Let’s Talk Memoir19 Jun 2025

178. Fragmented Forms, the Speculative, and Resisting Restriction featuring Marty Ross-Dolen

Marty Ross-Dolen joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation discovering the story while writing, inviting the speculative and magical elements into a narrative, rediscovering lost relatives, advocating for our vision and for our books, scaffolding fragmented forms, being raised by a mother in protracted mourning, incorporating letters, photographs, and erasure poetry, when people tell you what your book is supposed to be, living with an inherited sense of grief, unspoken family pacts, when structure is a surprise, and her new memoir Always There, Always Gone: A Daughter’s Search for Truth.

Also in this episode:

--being raised in silence around a tragedy

-telling 3 stories at once

-memoir as erasure

Books mentioned in this episode:

-Safekeeping by Abigail Thomas

-Another Bullshit Night in Suck City by Nick Flynn

-Ghostbread by Sonja Livingston

-Disconto for My Father by Harrison Kandelaria Fletcher

-Fearless Confessions by Sue William SIlverman

Marty Ross-Dolen is a graduate of Wellesley College and Albert Einstein College of Medicine and is a retired child and adolescent psychiatrist. She holds an MFA in Writing from Vermont College of Fine Arts. Prior to her time at VCFA, she participated in graduate-level workshops at The Ohio State University. Her essays have appeared in North Dakota Quarterly, Redivider, Lilith, Willow Review, and the Brevity Blog, among others. Her essay entitled “Diphtheria” was named a notable essay in The Best American Essays series. She teaches writing and lives in Columbus, Ohio.

Connect with Marty:

Website: www.martyrossdolen.com

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

Get the book: https://a.co/d/5HtWU4s

https://www.thurberhouse.org/adult-writers-studio

–

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