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

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