172. Doing the Unfinished Business of Raising Ourselves featuring Daria Burke

Daria Burke joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about sharing her journey out of Detroit where she was raised in poverty and the question that inspired her memoir, writing well and being well while writing, running away from the past, writing deeply and with courage, refusing to believe in inevitability, doing the unfinished business of raising ourselves, surviving the retelling of our story, holding space for each of the versions of ourselves, how she delivered the investigative reporting aspects of her memoir, rewriting the stories we tell ourselves, posttraumatic growth, embracing full frontal honesty, and her new memoir Of My Own Making.

Also in this episode:

-neuroplasticity

-becoming fully available to our life

-incorporating books and research

Books mentioned in this episode:

-I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou

-The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls

The Art of Memoir by Mary Karr

-Black Women Writers at Work by Claudia Tate

The Myth of Normal by Gabor Mate MD

The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel van der Kolk

Emotional Inheritance by Galit Atlas

DARIA BURKE is an American writer, speaker, and wellbeing advocate. A marketer by trade and a seeker at heart, Daria is a storyteller and sense-maker, weaving together personal experience and the science of healing and transformation to explore new ways of understanding how we choose who we become. Her debut memoir, OF MY OWN MAKING (Spring 2025), is a soulful and scientific exploration of overcoming adversity, healing from childhood trauma, and rewriting one's own story. As a Chief Marketing Officer, Daria was named a 2020 AdAge Woman to Watch whose work has been recognized by Women’s Wear Daily, Forbes, Vogue, Town & Country and the Cut. She has written for Fast Company, The Huffington Post, and Black Enterprise, and has appeared on The Melissa Harris-Perry Show on MSNBC. A distinguished alumna of NYU Stern School of Business (MBA) and the University of Michigan (BA), Daria was born in Detroit and now calls Los Angeles and East Hampton home.

Connect with Daria:

Website: dariaburke.com

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

Get her book: https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/daria-burke/of-my-own-making/9781538766804/

LinkedIn Newsletter: The Power of Possibility

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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/

https://www.facebook.com/RonitPlank

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