Let’s Talk Memoir

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 – 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

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: Website: https://www.amyirvine.com/ 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 – 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

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   – 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

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   – 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