with, being a reluctant memoirist and leaning into telling the story of an ordinary person figuring things out, the Holocaust and the history of the Jews of Serbia, inherited memories, making ourselves the central character, when our parents’ foundational stories become ours, finding our place, permission to tell a...
Apr 29, 2025•33 min
Margaret Anne Mary Moore joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about her realization at an early age that she wanted to be a nonfiction writer and memoirist, facing severe discrimination as a child with disabilities, how she wrote about her disability experience on a granular level, using a communication device, taking breaks to work on other aspects of a project when the writing process grows tiresome, devoting chapters to a single theme, striving to make characterizations rich in detail, ...
Apr 22, 2025•31 min•Ep. 68
Diana Raab joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about connecting with ancestors and tuning into their guidance, books that need to be written, when publisher requests don’t resonate with us, adding prompts for readers, unwanted daughters and intergenerational trauma, how books we don’t like help us, adding prompts for readers, tapping into authentic voice, and her new book Hummingbird: Messages from My Ancestors. Also in this episode: -reading broadly -surviving cancer multiple times -how ...
Apr 17, 2025•25 min
Rebe Huntman joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about who are we as women and what holds us together as a culture, following questions to their conclusions and changing in the process, running away from grief, magical thinking, reinventing ourselves, Afro-Cuban traditions and relationships to the dead, hungering for answers, permission to be more than one thing, losing mothers and finding them again through memoir, spiritual mothers and keeping the dead close, and her new memoir My Mothe...
Apr 15, 2025•44 min
Bridgett M. Davis joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about the effect of trauma and weathering on Black lives, the unique bond between sisters, showing relationships in action and dialogue, homing in on a throughline, giving our books and writing the space they need,finding patterns and switching lenses, exploring varying lived experiences within family structures, shedding light on Lupus, the physiological effects of systemic racism, Black maternal mortality, moments of heartbreak, aski...
Apr 08, 2025•40 min
Megan Williams joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about being a new mother while training at the police academy, looking for validation, resisting the urge to punish ourselves, pushing back against the voice of patriarchal culture, writing to our past self, going too far and not going far enough, the loneliness of motherhood, setting boundaries in memoir, testing ourselves, what motherhood feels like now, moving elegantly through time in memoir, surrounding yourself with talented writers...
Apr 03, 2025•35 min
Paul Lisicky joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about how his appreciation for Joni Mitchell and love of her work shaped his life as a musician and a writer, vulnerability and uncertainty on the page, falling outside the containers of what’s expected, the singular and universal in our work, vulnerability and uncertainty in our creative process, corralling ourselves back to our 5 senses, feeling structure in our bodies, writing for the reader, developing ourselves as artists, being tenaci...
Apr 01, 2025•39 min
Maggie Smith returns to Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about letting imposter syndrome go, fiercely guarding your interior life, getting back to the core place where creativity thrives, rewriting a book from scratch, how writing feels in the body, swerving out of your creative lane, battling the sophomore slump, what it feels like to be watched, when ego gets in the way, fears of paralyzing failure, playing the long game, the best advice she ever got, staying agile and awake in the creativ...
Mar 25, 2025•29 min
Karen Kirsten joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about the messy complexity of family, asking the right questions, writing about a time in history when you weren’t present in that history, utilizing and incorporating primary research, recorded interviews, archived documents, diaries, film, and photographs into memoir, writing fact-based vivid scenes, working with historians to accurately depict world-altering events, being honest with the reader and grappling with conflicting information...
Mar 18, 2025•41 min
Paula Delgado-Kling joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about how her research and reporting on child soldiers, drug trafficking, and the revolutionary armed forces of Columbia (FARC) led her to tell the story of one woman and her family, the relationships we forge with whom we write about, allowing memoir to answer our questions, negotiating language barriers and class differences, coming to truth and understanding, grounding ourselves, hitting upon the structure a book needs, searching ...
Mar 13, 2025•42 min
Diane Vonglis Parnell joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about growing up with 9 siblings on an isolated farm under the tyranny of her abusive father and living in constant fear, homing in on the story we are called to tell, steering clear of portraying ourselves as victim or hero, not having closure, yearning for a mother, emotional absence, self-nurturing, trusting readers, the toll of secrets, changing names of family members, sharing manuscripts with siblings, writing about abusers, ...
Mar 11, 2025•41 min
Martha S. Jones joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about being Black, white, and other in America, the origins of her family in slavery and sexual violence, anti-miscegenation laws, passing, who we call kin and why, taking up space, avoiding the Black-White binary, discovering family stories, writing in a full-throated way, leaving complexity in our work, being patient with our material, chasing threads, the duty we have to the people we write about, grappling with contradictions, leavin...
Mar 06, 2025•39 min
Nicole Graev Lipson joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about our culture’s fascination with reducing women to readymade templates and archetypes, performing fictional versions of ourselves, finding our way back to who we are, the essay as a place where writers can grapple with confusion, working sentence by sentence, finding the most precise microscopic truth, embracing our particularities, focusing on we’re enthralled with, what it means to be a woman today, writing about children, atte...
Mar 04, 2025•42 min
Sarah Jaffe joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about allowing ourselves to be known on the page, learning how to pivot from journalism to the very personal, processing experiences through writing, being upended by grief, taking care of ourselves when writing about violence and terror, witnessing and giving voice to other people’s hardships with integrity and respect, becoming undone on the page, how we are haunted by the losses we live through, sculpting material down during revision, an...
Feb 27, 2025•41 min
Susan Lieu joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about realizing you’re an artist later in life, becoming a multi-hyphinate storyteller, being a mother when you never knew your own, piecing together a family story, feeling plagued by structure, sticking to the throughline, writing residencies, writing down goals, deciding to stop searching for approval from loved ones and getting it for and from ourselves, accepting loved ones as they are, grief journeys, storytelling as closure, and her ne...
Feb 25, 2025•52 min
