Let’s Talk Memoir

Stephen Policoff joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about the tragic death of his beloved wife and his older daughter Anna within the space of about 3 years, caring for Anna who had a rare lysosomal storage disorder known as Niemann-Pick disease, making sure both his wife and daughter came across as being more than just victims of terrible illnesses, the way memory works, writing a memoir in 3-4 months, drafting the whole manuscript and then revising, writing about how the world saw his daughter,  juggling hope with despair, figuring out how to go on, and his memoir A Ribbon for Your Hair: Loss. More Loss. And How We (Sort of) Went On.

Also in this episode:
- thinking about other people’s lives
- choosing not to write chronologically
- finding beauty and laughter even in the darkness
 

Books mentioned in this episode:
- H is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald
- The Lonely City by Olivia Laing
- The Art of Losing: Poems of Grief and Healing edited by Kevin Young

Stephen Policoff's 1st novel, Beautiful Somewhere Else, won the James Jones Award and was published by Carroll & Graf in 2004.

His 2nd novel, Come Away, won the Dzanc Award and was published by Dzanc Books in 2014. His 3rd novel, Dangerous Blues, was published by Flexible Press in 2022. His memoir, A Ribbon for Your Hair, was published in 2026 by Heliotrope Books.
He has taught writing at Wesleyan University and Yale, and has recently retired after teaching writing at New York University for 40 years. He is now Clinical Professor of Writing Emeritus at NYU.

Connect with Stephen:
Website: www.stephenpolicoff.net

Facebook: Stephen Policoff
Instagram: @spolicoff

 

Purchase Book:
https://www.amazon.com/Ribbon-Your-Hair-Stephen-Policoff/dp/1956474722

https://bookshop.org/p/books/a-ribbon-for-your-hair-stephen-policoff

 

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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

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Patricia Knight Meyer joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about being a Black Market Baby during the Baby Scoop Era, coming to terms with adoption trauma, the consequences of growing up without identification, mothers who were shamed into relinquishment, solving the mystery of her birth and adoption, bringing awareness to the adoption industry and her advocacy work, the mistakes she feels she made in reunion, realizing she was in a codependent relationship with her raising mother, finding her birth father, generational trauma, not reducing the people in our memoirs to heroes and villains, learning not to send our manuscripts out too soon, creating her own imprint, pivoting from querying agents to indie presses and her new book WONDERLAND: Memoir of a Black-Market Adoption.

 

 

Also in this episode:

- birth father rights

-including the darker aspects of a story

-debunking adoption as a win-win situation

 

Books mentioned in this episode:

-Who is a Worthy Mother by Rebecca Wellington

-The Art of Memoir by Mary Karr

-The Liar’s Club by Mary Karr

-Educated by Tara Westover

-Wavewalker by Suzanne Heywood

 

Patricia Knight Meyer is an author, speaker, and adoption reform advocate. She was trafficked as an infant along a Texas hospital curb in 1970. No agency. No judge. No paperwork. Never legally adopted, she did not receive her first legally obtained birth certificate until 47 years old. Patricia tells this story in her debut memoir, WONDERLAND: Memoir of a Black-Market Adoption (Unsolicited Press, November 3, 2026). The book arrives as an IndieReader Award Winner in True Crime. 

 

She serves on the board of the National Association of Adoptees and Parents (NAAP), where she hosts the monthly NAAP Happy Hour. Her blog, My Adopted Life, reaches a large community of adoptees and advocates. Patricia has appeared on Al Jazeera’s The Stream and HuffPost Live. Her essays have been published in Ms. Magazine, Severance Magazine, Narrative Arc, and Kinsmen Quarterly.

 

Connect with Patricia:

WONDERLAND memoir page: https://myadoptedlife.com/wonderland-the-memoir/

Book website: https://www.wonderlandthememoir.com

Audiobook on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/7EZEbVZQAAFVyeaDvcnG2i

Free livestream, Nov 6: Down the Rabbit Hole: The Fight for Texas Adoptee Rights Then and Now. A scene from WONDERLAND unfolds live on stage, followed by a panel on the fight to open Texas adoptees' birth certificates. https://bit.ly/TXADOPTEERIGHTS

My Adopted Life: https://www.myadoptedlife.com

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

Instagram (book): https://www.instagram.com/wonderlandthememoir

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

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

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@myadoptedlife

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/patricia-ann-meyer

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

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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

Amy Irvine joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about maternal lineage and what gets handed down to us, exploring the impact of our women ancestors, feeling trapped by motherhood, reckoning with and disrupting deep cultural conditioning, living a remote life and how much of that world is not good for women, coping with undiagnosed postpartum depression, making meaning without appropriating other cultures, carrying stories of harm in our bodies, fearing we’ve passed trauma down to our children, writing the natural world, capturing wildness, rewilding ourselves, widening the lens on our story, and her new memoir Almost Animal: A Memoir of Motherhood, Wildness, and the American West.

 

 

Also in this episode:

-plural marriage

-reframing history

-feeling stalked by Mormon ancestors

 

Books mentioned in this episode:

-What My Bones Know by Stephanie Foo

-Soil: The Story of a Black Mother’s Garden by Camille Dungy

-The Bear River Massacre: A Shoshone History by Darren Parry

-In the Eye of the Wild by Natsassja Martin

 

Amy Irvine is a sixth-generation Utahn who descends from the first Mormons to occupy the West. Her memoir Trespass: Living at the Edge of the Promised Land received the Orion Book Award and the Colorado Book Award. Her second book, Desert Cabal: A New Season in the Wilderness, is a feminist response to Edward Abbey’s Desert Solitaire, and during lockdown, Pam Houston and Irvine coauthored the epistolary Air Mail: Letters of Politics, Pandemics, and Place. Irvine’s essays have appeared in both The Best American Science & Nature Writing and The Best American Food Writing, as well as Orion, Outside, High Country News, Lit Hub, and Backpacker. She lives and writes on a remote mesa in southwest Colorado. Her memoir, ALMOST ANIMAL: MOTHERHOOD, WILDNESS AND THE AMERICAN WEST will be released on November 10th by Spiegel & Grau.

 

Connect with Amy:
Website: https://www.amyirvine.com/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/amy.irvine.90295

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/junipergirl44/

Get the book: https://bookshop.org/p/books/almost-animal-a-memoir-of-motherhood-wildness-and-the-american-west-amy-irvine/b60f8eb9877eec31?ean=9781966302384

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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

Karson Brown joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about crossing the Atlantic ocean on a 34-foot sailboat from Portugal when she was 29 years old, the 13 years it took to put her story into book form, the learning process of becoming a writer, offering a little more for readers and less for ourselves, staying focused on our throughline and honoring what memoir is, not sacrificing and abandoning our intuition, getting offers from 3 indie publishers, discovering how to slow down and sit with ourselves during the writing process, and her new memoir 48 Days to Barbados.

  

Also in this episode:

- not giving up

- memoir as opposed to journaling

- when our tactic becomes silence

 

Books mentioned in this episode:

Bird by Bird by Anne Lammott

West with the Night by Beryl Markham

The Bean Trees Barbara Kingsolver

Books by Joyce Maynard

Books by Alexandra Fuller

Books by Joan Didion

Karson Brown grew up sailing and living aboard boats in the Pacific Northwest. She turned twenty-one on a fishing vessel in the Bering Sea and crossed the Atlantic Ocean before turning thirty. Karson raised her two children along the shores of Vashon Island surrounded by a menagerie of critters. She is a writer, photographer, artist, and lifelong devotee of water. Karson is an alumna of Joyce Maynards, “Write By The Lake Workshop,” in Guatemala. She has four stories included in the Vine Leaves Press 50 Give or Take anthologies. She currently resides in the Pacific Northwest. 48 Days to Barbados is her debut memoir and will be released by Red Fern Press October 20, 2026.

 

Connect with Karson:

Website: karsonbrownarts.com

Instagram @ekarsonbrown

Facebook: Karson Brown 

TikTok: @karsonbrown71

 

Purchase Book: 

https://bookshop.org/beta-search?bkshp-astro=t&keywords=48+days+to+Barbados

 

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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

Jo-Anne Berelowitz joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about cultural displacement and longing for home, exploring the experience of Jews in South Africa, struggling with heritage, having origins in a country drawn along racist lines, feeling you need to be exportable to survive, dislodging a parent from a pedestal, establishing dynamics and patterns early in a memoir, developing the skills to tell an extended narrative, writing about ourselves in the third person, diving into a history she had once suppressed, and her new memoir Somewhere I Belong: A Story of Country, Family, Home, and Jewish Identity.

 

Also in this episode: 

 - going with an independent publisher

- trying to leave siblings out of a memoir

- prejudice in the publishing world about Jewish writers

 

Books mentioned in this episode:

Middlemarch by George Eliot

Daniel Deronda by Geroge Eliot

Zakhor by Yosef Yerushalmi

Reading Writing and Leaving Home by Lynn Freed

 

Jo-Anne Berelowitz is a writer and art historian whose work explores identity, family, cultural displacement, and longing for home. Born and raised in Durban, South Africa, she emigrated to California in 1977, earned her MA in Art History from Stanford University, her PhD from the University of California at Los Angeles, and her MFA in Creative Writing with an emphasis on nonfiction from the Rainier Writing Workshop. She was, for many years, senior art historian at San Diego State University. Her art history essays have appeared in Genders, Society and Space, The Oxford Art Journal, The Journal of Modern Jewish Studies, The Canadian Journal of Comparative Literature, and elsewhere. In 2018, she was awarded the Wabash Prize for Literary Nonfiction. She now resides in Austin, Texas.

 

Connect with Jo-Ann:

Website: https://www.joanneberelowitz.com

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

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

 

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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