74. Depicting Complex Relationships and Calibrating Metaphor in Memoir featuring Rosa Lowinger

Rosa Lowinger joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about growing up in Cuba, her storied career in art restoration, taking a closer look at the complicated and evolving relationship she’s had with her mother, sending manuscripts to family and exes before they go to press, protecting loved ones in our work, how much metaphor is too much, and her new memoir Dwell Time.

Also in this episode:

-finding community

-working with book coaches

-approaching writing like a job

Books mentioned in this episode:

Educated by Tara Westover

Born a Crime by Trevor Noah

Blow Your House Down by Gina Frangelo

Little Failure by Gary Shteyngart

The Year of Magical Thinking by Jon Didion

H is for Hawk by Helen MacDonald

Liar by Rob Roberge

The Distance Between Us by Rayna Grande

Avid Reader by Robert Gottlieb

When She Comes Back by Ronit Plank

Rosa Lowinger is a Cuban-born American art conservator and founder of RLA Conservation of

Art + Architecture, LLC. (www.rlaconservation.com), the U.S.’s largest woman-owned materials

conservation practice. She is also a published author, most well-known for Tropicana Nights:

The Life and Times of the Legendary Cuban Nightclub (Harcourt, 2005), a book on Havana’s

pre-Castro nightclub era. Other fictional works by Rosa include The Encanto File, a play produced off-Broadway by the Women’s Project and Productions and published in Rowing to America and Sixteen Other Short Plays, edited by Julia Miles (Smith & Kraus, 2002), and The Empress of the Waves, a short story published in the anthology Island in the Light/Isla en la Luz (Trapublishing, 2019).

Rosa’s academic and professional distinctions include the 2008-09 Rome Prize at the American Academy in Rome, where she researched the history of vandalism, graffiti, and street art; and Fellow status in the American Institute for Conservation and the Association for Preservation Technology. She holds an M.A. in Art History and Conservation from NYU’s Institute of Fine Arts, lectures regularly at numerous universities around the country, and serves on the boards of the Amigos of the Cuban Heritage Collection at University of Miami, Florida Association of Museums, the Partnership for Sacred Places, and the Florida Association of Public Art Professionals. Rosa co-curated the exhibits Promising Paradise: Cuban Allure American Seduction (Wolfsonian Museum, 2016) and Concrete Paradise: Miami Marine Stadium (Coral Gables Museum, 2013). She writes regularly for academic and popular media about conservation, the arts, and Cuba. Her 1999 cover story on Havana for Preservation spawned a career in cultural travel that has taken her to Cuba over 100 times since 1992. She lives in Los Angeles and Miami and is married to Todd Kessler.

Connect with Rosa:

Rosa’s Website:www.rosalowinger.com

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

RLA Conservation’s Website: www.rlaconservation.com

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

Purchase Dwell Time: https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/dwell-time-rosa-lowinger/1143192800

https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Dwell-Time/Rosa-Lowinger/9781955905275

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Ronit’s writing has appeared in The Atlantic, The Rumpus, The New York Times, 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 lives in Seattle with her family where she teaches memoir workshops and is working on her next book.

More about Ronit: https://ronitplank.com

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Background photo credit: Photo by Patrick Tomasso on Unsplash

Headshot photo credit: Sarah Anne Photography

Theme music: Isaac Joel, Dead Moll’s Fingers