Let’s Talk Memoir

Stephen Policoff joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about the tragic death of his beloved wife and his older daughter Anna within the space of about 3 years, caring for Anna who had a rare lysosomal storage disorder known as Niemann-Pick disease, making sure both his wife and daughter came across as being more than just victims of terrible illnesses, the way memory works, writing a memoir in 3-4 months, drafting the whole manuscript and then revising, writing about how the world saw his daughter,  juggling hope with despair, figuring out how to go on, and his memoir A Ribbon for Your Hair: Loss. More Loss. And How We (Sort of) Went On.

Books mentioned in this episode:

Facebook: Stephen Policoff

Purchase Book:

https://bookshop.org/p/books/a-ribbon-for-your-hair-stephen-policoff

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Ronit’s writing has appeared in The Atlantic, The Rumpus, The New York Times, Poets & Writers, 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 teaches memoir through the University of Washington's Online Continuum Program and also independently. She launched Let's Talk Memoir in 2022, lives in Seattle with her family of people and dogs, and is at work on her next book.

More about Ronit: https://ronitplank.com

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

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

https://www.facebook.com/RonitPlank

https://bsky.app/profile/ronitplank.bsky.social

Patricia Knight Meyer joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about being a Black Market Baby during the Baby Scoop Era, coming to terms with adoption trauma, the consequences of growing up without identification, mothers who were shamed into relinquishment, solving the mystery of her birth and adoption, bringing awareness to the adoption industry and her advocacy work, the mistakes she feels she made in reunion, realizing she was in a codependent relationship with her raising mother, finding her birth father, generational trauma, not reducing the people in our memoirs to heroes and villains, learning not to send our manuscripts out too soon, creating her own imprint, pivoting from querying agents to indie presses and her new book WONDERLAND: Memoir of a Black-Market Adoption.

Also in this episode:

- birth father rights

-including the darker aspects of a story

-debunking adoption as a win-win situation

Books mentioned in this episode:

-Who is a Worthy Mother by Rebecca Wellington

-The Art of Memoir by Mary Karr

-The Liar’s Club by Mary Karr

-Educated by Tara Westover

-Wavewalker by Suzanne Heywood

Patricia Knight Meyer is an author, speaker, and adoption reform advocate. She was trafficked as an infant along a Texas hospital curb in 1970. No agency. No judge. No paperwork. Never legally adopted, she did not receive her first legally obtained birth certificate until 47 years old. Patricia tells this story in her debut memoir, WONDERLAND: Memoir of a Black-Market Adoption (Unsolicited Press, November 3, 2026). The book arrives as an IndieReader Award Winner in True Crime. 

She serves on the board of the National Association of Adoptees and Parents (NAAP), where she hosts the monthly NAAP Happy Hour. Her blog, My Adopted Life, reaches a large community of adoptees and advocates. Patricia has appeared on Al Jazeera’s The Stream and HuffPost Live. Her essays have been published in Ms. Magazine, Severance Magazine, Narrative Arc, and Kinsmen Quarterly.

Connect with Patricia:

WONDERLAND memoir page: https://myadoptedlife.com/wonderland-the-memoir/

Book website: https://www.wonderlandthememoir.com

Audiobook on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/7EZEbVZQAAFVyeaDvcnG2i

Free livestream, Nov 6: Down the Rabbit Hole: The Fight for Texas Adoptee Rights Then and Now. A scene from WONDERLAND unfolds live on stage, followed by a panel on the fight to open Texas adoptees' birth certificates. https://bit.ly/TXADOPTEERIGHTS

My Adopted Life: https://www.myadoptedlife.com

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

Instagram (book): https://www.instagram.com/wonderlandthememoir

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

TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@myadoptedlife

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@myadoptedlife

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/patricia-ann-meyer

Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/myadoptedlife.bsky.social

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Ronit’s writing has appeared in The Atlantic, The Rumpus, The New York Times, Poets & Writers, 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 teaches memoir through the University of Washington's Online Continuum Program and also independently. She launched Let's Talk Memoir in 2022, lives in Seattle with her family of people and dogs, and is at work on her next book.

More about Ronit: https://ronitplank.com

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

Amy Irvine joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about maternal lineage and what gets handed down to us, exploring the impact of our women ancestors, feeling trapped by motherhood, reckoning with and disrupting deep cultural conditioning, living a remote life and how much of that world is not good for women, coping with undiagnosed postpartum depression, making meaning without appropriating other cultures, carrying stories of harm in our bodies, fearing we’ve passed trauma down to our children, writing the natural world, capturing wildness, rewilding ourselves, widening the lens on our story, and her new memoir Almost Animal: A Memoir of Motherhood, Wildness, and the American West.

Also in this episode:

-plural marriage

-reframing history

-feeling stalked by Mormon ancestors

Books mentioned in this episode:

-What My Bones Know by Stephanie Foo

-Soil: The Story of a Black Mother’s Garden by Camille Dungy

-The Bear River Massacre: A Shoshone History by Darren Parry

-In the Eye of the Wild by Natsassja Martin

Amy Irvine is a sixth-generation Utahn who descends from the first Mormons to occupy the West. Her memoir Trespass: Living at the Edge of the Promised Land received the Orion Book Award and the Colorado Book Award. Her second book, Desert Cabal: A New Season in the Wilderness, is a feminist response to Edward Abbey’s Desert Solitaire, and during lockdown, Pam Houston and Irvine coauthored the epistolary Air Mail: Letters of Politics, Pandemics, and Place. Irvine’s essays have appeared in both The Best American Science & Nature Writing and The Best American Food Writing, as well as Orion, Outside, High Country News, Lit Hub, and Backpacker. She lives and writes on a remote mesa in southwest Colorado. Her memoir, ALMOST ANIMAL: MOTHERHOOD, WILDNESS AND THE AMERICAN WEST will be released on November 10th by Spiegel & Grau.

Connect with Amy:

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/amy.irvine.90295

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/junipergirl44/

Get the book: https://bookshop.org/p/books/almost-animal-a-memoir-of-motherhood-wildness-and-the-american-west-amy-irvine/b60f8eb9877eec31?ean=9781966302384

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Ronit’s writing has appeared in The Atlantic, The Rumpus, The New York Times, Poets & Writers, 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 teaches memoir through the University of Washington's Online Continuum Program and also independently. She launched Let's Talk Memoir in 2022, lives in Seattle with her family of people and dogs, and is at work on her next book.

More about Ronit: https://ronitplank.com

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

Karson Brown joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about crossing the Atlantic ocean on a 34-foot sailboat from Portugal when she was 29 years old, the 13 years it took to put her story into book form, the learning process of becoming a writer, offering a little more for readers and less for ourselves, staying focused on our throughline and honoring what memoir is, not sacrificing and abandoning our intuition, getting offers from 3 indie publishers, discovering how to slow down and sit with ourselves during the writing process, and her new memoir 48 Days to Barbados.

Also in this episode:

- not giving up

- memoir as opposed to journaling

- when our tactic becomes silence

Books mentioned in this episode:

Bird by Bird by Anne Lammott

West with the Night by Beryl Markham

The Bean Trees Barbara Kingsolver

Books by Joyce Maynard

Books by Alexandra Fuller

Books by Joan Didion

Karson Brown grew up sailing and living aboard boats in the Pacific Northwest. She turned twenty-one on a fishing vessel in the Bering Sea and crossed the Atlantic Ocean before turning thirty. Karson raised her two children along the shores of Vashon Island surrounded by a menagerie of critters. She is a writer, photographer, artist, and lifelong devotee of water. Karson is an alumna of Joyce Maynards, “Write By The Lake Workshop,” in Guatemala. She has four stories included in the Vine Leaves Press 50 Give or Take anthologies. She currently resides in the Pacific Northwest. 48 Days to Barbados is her debut memoir and will be released by Red Fern Press October 20, 2026.

Connect with Karson:

Website: karsonbrownarts.com

Instagram @ekarsonbrown

Facebook: Karson Brown 

TikTok: @karsonbrown71

Purchase Book: 

https://bookshop.org/beta-search?bkshp-astro=t&keywords=48+days+to+Barbados

Jo-Anne Berelowitz joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about cultural displacement and longing for home, exploring the experience of Jews in South Africa, struggling with heritage, having origins in a country drawn along racist lines, feeling you need to be exportable to survive, dislodging a parent from a pedestal, establishing dynamics and patterns early in a memoir, developing the skills to tell an extended narrative, writing about ourselves in the third person, diving into a history she had once suppressed, and her new memoir Somewhere I Belong: A Story of Country, Family, Home, and Jewish Identity.

Also in this episode: 

 - going with an independent publisher

- trying to leave siblings out of a memoir

- prejudice in the publishing world about Jewish writers

Books mentioned in this episode:

Middlemarch by George Eliot

Daniel Deronda by Geroge Eliot

Zakhor by Yosef Yerushalmi

Reading Writing and Leaving Home by Lynn Freed

Jo-Anne Berelowitz is a writer and art historian whose work explores identity, family, cultural displacement, and longing for home. Born and raised in Durban, South Africa, she emigrated to California in 1977, earned her MA in Art History from Stanford University, her PhD from the University of California at Los Angeles, and her MFA in Creative Writing with an emphasis on nonfiction from the Rainier Writing Workshop. She was, for many years, senior art historian at San Diego State University. Her art history essays have appeared in Genders, Society and Space, The Oxford Art Journal, The Journal of Modern Jewish Studies, The Canadian Journal of Comparative Literature, and elsewhere. In 2018, she was awarded the Wabash Prize for Literary Nonfiction. She now resides in Austin, Texas.

Connect with Jo-Ann:

Website: https://www.joanneberelowitz.com

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

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

Matt Fogelson joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about coming to grips with the death of his father, the struggle to not pass down the emotional distance he grew up with to his own son, grabbing emotions from scenes and seeing what germinates, finding the forward momentum and narrative drive for our memoirs, when clarity comes later, putting a parent on a pedestal, recognizing our behavior and changing the dynamic, trying to be emotionally present when we’re physically present, living without self-imposed constraints, searching for universal kernels in our work, using core themes as guideposts and touchstones, and his new memoir Restrung: Fatherhood in a Different Key.

 Also mentioned in this episode: 

Matt Fogelson is the author of the memoir Restrung: Fatherhood in a Different Key. His work has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, and TIME. He writes the Substack newsletter Fine Tuning, about music, memory, and parenting.

Connect with Matt: 

Substack: https://mattfogelson.substack.com/

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

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/matt-fogelson-94200895/

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

Kate Jackson joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about discovering the family you were raised in was not what you thought, mourning the life we didn’t get a chance to live, writing about the missing, if wholeness is possible, longing for family, how unknowing can be bewildering and shame inducing, when our identity flips, genetic privilege, untangling threads, writing like no one is reading, facing repercussions for telling our story, what we have permission to say, feeling we can own our story, and her new collection of 28 literary essays by adoptees, donor-conceived people, others who’ve learned about misattributed parentage Relative Strangers: Inheritance, Identity, and the Meaning of Kinship.

October 2026 book events for Relative Strangers: https://bkjacksonwriter.com/events/

Also in this episode:

-untangling threads

-when agents ghost

-simultaneously working on two projects

Books mentioned in this episode:

-On Writing by Stephen King

-Still Writing by Dani Shapiro

-Thinking About Memoir by Abigail Thomas 

-Permission by Elissa Altmen

-Mothers of Sparta by Dawn Davies

-This Boys Life by Tobias Flynn

-And When Did You Last See Your Father by Blake Morrison

-Nick Flynn’s memoirs

B.K. (Kate) Jackson is an author; a developmental editor and certified book coach; and a journalist with bylines in HuffPost, The Los Angeles Times, The Sun, SurvivorLit, Whale Road Review, Hippocampus Magazine, WIRED, and more. She earned a BA and an MA from UCLA. Kate is the founder and editor of Severance (severancemag.com)—a magazine and community for adoptees and individuals who’ve discovered misattributed parentage. She’s the editor of the anthology Relative Strangers: Inheritance, Identity, and the Meaning of Kinship, and she's revising a memoir about maternal abandonment and family secrets. She lives in Milford, Pennsylvania. Find her at www.bkjacksonwriter.com; creativelyadhd.substack.com; and halfasorrow.substack.com.

Connect with Kate:

Website: www.bkjacksonwriter.com

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/b.k.jackson/

X: https://x.com/jaxbkjax

Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/bkjackson.bsky.social

Threads: https://www.threads.com/@b.k.jackson

Substack: https://substack.com/@bkjackson877028

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/kate.b.jackson/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/b-k-kate-jackson-50a6571b0/

Purchase Book:

www.bkjacksonwriter.com/book

Suzanne Roberts joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about why writing prompts are so powerful, images that haunt us, avoiding revenge prose, revising to create a rounded character, writing our truth, getting better at dialogue, how to navigate AI, the joy of creating something from start to finish, writing about family and friends, writing about our bodies, building writing community, how reading time is writing time, enjoying exploration, essay as immediate gratification while writing memoir, making stories from shame, and her new multi-genre craft book divided by theme 52 Writing Prompts: Inspiration for Writers.

 Suzanne’s first Let’s Talk Memoir interview:

https://ronitplank.com/2023/02/28/lets-talk-memoir-season-2-episode-16-ft-suzanne-roberts/

Camille Dungy’s Let’s Talk Memoir interview: https://ronitplank.com/2023/05/02/lets-talk-memoir-episode-41-ft-camille-t-dungy/

Also in this episode:

-reading broadly and deeply

-memoir as a gift to the universe

-writing for hands and hearts you cannot see

Books mentioned in this episode:

- The Art of Death by Edwidge Danticat

- The Art of Description by Mark Doty

- The Art of Time in Memoir by Sven Birkerts

- Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott

- Imaginative Writing: The Elements of Craft by Janet Burroway

- The Situation and the Story by Vivian Gornick 

- The Triggering Town by Richard Hugo

- I Would Die if I Were You by Emily Rapp Black

- The Art of Memoir by Mary Karr

- Big Magic by Elizabeth Gilbert

- Tell it Slant by Brenda Miller

- Negotiating with the Dead: A Writer on Writing by Margaret Atwood

- The Writing Life by Annie Dillard 

Suzanne Roberts is the author of the essay collection Animal Bodies: On Death, Desire, and Other Difficulties, the memoir-in-essays Bad Tourist: Misadventures in Love and Travel, and the memoir Almost Somewhere: Twenty-Eight Days on the John Muir Trail, four full-length poetry collections, and a creative writing craft book: 52 Writing Prompts: Inspiration for the Creative Writer (October 2026, The University of Nebraska Press). Named “The Next Great Travel Writer” by National Geographic’s Traveler, Suzanne’s work has been listed as notable in Best American Essays and included in The Best Women’s Travel Writing. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, CNN, National Geographic Traveler, Ploughshares, Creative Nonfiction, Brevity, The Rumpus, The Fourth Genre, and elsewhere. She holds a doctorate in literature and the environment from the University of Nevada-Reno and lives in South Lake Tahoe, California. More information may be found on her website: www.suzanneroberts.net

Website: www.suzanneroberts.net

IG: @suzanneroberts28

X: suzannneroberts

FB: https://www.facebook.com/suzanne.roberts.798/

BSky: @suzanneroberts

Here are the links Suzanne’s books:

https://www.nebraskapress.unl.edu/nebraska/9781496239563/52-writing-prompts/

https://www.nebraskapress.unl.edu/nebraska/9781496231024/animal-bodies/

https://www.nebraskapress.unl.edu/bison-books/9781496236920/almost-somewhere/

https://www.nebraskapress.unl.edu/nebraska/9781496222848/bad-tourist/

Jamie Leigh Lorente joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about not getting to know her biological father who emigrated from Cuba during the Cold War from Cuba as an unaccompanied minor until the end of his life, how we learn to understand and accept one another despite our cultural differences, evolving as a writer and human as we write memoir, being able to comfort and repair the different versions of ourselves, coming of age and being safe, experimenting with alternating points of view to increase compassion and empathy, discovering a softening toward men, feeling too vulnerable to share a story, the existential fear of exile from our communities, loving each other despite our conflicts, the memoir writing process allowing us to get closer to loved ones, returning to and forgiving our authentic selves, and her new memoir My Three Fathers.

Also in this episode:

-complex trauma

-Jungian empty chair exercise

-mentally preparing to let a story out into the world

Books mentioned in this episode:

Clam Down by Anelise Chen

Family Trouble: Memoirists on the Hazards and Rewards of Revealing Family edited by Joy Castro

Writing Down the Bones by Natalie Goldberg

Her by Christa Parravani

Jamie Leigh Lorente is a Cuban-American writer, veteran, and advocate. She writes to reclaim the body and reframe the narrative of survival. Her work appears in My Teeth Don’t Chew on Shrapnel, the Anthology of Veterans Writing, Afterwords: The Real Me, and Poetic Prosthesis: Trauma and Language in Contemporary Veterans’ Writing (Edinburgh University Press, 2022). She teaches writing at San Francisco Film School and facilitates veteran writing workshops. Her short documentary, My Body Is explores the healing power of poetry. https://vimeo.com/1013310340?share=copy

Connect with Jamie:

Website: www.jamieleighlorente.com. (not live yet) 

Instagram: jamie_leigh_lorente

Substack: Jamie Leigh Lorente @jamieleighlorente

Deborah Derrickson Kossmann joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about how complicated family dynamics culminated in her mother’s severe hoarding disorder, grieving what you didn’t get as a child, going back to rescue the past, sharing family secrets, recognizing shame in loved ones, telling a story in a fair way, how anger is a shortcut, waiting until someone has passed to write about them, how editing makes us better writers, recognizing when there is an emotional piece missing, wanting a memoir to read propulsively, keeping narrative arc in mine, and her memoir LOST FOUND KEPT.

Also in this episode:

-trying to be fair and accurate

-thinking about your book as a reader

-the important work of publishing and promotion

Books mentioned in this episode:

-The Memory Police by Yoko Ogawa

-Writers and Lovers by Lily King

Deborah Derrickson Kossmann won Trio House Press's inaugural 2023 Aurora Polaris Creative Nonfiction Award for LOST FOUND KEPT: A MEMOIR (January 2025). Book Pages named it one of the Best Memoirs of 2025. She is currently working on a new book COMPLICATIONS OF CAPTIVITY.

Deb’s humorous essays have appeared several times as “Modern Love” columns in The New York Times and her story about her relationship with the world’s oldest captive gorilla appeared in the “Opinionator” section of that newspaper. Her poetry, essays and feature articles have been published in Bellevue Literary Review, Nashville Review, Memoir Monday, Rhino, Tiferet, Psychotherapy Networker, and PSYCHE, to name a few. She was the winner of the Short Memoir Competition at the Philadelphia First Person Arts Festival and has received a Poetry Fellowship from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts.

A clinical psychologist in private practice, she lives in Havertown with her husband and Sofia Carmela, a cat with a whole lot of “tortitude.” 

Connect with Deborah: 

Website: lostfoundkept.com

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/drdebkossmann/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/people/Deb-Derrickson-Kossmann/61562692720716/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/deb.derricksonkossmann

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

Substack: https://debderricksonkossmann.substack.com/

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