Lisa Cooper Ellison joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about therapy vs. memoir, taking care of our nervous systems while working on charged material, writing about trauma without retraumatizing ourselves, developing a robust self-care practice, how to avoid creating victim narratives in our memoirs, what to do with gaps in our memory, putting more of ourselves on the page, and her new podcast Writing Your Resilience.

Also in this episode:

-signs of a trauma response

-learning how to be present

-neuroplasticity 

Book mentioned in this episode:

Writing to Heal by James Pennebaker

Healing Trauma: Restoring the Wisdom of the Body by Peter A. Levine

Trauma and Memory by Peter A. Levine

Becoming the Love You Seek by Dr. Nicole Lepera

Stash by Laura Cathcart Robbins

Acetylene Torch Songs by Sue William Silverman

What Happened to You by Bruce D. Perry and Oprah Winfrey

Hunger by Roxanne Gay

Another Bullshit Night in Suck City by Nick Flynn

Lisa Cooper Ellison is an author, speaker, and trauma-informed writing coach with an Ed.S in Clinical Mental Health Counseling and a background in mindfulness. She regularly presents and teaches courses on the use of mindfulness in writing, writing about trauma, the book proposal, and all things memoir. A regular contributor to the Jane Friedman blog, her essays and short stories have appeared in HuffPost, Hippocampus Literary Magazine, the New Guard Review, Kenyon Review Online, and Brevity, among others.

Connect with Lisa:

Website: https://lisacooperellison.com/

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

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

Threads: https://www.threads.net/@lisacooperellison

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lisa-ellison-b5483840/

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About Ronit

Subscribe to Ronit's Memoir Substack: https://substack.com/@ronitplank?utm_source=profile-page

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