170. Reverse Outlining for Emotional Resonance and Hammering Out a Narrative Arc featuring Bonny Reichert

Bonny Reichert joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about not knowing if she’d find a way to tell the story that weighed on her, growing up in the shadow of traumatic family history, selling on proposal and working out the boundaries of a book, her background as a food journalist, hammering out the details of the narrative arc, eliminating the squishy middle, reverse outlining for emotional resonance, creating composite characters, telling a story through food, crafting the self as a character, shortening chapters for flexibility, drawing the complexity and sense of beauty and wonder around her father’s story of surviving the Holocaust, and her memoir How to Share an Egg.

Also in this episode:

-food as glue

-writing a culinary memoir wrapped around a family story

-the toll of intergenerational trauma

Books mentioned in this episode:

-Also a Poet:Frank O’Hara, My Father, and Me by Ada Calhoun

-H is for Hawk by Helen McDonald

-Tender at the Bone by Ruth Reichl

Bonny Reichert is a National Magazine Award-winning journalist. She has been an editor at Today’s Parent and Chatelaine magazines, and a columnist and regular contributor to The Globe and Mail newspaper. When she turned forty, a now-or-never feeling made her quit her job to enroll in culinary school, and she’s been exploring her relationship with food on the page ever since. Bonny was born in Edmonton, Alberta, and lives in Toronto with her husband and little dog, Bruno. HOW TO SHARE AN EGG won the 2022 Dave Greber Book Award for social justice writing.

Connect with Bonny:

Website: https://bonnyreichert.com/

Instagram: https://instagram.com/bonnyreichert

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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

Follow Ronit:

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

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https://bsky.app/profile/ronitplank.bsky.social

Background photo credit: Photo by Patrick Tomasso on Unsplash

Headshot photo credit: Sarah Anne Photography

Theme music: Isaac Joel, Dead Moll’s Fingers