50. Discovering the Narrative Voice Your Memoir Needs featuring Heather Lanier

Heather Lanier joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about finding the psychic distance and narrative voice your memoir needs, writing about our children, defying the tyranny of normal, personal narratives for social change, excavating our own ableism, blogs vs. literary essays, avoiding self-pity, and Raising a Rare Girl, her memoir of parenting a child with a rare syndrome.

Also in this episode:

-Revealing the ‘ugly’ side of ourselves on the page

-The right we have to tell our stories

-How narratives begin with voice

Books mentioned in this episode:

Stranger Care by Sarah Sentilles

Heavy by Kiese Laymon

Heather Lanier is the author of the poetry collection, Psalms of Unknowing (Monkfish Publishing 2023) as well as the memoir, Raising a Rare Girl (Penguin Press 2020), a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice. Her work has appeared in Salon, The Sun, The Atlantic, The Wall Street Journal, Longreads, McSweeney’s, TIME, and elsewhere. She works as an assistant professor of creative writing at Rowan University, and her TED talk has been viewed three million times and translated into 18 languages.

Connect with Heather:

Twitter: twitter.com/heatherklanier

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

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

Website: https://heatherlanierwriter.com

Heather’s new poetry book: https://bookshop.org/p/books/psalms-of-unknowing-poems/19664834?ean=9781958972069

Heather’s Memoir: https://bookshop.org/p/books/raising-a-rare-girl-heather-lanier/13330911?ean=9780525559658

"Rules for Writing about Fiona." https://starinhereye.wordpress.com/2016/08/12/rules-for-writing-about-fiona/

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Ronit Plank is a writer, teacher, and editor whose work has been featured in The Atlantic, The Washington Post, The New York Times, Writer’s Digest, The Rumpus, American Literary Review, Hippocampus, The Iowa 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 a 2021 Best True Crime Book by Book Riot and was a Finalist in the National Indie Excellence Awards, the Housatonic Book Awards, and the Book of the Year Awards. Her fiction and creative nonfiction have been nominated for Pushcart Prizes, the Best of the Net, and the Best Microfiction Anthology, and her short story collection HOME IS A MADE-UP PLACE won Hidden River Arts’ Eludia Award. She is creative nonfiction editor at The Citron Review and lives in Seattle with her family where she is working on her next book.

More about Ronit: https://ronitplank.com

Sign up for monthly podcast and writing updates: https://bit.ly/33nyTKd

Follow on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ronitplank/

More about WHEN SHE COMES BACK, a memoir: https://ronitplank.com/book/

More about HOME IS A MADE-UP PLACE, a short story collection: https://ronitplank.com/home-is-a-made-up-place/

Connect with Ronit:

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

https://twitter.com/RonitPlank

https://www.facebook.com/RonitPlank

Background photo: Canva

Headshot photo credit: Sarah Anne Photography

Theme music: Isaac Joel, Dead Moll’s Fingers