Courtney Kocak joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about her Hollywood misadventures, facing coercion and exploitation as a young woman, systemic structures we bump up against, fighting the patriarchy, having compassion for the girl she was, landing on essays as a place to stretch out on the page, not terrorizing the people we write about, making dialogue feel alive, book incubators, engaging with other writers and finding community, writing as a means to create opportunities for ourselves, forgiving our younger selves, writing our own rules, taking power back, and her new memoir Girl Gone Wild.

Ronit's upcoming workshop: Writing Dynamic Memoir: From Lived Experience to Gripping Story https://www.lmcmurtrylitcenter.org/workshops/writing-dynamic-memoir-from-lived-experience-to-gripping-story

Also in this episode:

Courtney Kocak is a writer, podcaster, and comedian who splits time between Austin and Los Angeles. She wrote for Amazon’s Emmy-winning animated series Danger & Eggs and Netflix’s Know It All. She’s produced a slew of highly-ranked podcasts and currently hosts three of her own with over two million downloads to date: Private Parts Unknown, about love and sexuality around the world, The Bleeders, about book writing and publishing, and Podcast Bestie, a best friend to podcasters trying to grow and monetize their shows (and a popular Substack). As a writer, her bylines include The New York Times, The Cut, The Washington Post, LA Times, Cosmopolitan, Slate, HuffPost, and more. Her debut memoir, Girl Gone Wild, with Trio House Press, is out now!

Connect with Courtney:

Website: https://www.courtneykocak.com/

Purchase Book via Bookshop:

Girl Gone Wild on Bookshop.org: https://bookshop.org/a/85623/9781949487541

-

Carol Odell joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about being methodically sexually groomed as a girl during her time working at a stable, sexual grooming as a slow desensitization process,  interrupting the patterns created from unprocessed trauma, including her experience as a therapist in her pages, trying to trace our behavior and thread the story in the narrative, taking risks and doing deeper work, the divisions within ourselves, writing self back into scenes we’ve emotionally splintered off from, recognizing ourselves as victims, hybrid publishing through She Writes Press, turning down the volume on critical self-talk, and her new memoir Girl Groomed: A Therapist’s Memoir of Trauma.

Ronit's upcoming workshop: Writing Dynamic Memoir: From Lived Experience to Gripping Story https://www.lmcmurtrylitcenter.org/workshops/writing-dynamic-memoir-from-lived-experience-to-gripping-story

Also in this episode:

Books mentioned in this episode: 

Connect with Carol:

Instagram: mosaicofthoughts_

-

Cinelle Barnes joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about her brain aneurism rupture, writing a memoir two years after brain surgery, the healing modality that is writing personal narrative, memoir as a palimpsest, having multiple memoirs, narrating from the perspective of the adult, choosing to be in a place of discovery, alternating timelines, offloading thoughts onto sticky notes, when writing becomes episodic and collage like, gratitude as fertilizer for the brain, holding onto our words and art to keep holding onto who we are, investigating the many selves within the self, and her new memoir A Way Home: A Memoir of Losing Yourself and the Beauty of Returning.

Ronit's upcoming workshop: Writing Dynamic Memoir: From Lived Experience to Gripping Story https://www.lmcmurtrylitcenter.org/workshops/writing-dynamic-memoir-from-lived-experience-to-gripping-story

Also in this episode:

-micromemoirs

-fostering neuroplasticity

-changing as we explore

Books mentioned in this episode: 

-Easy Beauty by Chloe Cooper Jones

-Mother Mary Comes to Me by Arundhati Roy

-The Man Who Could Move Clouds by Ingrid Contreras

Cinelle Barnes is the Philippine-born author of Monsoon Mansion: A Memoir, Malaya: Essays on Freedom, and A Way Home: A Memoir of Losing Yourself and the Beauty of Returning. She is also the editor of the New York Times “New and Noteworthy” A Measure of Belonging: Twenty-One Writers of Color on the New American South. Cinelle is a survivor of a brain aneurysm rupture and sits on the Brain Injury Leadership Council of South Carolina, and is the recipient of awards and fellowships from the Sustainable Arts Fund, the Authors League Fund, the National Endowment for the Arts, South Arts, and the North American Travel Journalists Association, among others. She has served on the jury panels for several literary awards, including the inaugural Pulitzer Prize for Memoir. Her writing has appeared in Coastal Living, Travel + Leisure, Buzzfeed, Catapult, Electric Literature, and Longreads, among others. Cinelle lives in Charleston, SC, with her husband, daughter, and cat. 

Connect with Cinelle:

Webiste: cinellebarnes.com

Instagram: @cinellebarnesbooks

Purchase Book via Bookshop:

https://bookshop.org/p/books/a-way-home-a-memoir-of-losing-yourself-and-the-beauty-of-returning-cinelle-barnes/1a3f1cce1c657294?ean=9781662510618&next=t

-

Amil Niazi joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about the pressure on children of immigrants, outsiderness, striving to change our circumstances, what happens to women in the workplace after becoming mothers, confronting misogyny and racism, The Hard Part - her series for The Cut, when people are threatened by ambition, avoiding the need to make memoir prescriptive, offering people perspective that is uniquely yours, sticking to our original vision, finding a way to get our books into the worlds, when work, motherhood, and ambition collide, the desire to have more, the journey of a life, and her new memoir Life After Ambition: A “Good Enough” Memoir.

Ronit's upcoming workshop: Writing Dynamic Memoir: From Lived Experience to Gripping Story https://www.lmcmurtrylitcenter.org/workshops/writing-dynamic-memoir-from-lived-experience-to-gripping-story

Books mentioned in this episode:

Amil Niazi is a writer and producer. She writes The Cut’s series on parenting, The Hard Part, and covers work and motherhood and how the two intersect. Her writing has also appeared in The New York Times, The Guardian, and The Washington Post.

Connect with Amil:

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

Ami Niazi’s column on The Cut: https://www.thecut.com/author/amil-niazi/

Life After Ambition: https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Life-After-Ambition/Amil-Niazi/9781668056035

-

Melisa Febos joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about romantic obsessions, celibacy as a portal to freedom, living her way into a corner and having to fight her way out, leading with scene and story and plot, taking back the sovereignty of her own mind and body, approaching oneself as a protagonist, leaving out what isn’t central to the story, remembering memoir is not a transcription of a time lived, radical feminists, exercising agency and self-reclamation, living an examined life, integrating memories that were indigestible to us in the moment, the project of looking at ourselves honestly, and her most recent book, now in paperback The Dry Season: A Memoir of Pleasure in a Year Without Sex.

Ronit's upcoming workshop: Writing Dynamic Memoir: From Lived Experience to Gripping Story https://www.lmcmurtrylitcenter.org/workshops/writing-dynamic-memoir-from-lived-experience-to-gripping-story

Also in this episode:

Books mentioned in this episode:

Melissa Febos is the national bestselling author of five books, including Abandon Me, Girlhood—which won the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism, Body Work: The Radical Power of Personal Narrative, and, most recently, The Dry Season. Her awards and fellowships include those from the Guggenheim Foundation, LAMBDA Literary, the National Endowment for the Arts, The British Library, The Black Mountain Institute, MacDowell, the Bogliasco Foundation, The American Library in Paris, and others. Her work has appeared in The Paris Review, The New Yorker, The Sun, The New York Times Magazine, The Best American Essays, Vogue, The Best American Travel and Food Writing, and New York Review of Books. Febos is a Roy J. Carver Professor at the University of Iowa, where she teaches in the Nonfiction Writing Program. She lives in Iowa City with her wife, the poet Donika Kelly.

Connect with Melissa:

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

https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-dry-season-a-memoir-of-pleasure-in-a-year-without-sex-melissa-febos/f1c8367d8e351d91?ean=9780593685150&next=t

In celebration of the launch of season 8, Jill Christman joins Let’s Talk Memoir to interview Ronit about growing up with no blueprint for making a relationship work, fending for ourselves in childhood, being driven by curiosity, writing about others with generosity and complexity, conveying to readers that we are not the only one, the use of speculation to move toward a deeper truth, the key to memoir structure, how the now-narrator reaches a hand back to help the character we were, finding a deeper empathy and understanding, opposite world, trying to look perfectly 1980s, trusting that our memories are trying to tell us something, and Ronit’s memoir When She Comes Back.

Ronit's upcoming in-person workshop: Writing Dynamic Memoir: From Lived Experience to Gripping Story: https://www.lmcmurtrylitcenter.org/workshops/writing-dynamic-memoir-from-lived-experience-to-gripping-story

Also in this episode:

-Swedish Fish

-The Love Boat

-being prologue girls

Books mentioned in this episode:

The Situation and the Story by Vivian Gornick

Notes of a Native Son by James Baldwin

Stop-Time by Frank Conroy

This Boy’s Life by Tobias Wolf

To Show and to Tell by Pilllip Lopate

Jill Christman bio and links:

Jill Christman is the author of The Heart Folds Early: A Memoir (released March 2026 from the University of Nebraska Press). Christman’s other books include If This Were Fiction: A Love Story in Essays (2023 Foreword INDIES Silver Winner), Darkroom: A Family Exposure (winner of AWP Prize for CNF), and Borrowed Babies: Apprenticing for Motherhood. Her essays have appeared in many anthologies and in magazines such as Brevity, Creative Nonfiction, Fourth Genre, Iron Horse Literary Review, Longreads, and O, The Oprah Magazine. A 2020 NEA Literature Fellow, she teaches at Ball State University and serves as editor of River Teeth: A Journal of Nonfiction Narrative and Beautiful Things (a weekly online magazine of micro nonfiction). Visit her at jillchristman.com.

Connect with Jill:

https://www.instagram.com/jillchristmanwriter

@jillchristman.bsky.social

jillchristman.com

Order for yourself and all your memoir-loving friends—directly from the University of Nebraska Press or your local independent or by using any of the handy links on my website. Use code 6AS26 for 40% off on any UNP book!

Ronit Plank bio and links: 

Ronit Plank is a writer, teacher, and editor whose work has appeared in The Atlantic, Poets & Writers, River Teeth’s Beautiful Things, The Rumpus, Salon, Hippocampus, The New York Times, and elsewhere, earning Best of the Net, Best Microfiction, and multiple Pushcart Prize nominations. Her memoir When She Comes Back was a Book Riot Best True Crime Book and Kirkus Reviews calls it, “An intimate, intuitive, emotionally vivid family account that finds hope in reconciliation". Ronit is also the author of the award-winning short story collection Home is a Made-Up Place, and her work has been anthologized in Selected Memories, Vol. 2: 15 Years of Hippocampus Magazine and Manna Songs: Stories of Jewish Culture and Heritage. Ronit is the Creative Nonfiction Editor at The Citron Review, teaches memoir at a host of venues including the University of Washington’s Continuum Program, Antioch University, and 92NY’s Roundtable, and is host of the podcast Let’s Talk Memoir and the Substack Let’s Talk Memoir. Find her on social media @ronitplank

Website: www.ronitplank.com

Substack: https://substack.com/@ronitplank

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

When She Comes Back: https://ronitplank.com/when-she-comes-back/

Timothy Schraeder Rodriguez joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about  going through almost a decade of conversion therapy, dismantling the dogma of pseudo science with its added layer of spiritual discipline, feeling desperate to change, yearning for a place to belong, keeping faith without losing soul, holding onto journals with the sense of using them someday, the difficulty of having to revisit traumatic experiences, weaving in dark humor, being a present-day witness to the past and honoring the more innocent, naive version of ourselves, getting sober and writing from a place of peace, making discoveries in the memoir-writing process, the importance of platform for nonfiction authors, being present and active on social media before our memoirs  come out, being a queer person of faith, loving the present day person we’ve become, and his new memoir Conversion Therapy Dropout: A Queer Story of Faith and Belonging.

Ronit's upcoming workshop: Writing Dynamic Memoir: From Lived Experience to Gripping Story: https://www.lmcmurtrylitcenter.org/workshops/writing-dynamic-memoir-from-lived-experience-to-gripping-story

Also in this episode:

Books mentioned in this episode:

Timothy Schraeder Rodriguez spent almost a decade in gay conversion therapy—all while working behind the scenes at some of the most influential Evangelical Christian megachurches. After embracing his identity as a gay Christian and stepping away from church work, he co-founded Church Clarity, an organization that helps queer people find affirming faith communities.

His story and work have been featured by BBC Newshour, TIME, NBC, VICE, The Washington Post, Huffington Post, and Religion News Service. Born in the Midwest, he now calls New York City home, where he continues his work as a writer, digital strategist, and advocate for queer people of faith. His first book is Conversion Therapy Dropout: A Queer Story of Faith and Belonging.

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/timothy.s.rodriguez

Threads: https://www.threads.com/@timothy.s.rodriguez

Tik Tok: https://www.tiktok.com/@timothy.s.rodriguez

Substack: https://timothysrodriguez.substack.com

–

Subscribe to Ronit’s Substack: https://substack.com/@ronitplank

Dr. Craig Yorke joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about the toll of centuries of bigotry, being consumed by race, growing up with psychological financial desperation, living other people’s lives, rethinking what Black studies are, processing shame, shedding identities assigned to us, the use of memory for liberation, being ruthless in our writing and revision process, the steep climb toward clarifying ourselves, bringing neuroscience to life, inviting people to wake up to how our history has controlled us, delighting in surprise, and his new memoir: STEEP: A Black Neurosurgeon's Journey.

Ronit's upcoming workshop: Writing Dynamic Memoir: From Lived Experience to Gripping Story: https://www.lmcmurtrylitcenter.org/workshops/writing-dynamic-memoir-from-lived-experience-to-gripping-story

Also in this episode:

Books mentioned in this episode:

After a neurosurgical residency at the University of California at San Francisco, he and his wife Mary found their way to an unlikely destination. He practiced in Topeka, Kansas, for 25 years, wrestling with his history and the armored identity it had imposed. He and Mary raised two admirable boys, Zack who lives in Brooklyn and Chris who calls Seattle home.

Dr. Yorke brews coffee for two each morning in the colonial home they’ve occupied for 33 years. He’s a credible violinist, having played the Bruch G Minor concerto with the Boston Pops at 17, and hits tennis balls with passion. Steep is his first book.

Connect with Craig:

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=61570269755209

Purchase book:

https://bookshop.org/p/books/steep-a-black-neurosurgeon-s-journey-craig-yorke/c5808fe0489a778c?ean=9781953583987&next=t&aid=107402&listref=our-authors-books

–

After four years of Let’s Talk Memoir, I wanted to take a moment to thank you for being here and share a few exciting updates about what’s ahead for the podcast.

–

Monica Macansantos joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about organizing her collection of essays around her father’s very sudden and unexpected passing, not being sure she could write again, when common themes begin to emerge, connecting with loved ones through writing, recognizing and exploring complicated relationships with a home town and home country, feeling othered, the literary scene in the Phillipines, how writing takes a level of privilege, modeling literary citizenship, deepening our narrative journeys and allowing ourselves to go places we didn’t plan, growing up in a colonized land, leaning into the discomfort of writing, giving shape to grief, taking risks, and her new essay collection Returning to My Father’s Kitchen.

Ronit’s in-person Fall Workshop - Writing Dynamic Memoir: From Lived Experience to Gripping Story  https://www.lmcmurtrylitcenter.org/workshops/writing-dynamic-memoir-from-lived-experience-to-gripping-story

Also in this episode:

Books mentioned in this episode:

Monica Macansantos is the author of the essay collection, Returning to My Father's Kitchen (Curbstone/Northwestern University Press, 2025), and the story collection, Love and Other Rituals (Grattan Street Press, 2022). She was a 2024-25 Shearing Fellow with the Black Mountain Institute in Las Vegas, and a 2025 Marguerite & Lamar Smith Fellow with the Carson McCullers Center in Columbus, Georgia. Her work has recently appeared in Electric Lit, River Styx, Lit Hub, Bennington Review, and Poor Yorick, among others. Her honors include a James A. Michener Fellowship from the University of Texas at Austin, and residencies from Hedgebrook, the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts, the Storyknife Writers Retreat, the I-Park Foundation, and Monson Arts. 

Connect with Monica:

Website: https://monicamacansantos.com

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

Bluesky: @missmacansantos.bsky.social

Purchase Book:

Purchase Returning to My Father's Kitchen from Northwestern University Press: https://nupress.northwestern.edu/9780810148390/returning-to-my-fathers-kitchen/

Or from Bookshop: https://bookshop.org/p/books/returning-to-my-father-s-kitchen-essays-monica-macansantos/8c4605e505fd4de8?ean=9780810148390&next=t&next=t

Or from Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Returning-My-Fathers-Kitchen-Essays/dp/0810148390/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0

–