260. Returning to and Forgiving Our Authentic Selves featuring Jamie Leigh Lorente

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

– 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

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