Brooke Champagne joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about rejecting and accepting identity, growing up in New Orleans and feeling bifurcated by race, language, and class, knowing you’re a writer, humor on the page, selecting work for a collection, why we write, watching ourselves continue to make the same mistakes, deciding what stories are ours, how much permission we ask, preparing for editorial work on our projects, keeping the bigger picture in mind, the many different versions of ourselves, seeing yourself as a persona, and her new book Nola Face: A Latina’s Life in the Big Easy.

Also in this episode:

-writing about trauma

-Proust

-the nature of art and truth

Books mentioned in this episode:

The Situation and the Story by Vivian Gornick

The Lifespan of a Fact by John Degoda

Hell if We Don’t Change Our Ways by Brittany Means

Brooke Champagne is the author of Nola Face: A Latina’s Life in the Big Easy, published with the Crux Series in Literary Nonfiction at the University of Georgia Press. Nola Face has received starred reviews from Kirkus and Independent Book Review. Champagne’s work has been selected as Notable in several editions of the Best American Essays anthology series, and she is the recipient of the 2023-2024 Alabama State Council on the Arts Literary Fellowship in Prose. She lives with her husband and children in Tuscaloosa, where she is Assistant Professor of Creative Writing in the MFA Program at the University of Alabama.

Connect with Brooke:

Website: https://www.brookechampagne.com

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

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

x: https://x.com/brchampagne

Get Nola Face: https://ugapress.org/book/9780820366531/nola-face/

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Ronit’s writing has appeared in The Atlantic, The Rumpus, The New York Times, 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 lives in Seattle with her family where she teaches memoir workshops and is working on her next book.

More about Ronit: https://ronitplank.com

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Background photo credit: Photo by Patrick Tomasso on Unsplash

Headshot photo credit: Sarah Anne Photography

Theme music: Isaac Joel, Dead Moll’s Fingers