209. Reclaiming Identity and Trusting Our Own Process featuring Heather Sweeney

Heather Sweeney joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about her quest to find out who she was apart from her life as a military wife, mining 20 years worth of journals, uncovering internal dynamics through writing, knowing where to begin a memoir, managing multiple settings with a chronological timeline, cutting redundancies, retitling a memoir late in the game, killing our darlings, writing about exes, coping strategies, reclaiming identity, being true to our own writing process, and her new memoir Camouflage: How I Emerged from the Shadows of a Military Marriage.

Also in this episode:

-writing when you can

-the e-structure

-brainstorming for titles

Books mentioned in this episode:

-Seven Drafts Allison K. Williams

-Wild by Cheryl Strayed

-On Writing by Stephen King

-Bird by Bird by Anne Lammott

-Big Magic by Elizabeth GIlbert

-Before and After the Book Deal by Courtney Maum

-The Art of Memoir by Mary Karr

-The Book Bible by Sue Shapiro

-A Thousand Words by Jamie Attenberg

Heather Sweeney is the author of the memoir Camouflage: How I Emerged from the Shadows of a Military Marriage. She writes about divorce, life as a military spouse, parenting, and women’s health, and her work has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, HuffPost, TODAY.com, Newsweek, Business Insider, Good Housekeeping, Healthline, Grown and Flown, Military.com, and many others. She lives in Virginia with her boyfriend, two college-aged kids, and their geriatric Labrador retriever.

Connect with Heather:

Website: https://www.heatherlsweeney.com/

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

Threads: https://www.threads.net/@writersweeney

TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@heathersweeneywrites

Substack: https://heathersweeney.substack.com/

Amazon: http://posthill.to/B0F316HJTD

Barnes & Noble: https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/camouflage-heather-sweeney/1147211233

Bookshop: https://bookshop.org/p/books/camouflage-how-i-emerged-from-the-shadows-of-a-military-marriage-heather-sweeney/22522585

Target: https://www.target.com/p/camouflage-by-heather-sweeney-paperback/-/A-1003183204

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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