238. Being Clear on Why We’re Showing Up to Tell This Story Now featuring Jill Christman

238. Being Clear on Why We’re Showing Up to Tell This Story Now featuring Jill Christman

Jill Christman joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about contextualizing a memoir in a post-Roe world, what it means to make a choice as mothers, ending a pregnancy, knowing you will write about an experience while it is happening, writing about childhood sexual abuse, returning to a manuscript with your skirt on fire, writing to a point of discovery, putting down our self-defense and having to be fully, fully vulnerable, getting clear on why we’re showing up to tell this story now, and her new memoir The Heart Folds Early.

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:

-writing in present tense

-not casting judgment on others

-how an imaginary choice is not a choice

Books mentioned in this episode:

Love Works Like This by Lauren Slater

The Book of Knowledge and Wonder By Steven Harvey

Crossed Over: A Murder, a Memoir by Beverly Lowry

In the Dream House by Carmen Maria Maha

A Grief Observed by C.S. Lewis

The Light of the World by Elizabeth Alexander

Safekeeping by Abigail Thomas

An Exact Replica of a Figment of my Imagination by Elizabeth McCracken

Jill Christman’s recent articles on writing:

1. “Writing the Tooth—Or, How to Find Big Ideas in Tiny Things.” Assay: A Journal of Nonfiction Studies. https://www.assayjournal.com/jill-christman-writing-the-toothmdashor-how-to-find-big-ideas-in-tiny-things-assay-122.html

2. “Three Takes on a Jump.” https://riverteethjournal.com/river_revisted/river-teeth-classics-three-takes-on-a-jump/

3. “Tacking: A Sailor’s Guide to Writing Against the Wind.” Writer’s Digest,https://www.writersdigest.com/tacking-a-sailors-guide-to-writing-against-the-wind

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’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

Jaksot(243)

237. Creating Immediacy in Our Narratives Through Contained Timeframes and Present Tense featuring Mimi Nichter

237. Creating Immediacy in Our Narratives Through Contained Timeframes and Present Tense featuring Mimi Nichter

Mimi Nichter joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about being hijacked on a plane when she was twenty years old in the first incident of international terrorism, how we can be socialized into si...

21 Huhti 37min

236. Listening to Our Own Language and Going Where We Need to Go featuring Rachel Tzvia Back

236. Listening to Our Own Language and Going Where We Need to Go featuring Rachel Tzvia Back

Rachel Tzvia Back joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about living with depression, losing a sister, when a mother is emotionally and psychologically absent, how myths can be cloaks, listening ...

16 Huhti 38min

235. Searching for a Universal Truth in Your Memoir featuring Julie Scolnik

235. Searching for a Universal Truth in Your Memoir featuring Julie Scolnik

Julie Scolnick joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about falling madly in love with a married Frenchman when she was 20 years old and living in Paris studying music, working our way back from a...

14 Huhti 30min

234. Knowing When a Structure has Clicked in Place featuring Stephanie Weaver

234. Knowing When a Structure has Clicked in Place featuring Stephanie Weaver

Stephanie Weaver MPH joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about family estrangement, gaslighting, her recovered memories of childhood sexual abuse, chronic illness, not wanting a book to be abou...

9 Huhti 36min

233. Revealing the Divisions and Truths Within Us featuring Nikkya Hargrove

233. Revealing the Divisions and Truths Within Us featuring Nikkya Hargrove

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7 Huhti 31min

232. Self-Compassion and Recognizing the Illusion of Control featuring Amanda McCracken

232. Self-Compassion and Recognizing the Illusion of Control featuring Amanda McCracken

Amanda McCracken joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about what happens when you’re hopelessly, stubbornly in love with longing, fear of intimacy, the idea of falling in love vs. being in love,...

31 Maalis 34min

231. Recovering and Reclaiming the Teenage Version of Ourselves in Memoir featuring Wendy C. Ortiz

231. Recovering and Reclaiming the Teenage Version of Ourselves in Memoir featuring Wendy C. Ortiz

Wendy C. Ortiz joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about the English teacher who preyed on her when she was thirteen, writing about the person we are now when writing about our past, placing th...

24 Maalis 35min

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