Let’s Talk Memoir18 Mar 2025

158. Writing About a Past Where You Weren’t Present featuring Karen Kirsten

Karen Kirsten joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about the messy complexity of family, asking the right questions, writing about a time in history when you weren’t present in that history, utilizing and incorporating primary research, recorded interviews, archived documents, diaries, film, and photographs into memoir, writing fact-based vivid scenes, working with historians to accurately depict world-altering events, being honest with the reader and grappling with conflicting information on the page, changing the central question of your memoir, being a detective and being dogged, having a care plan and a nurturing creative community, writing about transgenerational trauma, inserting yourself into the narrative as a character, and her new memoir Irina’s Gift.

Also in this episode:

-structural changes late in the process

-delaying reveals to add suspense

-using image systems to address transgenerational trauma

Books mentioned in this episode:

The Fact of a Body by Alex Marzano-Lesnevich

The Most Dangerous Book by Kevin Birmingham

The Sinner and the Saint by Kevin Birmingham

Fairyland by Alysia Abbott

The Postcard by Anne Berest

The Situation and the Story by Vivian Gornick

Seabiscuit by Laura Hillenbrand

The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel WIlkers

The Neapolitan Novels by Elena Ferrante

Leviathan by Paul Auster

Question 7 by Richard Flanagan

Swimming in Paris: A Life in Three Stories by Colombe Schneck

Who I Always Was by Theresa Okokon

Karen Kirsten is the author of Irena’s Gift, a National Jewish Book Award finalist for Autobiography & Memoir, winner of Zibby Awards for Best Family Drama & Best Story of Overcoming, and an Australian Jewish Book Award finalist. Irena’s Gift is also The Australian newspaper’s’notable book’, and described by Pulitzer prize winning author Geraldine Brooks as ”a disturbing investigation into the power of secrets to harm and to haunt.”

Karen is an Australian-American writer and Holocaust educator who speaks around the world on the topics of hate and reconciliation. Karen’s essay “Searching for the Nazi Who Saved My Mother’s Life” was selected by Narratively as one of their Best Ever stories and nominated for The Best American Essays. Karen’s writing has also appeared in Salon.com, The Week, The Jerusalem Post, Huffington Post*, Boston’s National Public Radio station, The Boston Herald, The Sydney Morning Herald, and more.

Connect with Karen:

Website: https://www.karenkirsten.com/

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

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/karen.kirsten

Book: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/747811/irenas-gift-by-karen-kirsten/

–

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

Denne episoden er hentet fra en åpen RSS-feed og er ikke publisert av Podme. Den kan derfor inneholde annonser.

Episoder(253)

247. Turning Down the Volume on Critical Self-Talk featuring Carol Odell

Carol Odell joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about being methodically sexually groomed as a girl during her time working at a stable, sexual grooming as a slow desensitization process, inte...

23 Jun 31min

246. Investigating the Many Selves Within the Self featuring Cinelle Barnes

Cinelle Barnes joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about her brain aneurism rupture, writing a memoir two years after brain surgery, the healing modality that is writing personal narrative, mem...

16 Jun 47min

245. Avoiding the Need to Make Memoir Prescriptive featuring Amil Niazi

Amil Niazi joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about the pressure on children of immigrants, outsiderness, striving to change our circumstances, what happens to women in the workplace after bec...

9 Jun 40min

244. The Project of Looking at Ourselves Honestly featuring Melissa Febos

Melisa Febos joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about romantic obsessions, celibacy as a portal to freedom, living her way into a corner and having to fight her way out, leading with scene and...

2 Jun 39min

243. Moving Toward a Deeper Empathy and Understanding: Jill Christman interviews Ronit Plank

In celebration of the launch of season 8, Jill Christman joins Let’s Talk Memoir to interview Ronit about growing up with no blueprint for making a relationship work, fending for ourselves in childhoo...

26 Mai 1h 6min

242. Writing Memoir as an Act of Resistance featuring Timothy Schraeder Rodriguez

Timothy Schraeder Rodriguez joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about going through almost a decade of conversion therapy, dismantling the dogma of pseudo science with its added layer of spiri...

19 Mai 41min

241. Waking Up to How Our History Has Controlled Us featuring Dr. Craig Yorke

Dr. Craig Yorke joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about the toll of centuries of bigotry, being consumed by race, growing up with psychological financial desperation, living other people’s li...

14 Mai 34min

Season 8 Announcement

After four years of Let’s Talk Memoir, I wanted to take a moment to thank you for being here and share a few exciting updates about what’s ahead for the podcast. In this short episode, I talk about so...

14 Mai 3min