238. Being Clear on Why We’re Showing Up to Tell This Story Now featuring Jill Christman

Jill Christman joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about contextualizing a memoir in a post-Roe world, what it means to make a choice as mothers, ending a pregnancy, knowing you will write about an experience while it is happening, writing about childhood sexual abuse, returning to a manuscript with your skirt on fire, writing to a point of discovery, putting down our self-defense and having to be fully, fully vulnerable, getting clear on why we’re showing up to tell this story now, and her new memoir The Heart Folds Early.

Ronit’s in-person Fall Workshop - Writing Dynamic Memoir: From Lived Experience to Gripping Story https://www.lmcmurtrylitcenter.org/workshops/writing-dynamic-memoir-from-lived-experience-to-gripping-story

Also in this episode:

-writing in present tense

-not casting judgment on others

-how an imaginary choice is not a choice

Books mentioned in this episode:

Love Works Like This by Lauren Slater

The Book of Knowledge and Wonder By Steven Harvey

Crossed Over: A Murder, a Memoir by Beverly Lowry

In the Dream House by Carmen Maria Maha

A Grief Observed by C.S. Lewis

The Light of the World by Elizabeth Alexander

Safekeeping by Abigail Thomas

An Exact Replica of a Figment of my Imagination by Elizabeth McCracken

Jill Christman’s recent articles on writing:

1. “Writing the Tooth—Or, How to Find Big Ideas in Tiny Things.” Assay: A Journal of Nonfiction Studies. https://www.assayjournal.com/jill-christman-writing-the-toothmdashor-how-to-find-big-ideas-in-tiny-things-assay-122.html

2. “Three Takes on a Jump.” https://riverteethjournal.com/river_revisted/river-teeth-classics-three-takes-on-a-jump/

3. “Tacking: A Sailor’s Guide to Writing Against the Wind.” Writer’s Digest,https://www.writersdigest.com/tacking-a-sailors-guide-to-writing-against-the-wind

Jill Christman is the author of The Heart Folds Early: A Memoir (released March 2026 from the University of Nebraska Press). Christman’s other books include If This Were Fiction: A Love Story in Essays (2023 Foreword INDIES Silver Winner), Darkroom: A Family Exposure (winner of AWP Prize for CNF), and Borrowed Babies: Apprenticing for Motherhood. Her essays have appeared in many anthologies and in magazines such as Brevity, Creative Nonfiction, Fourth Genre, Iron Horse Literary Review, Longreads, and O, The Oprah Magazine. A 2020 NEA Literature Fellow, she teaches at Ball State University and serves as editor of River Teeth: A Journal of Nonfiction Narrative and Beautiful Things (a weekly online magazine of micro nonfiction). Visit her at jillchristman.com.

Connect with Jill:

https://www.instagram.com/jillchristmanwriter

@jillchristman.bsky.social

jillchristman.com

Order for yourself and all your memoir-loving friends—directly from the University of Nebraska Press or your local independent or by using any of the handy links on my website. Use code 6AS26 for 40% off on any UNP book!

–

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

Det här avsnittet är hämtat från ett öppet RSS-flöde och publiceras inte av Podme. Det kan innehålla reklam.

Avsnitt(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 Juni 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 Juni 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 Juni 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 Juni 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 Maj 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 Maj 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 Maj 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 Maj 3min