Anne Gudger joins Let’s Talk memoir for a conversation about loss and choosing love every day, giving grief a microphone, voice-driven writing and breaking structure rules, essays for platform-building, holding both the raw experience and the long view, the legacy of shame and becoming unstuck, shifting energy in our bodies, and the metaphysical and spiritual components of her memoir The Fifth Chamber.

Also in this episode:

-journaling as source material

-normalizing grief

-taking care ourselves when working on painful material

Books mentioned in this episode:

Chronology of Water by Lidia Yuknavitch

Bluets by Maggie Nelson

Group by Christie Tate

Anne Gudger is a memoir/essay writer who writes hard and loves harder. She’s the author of THE FIFTH CHAMBER, published by Jaded Ibis Press September 2023. She's been published in multiple journals including The Rumpus, Real Simple Magazine, Tupelo Quarterly, Sweet Lit, Cutthroat, CutBank, Columbia Journal, The Normal School, Los Angeles Review, and elsewhere. She's won four essay contests and has been a Best of the Net Nominee twice. March 2020 she and her daughter founded Coffee and Grief: a community that includes a monthly reading series. Everybody grieves and when we share grief we feel less alone. She also co-created the podcast: Coffee, Grief, and Gratitude. She lives in Portland, Oregon with her beloved husband. 

Connect with Anne:

Website: https://www.annegudger.com

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

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/anne.gudger

Get Anne’s Book: https://bit.ly/3nZIvEy

Write Your Grief Out: https://writeyourgriefout.thinkific.com/courses/writeyourgriefoutOct

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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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https://www.instagram.com/ronitplank/

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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