176. Using the Tools of Fiction to Move Readers featuring Maureen Stanton

Maureen Stanton joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about her writing beginnings in fiction and using the scenic and immersive to move readers, falling in love with creative nonfiction, revisiting and recreating a love story, discovering the question behind her book, facing the blank page, bad first drafts, writing an illness narrative, placing an essay in Modern Love, authenticity on the page, the long winding path to publishing, not thinking your book will ever get published, working on multiple projects while querying, how love evolves, and her new memoir The Murmur of Everything Moving.

Also in this episode:

-the fog of grief

-killing our darlings

-submitting to writing contests

Books mentioned in this episode:

-Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott

-Angela’s Ashes by Frank McCourt

-The Liar’s Club by Mary Karr

-This Boys Life by Tobias Wolff

-Argonauts by Maggie Nelson

-Barbarian Days by William Finnegan

Maureen Stanton is the author of The Murmur of Everything Moving: A Memoir, winner of the Donald L. Jordan Prize for Literary Excellence; Body Leaping Backward: Memoir of a Delinquent Girlhood, winner of the Maine Literary Award for memoir and a People Magazine "Best Books Pick"; and Killer Stuff and Tons of Money: An Insider’s Look at the World of Flea Markets, Antiques, and Collecting, winner of the Massachusetts Book Award in nonfiction and a Parade Magazine "12 Great Summer Books" selection. Her nonfiction has been widely published, including in The New York Times, Fourth Genre, Creative Nonfiction, Longreads, New England Review, Florida Review, River Teeth, The Sun and many others. Her essays have received the Iowa Review prize, The Sewanee Review prize, Pushcart Prizes, the American Literary Review award, and the Thomas J. Hruska award from Passages North. She's been awarded fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Maine Arts Commission, the MacDowell Colony, and the Virginia Center for Creative Arts. She teaches creative writing at the University of Massachusetts Lowell and lives in Maine.

Connect with Maureen:

Website: https://www.maureenstantonwriter.com

LinkTree: https://linktr.ee/maureenstanton41

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/maureenstanton41

Threads: https://www.threads.com/@maureenstanton41

LinkedIn linkedin.com/in/maureen-stanton-6693ab11

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/maureen.p.stanton

Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/maureenstanton.bsky.social

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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