Let’s Talk Memoir

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

 

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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
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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

 

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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

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: 
- writing during the pandemic
- fatherhood and emotional intimacy
- creating a memoir from a collection of essays

Books mentioned in this episode:
- Angelea’s Ashes by Frank McCourt
- Wild by Cheryl Strayed
- Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls
- The Liars Club by Mary Karr
- Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry

 

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: 
Website: https://www.mattfogelson.com/

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

–
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

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

 

–
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

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/

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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