186. Broadening a Memoir’s Scale, Accessibility, and Audience featuring Mallory McDuff

Mallory McDuff joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about expanding a project from straight memoir to broaden its accessibility and audience, feedback from editors about what’s marketable, placing an essay to help sell a book, starting a memoir in the middle of the story, death and choices we can make that align our final wishes with the values we hold in our life, conversations around burial, making less of an impact on the earth, how detachment from death and dying is relatively new in our culture, allowing scenes to stack upon themselves, how to weave the personal throughout the whole book to take the reader with us, and her new memoir Our Last Best Act: Planning for the End of Our Lives to Protect the People and Places We Love.

Also in this episode:

-living with and on the earth

-climate justice

-mirroring real conversations in memoir

Books mentioned in this episode:

The Comfort of Crows by Margaret Renkl

Wild Spectacle by Janisse Ray

Soil by Camille Dungy

Briefly Perfectly Human by Alua Arthur

The Green Burial Guidebook by Elizabeth Fournier

From Here to Eternity by Caitlin Doughty

Mallory McDuff writes and teaches environmental education at Warren Wilson College, a liberal arts school that integrates academics with work and community engagement. She lives on campus with her two daughters in a 900-square foot house with an expansive view of a white barn, a herd of cows, and the Appalachian mountains of Western North Carolina, an area still recovering from the impacts of Hurricane Helen. Her writing examines the intersection of people and places for a better world.

She is the author of the books Love Your Mother: 50 States, 50 Stories, and 50 Women United for Climate Justice (Broadleaf Books); Our Last Best Act: Planning for the End of Our Lives to Protect the People and Places We Love (Broadleaf Books); Sacred Acts: How Churches are Working to Protect Earth’s Climate (New Society Publishers); Natural Saints: How People of Faith are Working to Save God’s Earth (Oxford University Press) and co-author of Conservation Education and Outreach Techniques, 2nd Ed., (Oxford University Press).

In addition, she has published 20 articles in academic journals and more than 50 essays in The New York Times, The Washington Post, WIRED, BuzzFeed, The Huffington Post, Sojourners, and more. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Florida, M.S. from the University of South Alabama, and B.S. from Vanderbilt University.

Connect with Mallory:

Website: https://mallorymcduff.com/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/mallory.mcduff

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/mallorymcduff1/

X: https://x.com/malmcduff

Link to purchase Our Last Best Act: https://bookshop.org/p/books/our-last-best-act-planning-for-the-end-of-our-lives-to-protect-the-people-and-places-we-love-mallory-mcduff/16147581?gad_source=1&gclid=Cj0KCQiAu8W6BhC-ARIsACEQoDCXXHpQuMQxxUoTaRQmdReLz7lFh-2qI4DYUvze6KyZm6hPclcqrZ4aAkMzEALw_wcB

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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