Memoir Nation

Form, form, form. We can’t stop circling it on Memoir Nation because everyone has a different approach to it. Mostly we’re taught that once you know your form, you can pour your content into it. And yet, we keep hearing from authors whose process is the exact opposite—which is that form follows content. Today we talk with Eleni Sikelianos about the ways in which she followed her subject matter to find the form of her story, in addition to memoir as series, what it means to embody the life of an ancestor you never knew in your writing, and the role of photographs as narrative rather than decorative elements. A fascinating exploration!
Born into a family of tree workers, bohemians, poets, ne'er-do-wells, visionaries, and small-time sort-of hustlers, Eleni Sikelianos is a poet, writer, collaborator, and "master of mixing genres." As a student of the poets of Naropa, she is a lineage-holder in the Outrider poetics family tree. Deeply engaged with ecopoetics, her work takes up urgent concerns of environmental precarity and ancestral work. She has published ten books of poetry (most recently, Your Kingdom, 2023) and three unclassifiable hybrid works, sometimes called nonfiction, sometimes memoirs, sometimes fiction: The Book of Jon and You Animal Machine, and Memory Rehearsal.
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If you’re a regular listener of Memoir Nation, you know we love to cover memoir in all its changing and emerging forms. The micro memoir is a form all its own—different from the fragmented style that’s been so popular of late. In this week’s show, we’re going micro, exploring how writers can boil the essence of what needs to be said into the fewest number of words. We’ll talk about the form, its benefits for all writers, and how memoir keeps pushing the boundaries with our guest, Beth Ann Fennelly. And in this week’s book trend, we cover how Substack is changing the way we think about book tours.
Beth Ann Fennelly was Poet Laureate of Mississippi from 2016-2021 and teaches in the MFA Program at the University of Mississippi where she is a four-time teaching award winner. She has published three poetry books: Open House, Tender Hooks, and Unmentionables. She’s also published a book of nonfiction, Great with Child, and a novel she co-authored with her husband, Tom Franklin, called The Tilted World. Her sixth book, Heating & Cooling: 52 Micro-Memoirs, was named an Atlanta Journal Constitution Best Book, a Goodreaders Favorite for 2017, and the winner of the Housatonic Book Prize. Her new book is The Irish Goodbye: Micro-Memoirs.
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This week on Memoir Nation we take a specific guest with a specific skillset/talent and look at ways to apply what he does to our broader writing community. Guest Brandon Deyette shares with us how he channels story by being hyper-attuned to his emotions, and Brooke and Grant speculate that this kind of attention is an emotional practice that any memoirist can cultivate. When you write memoir, you’re always embodying another voice—that voice of your earlier self, who in some cases is a near stranger to the person you are today. An interesting subject matter with a fun and eccentric guest. Enjoy!
Brandon Deyette is a writer, co-author, and award-winning filmmaker whose work centers on translating lived experience into deeply resonant narrative. He is the co-author of Young Is Blessed, a memoir written alongside Young Bae— tattoo artist, entrepreneur, and star of VH1's Black Ink Crew—chronicling her journey from an abusive childhood in South Korea to becoming a celebrated entrepreneur and television personality. As a filmmaker, his projects have earned recognition at festivals including Palm Springs, Atlanta, and New York. His television credits include Emmy-nominated series on The Weather Channel, TLC, VH1, and OWN.​
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It’s our 400th episode and we’re celebrating with celebrated food critic and author Ruth Reichl! Ruth wrote her first food memoir before food memoir was a thing, and she takes us back there to when bookstores didn’t know what to do with her work. Ruth is a pioneer of the food movement in America, and is known for her mission to demystify the world of fine cuisine. This is a generous interview, full of history and story—as well as some encouraging tips about the art of sensory writing. For Ruth, it’s all about creativity.
Ruth Reichl wrote her first cookbook in 1972. She spent the seventies as restaurant critic for New West Magazine and the eighties as restaurant critic and food editor of the Los Angeles Times. From 1993 to 1999 she was the restaurant critic for The New York Times before moving to Gourmet Magazine as Editor in Chief. A defining voice in American food writing and journalism over the past several decades, she’s written five memoirs, two novels and two cookbooks, edited a dozen books and hosted two television series. Her movie Food and Country is available on streaming and she produces a weekly newsletter, La Briffe, on Substack. The recipient of 7 James Beard Awards, including Lifetime Achievement, she is currently working on a sequel to The Paris Novel.
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We’re late to celebrate Grant’s new book, something out there in the distance, so we’re doing it this week, bringing on his co-collaborator on the project, Gail Butensky. Grant and Gail partnered up to create a beautiful and unusual project. This week’s show mixes things up a bit because Brooke interviews Grant, and Grant interviews Gail, and Grant shows up for his segments in all kinds of locations, including his mother’s apartment at her memory care facility. The show covers the power of intuition when it comes to both storytelling and photography, the risks indie presses can and do take, and why loving a good road-trip is a prerequisite to being Grant’s friend. And the trend this week, more state of mind than trend, is in celebration of indie books.
Gail Butensky is a renowned photographer whose work has been featured on numerous record covers as well as in books and magazines. Her lens documented the punk and rock scenes of the '80s and '90s, with work appearing in The San Francisco Guardian, The Village Voice, and The Chicago Reader, and in publications including Our Band Could Be Your Life and CBGB & OMFUG: 30 Years. She is the author of the photography book, Every Bend. Grant Faulkner is the co-founder and co-host of Memoir Nation, co-founder of the online literary journal 100 Word Story, and the former executive director of National Novel Writing Month. He’s the author of The Art of Brevity: Crafting the Very Short Story, as well as fiction collections All the Comfort Sin Can Provide and Fissures. His stories have appeared in Tin House, The Gettysburg Review, and Norton anthologies. Together Grant and Gail collaborated on the new flash novel, something out there in the distance, out on the University of New Mexico Press.
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