Dinty W. Moore joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about his 25 years as Editor-in-Chief of Brevity Magazine, elements that set submissions apart, landing on a writer’s voice, generating work in play mode yet being relentless in revision, resisting the urge to explain, allowing ourselves to be peculiar, and what rejection really means.

Also in this episode:

-the stories in our lives we keep coming back to.

-the gift of 750 words.

-giving readers room to interpret.

Authors mentioned in this episode:

James Baldwin

Joan Didian 

Cheryl Strayed

Heavy by Kiese Laymon

Maggie Nelson

Leslie Jamison

Dinty W. Moore worked as a journalist, a documentary filmmaker, a zookeeper, a modern dancer, and a Greenwich Village waiter before realizing he wanted to be a writer. He is author of the memoirs To Hell With It and Between Panic & Desire, winner of the Grub Street Nonfiction Book Prize, The Accidental Buddhist: Mindfulness, Enlightenment, and Sitting Still, the writing guide Crafting the Personal Essay, and is editor of The Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Writing Flash Nonfiction, among many other books. He has published essays and stories in The Georgia Review, Harper’s, The New York Times Magazine, The Southern Review, Kenyon Review, Creative Nonfiction, and elsewhere. He is founding editor of Brevity, the journal of flash nonfiction, and teaches master classes and workshops across the United States as well as in Ireland, Scotland, Spain, Switzerland, Canada, and Mexico. He is deathly afraid of polar bears.

Connect with Dinty:

Books: https://dintywmoore.com/category/books/

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

X: https://twitter.com/brevitymag

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

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Ronit’s writing has been featured 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 both the 2021 Housatonic Awards Awards and 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 was named winner of  Hidden River Arts’ 2020 Eludia Award and Finalist in the 2023 Page Turner Awards. 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 is at work 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