224. Writing About Chasing an Unconventional Life and Feeling Haunted featuring Alex Poppe

224. Writing About Chasing an Unconventional Life and Feeling Haunted featuring Alex Poppe

Alex Poppe joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about working in conflict zones, living abroad and negotiating cultural differences, teaching in northern Iraq, youth and female resilience, pursuing something elusive, using fiction techniques for creative nonfiction and essays, not standing on a soapbox in memoir, moving from the personal to the universal, safe domesticity vs. unpredictable intensity, feeling haunted, the tension between wanting to settle down and set roots but feeling desperate to travel, and her love letter to teaching the new memoir-in-essay Breakfast Wine: A Memoir of Chasing an Unconventional Life and Finding a Way Home.

Info/Registration for Ronit’s 10-Week Memoir Class Memoir Writing: Finding Your Story https://www.pce.uw.edu/courses/memoir-writing-finding-your-story

Also in this episode:

-field reporting

-theTulsa Remote Program

-starting chapters in scene and dialogue

Books mentioned in this episode

-Woman in Berlin by Anonymous

-The Line Becomes a River: Dispatches from The Border by Francisco Cantú

-Hollywood Park by Mikel Jollett

-The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood

-No Good Men Among the Living by Anand Gopal

-The Underground Girls of Kabul by Jenny Nordberg

-The Natashas:The Horrific Inside Story of Slavery, Rape, and Murder in the Global Sex Trade by Victor Malarek

-Notebooks on a Foreign Country: An American Abroad in a Post-American World by Suzy Hansen

-Emergency Sex and Other Desperate Measures: A True Story from Hell on Earth by Heidi Postlewait, Kenneth Cain and Andrew Thomson

Having worked in conflict zones such as Iraq, the West Bank, and Ukraine, Alex Poppe writes about fierce and funny women rebuilding their lives in the wake of violence. She is the award-winning author of four works of literary fiction. Breakfast Wine, her memoir-in-essay of her near decade teaching and volunteering in northern Iraq, celebrates women and youth resilience, post-conflict. Most recently, she served as the strategic communications advisor for a democracy and governance initiative at the US Agency for International Development (USAID). Alex continues to be awed by place, people, and their stories.

Connect with Alex:

Website: www.alexpoppe.com

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sallyalexpoppe/

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

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/alex.poppe.16/

Get the book: https://bookshop.org/p/books/breakfast-wine-alex-poppe/22155518?ean=9781627205931

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

Episoder(237)

121. Allowing Scenes and Dialogue to Do The Work featuring Becky Ellis

121. Allowing Scenes and Dialogue to Do The Work featuring Becky Ellis

Becky Ellis joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about growing up in the shadow of a father’s war trauma, what happens when soldiers come home, the power of secrets, the divided self and why mem...

24 Sep 202444min

120. What Remains Unsolved In Us featuring Jaclyn Moyer

120. What Remains Unsolved In Us featuring Jaclyn Moyer

Jaclyn Moyer joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about excavating what remains unsolved within us, clueing the reader in early in our pages, how each draft leads to a door to the next, leaning ...

19 Sep 202441min

119. Leaning into Honesty, the Darkly Funny, and the Jewish featuring Gila Pfeffer

119. Leaning into Honesty, the Darkly Funny, and the Jewish featuring Gila Pfeffer

Gila Pfeffer joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about outsmarting genetic destinies and her preventative double mastectomy, remembering what’s at stake in our work, tempering the serious with ...

17 Sep 202449min

118. Memoir Manifestos and Taking Back Our Power featuring Jessica Buchanan

118. Memoir Manifestos and Taking Back Our Power featuring Jessica Buchanan

Jessica Buchanan joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about her capture by pirates in Somalia in 2011 and how her life’s trajectory was irrevocably changed, taking back power, holding space for ...

10 Sep 202438min

117. Inviting Readers Into Our Most Intimate Spaces featuring Myra Sack

117. Inviting Readers Into Our Most Intimate Spaces featuring Myra Sack

Myra Sack joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about losing her very young daughter Havi to Tay-Sachs, a fatal neurodegenerative disease, maternal and parental intuition, compassionate bereaveme...

5 Sep 202434min

116. Going Viral and Going to Auction featuring Geraldine DeRuiter

116. Going Viral and Going to Auction featuring Geraldine DeRuiter

Geraldine DeRuiter joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about how being okay with yourself has become deeply radical, the role women have in the home and culinary world, our complex personal and...

3 Sep 202446min

115. Dismantling the Fear About Sharing Our Stories featuring Jo-Ann Finkelstein, PhD

115. Dismantling the Fear About Sharing Our Stories featuring Jo-Ann Finkelstein, PhD

Jo-Ann Finkelstein, PhD joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about dismantling the fear about sharing our stories, finding the freedom to give voice to what we experienced, recognizing when the ...

29 Aug 202435min

114. Thinking Like an Editor, Meaty Bylines, and Mitzvahs featuring Susan Shapiro

114. Thinking Like an Editor, Meaty Bylines, and Mitzvahs featuring Susan Shapiro

Susan Shapiro joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about the smart way to get meaty bylines, how to think like an editor, placing small pieces, getting tough criticism and listening to it, produ...

27 Aug 202436min

Populært innen Fakta

mikkels-paskenotter
fastlegen
dine-penger-pengeradet
relasjonspodden-med-dora-thorhallsdottir-kjersti-idem
foreldreradet
treningspodden
rss-strid-de-norske-borgerkrigene
jakt-og-fiskepodden
sinnsyn
rss-kunsten-a-leve
hverdagspsyken
fryktlos
rss-kull
rss-bisarr-historie
gravid-uke-for-uke
hagespiren-podcast
rss-var-forste-kaffe
rss-sunn-okonomi
lederskap-nhhs-podkast-om-ledelse
takk-og-lov-med-anine-kierulf