165. Writing About Disability on a Granular Level featuring Margaret Anne Mary Moore

Margaret Anne Mary Moore joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about her realization at an early age that she wanted to be a nonfiction writer and memoirist, facing severe discrimination as a child with disabilities, how she wrote about her disability experience on a granular level, using a communication device, taking breaks to work on other aspects of a project when the writing process grows tiresome, devoting chapters to a single theme, striving to make characterizations rich in detail, looking at rejection juxtaposed against life circumstances, how traumatic memories get seared into our memory, compassion and acceptance, and her memoir Bold, Brave, and Breathless: Reveling in Childhood's Splendiferous Glories While Facing Disability and Loss.

Margaret’s Brevity blog article link: https://brevity.wordpress.com/2024/12/23/who-gets-a-spot-on-the-river/

Also in this episode:

-hermit crab forms

-writing sharp scenes

-embodied writing

Books mentioned in this episode:

The Mindful Writer by Dinty W. Moore

The Shell Game by Kim Adrian

Congratulations, Who Are You Again? by Harrison Scott Key

Margaret Anne Mary Moore is the author of the bestselling disability memoir Bold, Brave, and Breathless: Reveling in Childhood's Splendiferous Glories While Facing Disability and Loss (Woodhall Press, 2023) and is currently writing the sequel. She is a summer 2022 graduate of Fairfield University’s Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing Program, where she earned a degree in creative nonfiction and poetry. Margaret is an editor and the marketing coordinator at Woodhall Press and an ambassador for PRC-Saltillo. A featured book on the AWP Bookshelf, Bold, Brave, and Breathless is her debut book. She is a contributor to Gina Barreca’s book Fast Famous Women: 75 Essays of Flash Nonfiction (Woodhall Press, 2025). Her writing has appeared in America Magazine, Brevity’s Nonfiction Blog, and Kairos: A Journal of Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy, Independent Catholic News among other publications.

Connect with Margaret:

Website: margaretannemarymoore.com Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/margaretannemarymooreauthor/ X: https://x.com/mooreofawriter Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/margaretannemarymoore_author LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/margaret-moore-m-f-a-86835312a/ Good Reads: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/29567595.Margaret_Anne_Mary_Moore Book: https://a.co/d/b0VZ8Mk

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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

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Background photo credit: Photo by Patrick Tomasso on Unsplash

Headshot photo credit: Sarah Anne Photography

Theme music: Isaac Joel, Dead Moll’s Fingers