168. Resisting Erasure and Crystallizing Our Lived Experience Through Memoir featuring KB Brookins

168. Resisting Erasure and Crystallizing Our Lived Experience Through Memoir featuring KB Brookins

KB Brookins joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about transness, masculinity, and race, how how being a writer has crystalized their experience and made it legible to an audience and to themselves, turning to prose to say the hard things, the tenacity of memoir, resisting erasure and pushing back on toxic systems, coming at creative nonfiction from a poetic impulse, having patience with ourselves, what we might need to let go of as writers, looking at our work with kinder eyes, the way we treat people because of gender, and their multi-themed memoir Pretty.

Also in this episode:

-stages of grief

-permission to have anger

-when lines for genre aren’t as helpful

Books mentioned in this episode:

-Asatta: An Autobiography by Asatta Shakur

-Black Boy by Richard Wright

-Heavy by Kiese Laymon

KB Brookins is a Black queer and trans writer, cultural worker, and visual artist from Texas. KB’s chapbook How To Identify Yourself with a Wound won the Saguaro Poetry Prize, a Writer’s League of Texas Discovery Prize, and a Stonewall Honor Book Award. Their debut poetry collection Freedom House won the American Library Association Barbara Gittings Literature Award and the Texas Institute of Letters Award for the Best First Book of Poetry. KB’s debut memoir Pretty, released in May 2024 with Alfred A. Knopf, won the Great Lakes Colleges Association Award in Creative Non-Fiction.

Connect with KB:

Website: https://earthtokb.com/

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

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

Substack: https://substack.com/@earthtokb

Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/earthtokb.bsky.social

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/earthtokb

Get the book: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/724994/pretty-by-kb-brookins/

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

Avsnitt(242)

237. Creating Immediacy in Our Narratives Through Contained Timeframes and Present Tense featuring Mimi Nichter

237. Creating Immediacy in Our Narratives Through Contained Timeframes and Present Tense featuring Mimi Nichter

Mimi Nichter joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about being hijacked on a plane when she was twenty years old in the first incident of international terrorism, how we can be socialized into si...

21 Apr 37min

236. Listening to Our Own Language and Going Where We Need to Go featuring Rachel Tzvia Back

236. Listening to Our Own Language and Going Where We Need to Go featuring Rachel Tzvia Back

Rachel Tzvia Back joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about living with depression, losing a sister, when a mother is emotionally and psychologically absent, how myths can be cloaks, listening ...

16 Apr 38min

235. Searching for a Universal Truth in Your Memoir featuring Julie Scolnik

235. Searching for a Universal Truth in Your Memoir featuring Julie Scolnik

Julie Scolnick joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about falling madly in love with a married Frenchman when she was 20 years old and living in Paris studying music, working our way back from a...

14 Apr 30min

234. Knowing When a Structure has Clicked in Place featuring Stephanie Weaver

234. Knowing When a Structure has Clicked in Place featuring Stephanie Weaver

Stephanie Weaver MPH joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about family estrangement, gaslighting, her recovered memories of childhood sexual abuse, chronic illness, not wanting a book to be abou...

9 Apr 36min

233. Revealing the Divisions and Truths Within Us featuring Nikkya Hargrove

233. Revealing the Divisions and Truths Within Us featuring Nikkya Hargrove

Nikkya Hargrove joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about the effects of incarceration on the family system, growing up lost and unsure who her family was, accepting the responsibility of becom...

7 Apr 31min

232. Self-Compassion and Recognizing the Illusion of Control featuring Amanda McCracken

232. Self-Compassion and Recognizing the Illusion of Control featuring Amanda McCracken

Amanda McCracken joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about what happens when you’re hopelessly, stubbornly in love with longing, fear of intimacy, the idea of falling in love vs. being in love,...

31 Mars 34min

231. Recovering and Reclaiming the Teenage Version of Ourselves in Memoir featuring Wendy C. Ortiz

231. Recovering and Reclaiming the Teenage Version of Ourselves in Memoir featuring Wendy C. Ortiz

Wendy C. Ortiz joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about the English teacher who preyed on her when she was thirteen, writing about the person we are now when writing about our past, placing th...

24 Mars 35min

230. Leaning into the Most Authentic Version of Our Story featuring Mallary Tenore Tarpley

230. Leaning into the Most Authentic Version of Our Story featuring Mallary Tenore Tarpley

Mallary Tenore Tarpley joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about the middle place between acute sickness and full recovery, living with the imprints of a disorder, resisting thinking in black a...

17 Mars 38min

Populärt inom Utbildning

historiepodden-se
rss-bara-en-till-om-missbruk-medberoende-2
alska-oss
det-skaver
harrisons-dramatiska-historia
nu-blir-det-historia
roda-vita-rosen
johannes-hansen-podcast
not-fanny-anymore
rss-foraldramotet-bring-lagercrantz
sektledare
rss-viktmedicinpodden
i-vantan-pa-katastrofen
allt-du-velat-veta
sa-in-i-sjalen
rss-om-vi-ska-vara-arliga
rss-sjalsligt-avkladd
rss-basta-livet
rss-npf-podden
rikatillsammans-om-privatekonomi-rikedom-i-livet