31. Language, Lyricism, and Sound featuring Suzanne Roberts

Suzanne Roberts joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about the difficulty of being in a human body - especially a woman’s, the male gaze, deciding how to approach our work, writing about loss, grief, death, and desire, reading widely and deeply, being an employee to our art, and Animal Bodies, her memoir made of lyrical essays, narrative pieces, and prose poems.

Also in this episode:

-when the body becomes political

-how poetry has informed her work

-a tool to get yourself to write even material that you most fear sharing

Books mentioned in this episode:

The Rules of Inheritance by Claire Bidwell Smith

Guidebook to Relative Strangers by Camille Dungy

Soil: A Black Mother’s Garden by Camille Dungy

What You Have Heard is True by Carolyn Forché

The Man Who Could Move Clouds by Ingrid Rojas Contreras

Lying by Lauren Slater

Constellations: Reflections from Life by Sinead Gleeson

Drawing Breath by Gayle Brandeis

Burnt: A Memoir of Fighting Fire by Clare Frank

The Abacus of Loss by Sholeh Wolpé

Trespass by Amy Irvine

Trailed by Kathryn Miles

Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit by Jeanette Winterson

Woman Warrior by Maxine Hong Kingston

Suzanne Roberts is the author of the award-winning essay collection Animal Bodies: On Death, Desire, and Other Difficulties (March 2022),​ the award-winning travel memoir in essays Bad Tourist: Misadventures in Love and Travel (2020), and the memoir Almost Somewhere: Twenty-Eight Days on the John Muir Trail (Winner of the National Outdoor Book Award), as well as four books of poems. Named "The Next Great Travel Writer" by National Geographic's Traveler, Suzanne's work has been listed as notable in Best American Essays and included in The Best Women's Travel Writing. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, CNN, Creative Nonfiction, Brevity, The Rumpus, Hippocampus, The Normal School, River Teeth, and elsewhere. She holds a doctorate in literature and the environment from the University of Nevada-Reno, teaches in the low residency MFA program in creative writing at UNR-Tahoe, and splits her time between South Lake Tahoe, California and an old green van named Shrek.

Connect with Suzanne:

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/suzanneroberts28/?hl=en

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/suzanne.roberts.798

Website: https://www.suzanneroberts.net/

Animal Bodies: https://www.nebraskapress.unl.edu/nebraska/9781496231024/#:~:text=About%20the%20Book&text=In%20Animal%20Bodies%20Suzanne%20Roberts,taboo%20desires%20and%20our%20grief.

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Ronit Plank is a writer, teacher, and editor whose work has been featured in The Atlantic, The Washington Post, The New York Times, Writer’s Digest, The Rumpus, American Literary Review, Hippocampus, The Iowa 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 a 2021 Best True Crime Book by Book Riot and was a Finalist in the National Indie Excellence Awards, the Housatonic Book Awards, and the Book of the Year Awards. Her fiction and creative nonfiction have been nominated for Pushcart Prizes, the Best of the Net, and the Best Microfiction Anthology, and her short story collection HOME IS A MADE-UP PLACE won Hidden River Arts’ Eludia Award. She is creative nonfiction editor at The Citron Review and lives in Seattle with her family where she is working on her next book.

More about Ronit: https://ronitplank.com

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More about WHEN SHE COMES BACK, a memoir: https://ronitplank.com/book/

More about HOME IS A MADE-UP PLACE, a short story collection: https://ronitplank.com/home-is-a-made-up-place/

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Background photo: Canva

Headshot photo credit: Sarah Anne Photography

Theme music: Isaac Joel, Dead Moll’s Fingers