Let’s Talk Memoir

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: 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: 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: 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: 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/