Memoir Nation

For many, spirituality is a private inner journey filled with nuance and informed by culture, family of origin, life experiences both positive and negative, and much more. Guest Alicia Jo Rabins shares her own journey at the heart of her new memoir, When We’re Born We Forget Everything—one that started with a fairly typical secular Jewish suburban upbringing and later twists and turns through the spiritual, the sacred, and the mystical. Her memoir is a beautiful mosaic that invites readers to consider and contemplate their own understanding of the Divine. This week, inspired by Alicia Jo, Brooke and Grant do just that, in addition to talking about publishing’s relationship to spiritual (and religious) works.
Alicia Jo Rabins a writer, musician, performer, and feminist Torah teacher. Her spiritual memoir, out on Schocken Books, is When We’re Born We Forget Everything. She is the author of four additional books, including the poetry collections Divinity School and Fruit Geode. As a songwriter, violinist and composer, Rabins tours internationally with Girls in Trouble, her indie-folk song cycle about women in Torah. Visit her at www.aliciajo.com.
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This week’s Memoir Nation introduces a new memoir challenge and invitation to writers to come check out what we’re calling Memoir Showers at Memoir Nation. Join our community for a whole month of writing prompts, community support, and confetti—of course.
And what’s up with this new slew of celebrity pet memoirs? Do you find this week’s book trend troubling or amusing? Tune in to see what you think!
Cohosts Grant Faulkner and Brooke Warner present today’s show. Together they’re the cofounders of Memoir Nation, just one of the many hats each of them wear. Both of them are memoir champions and have memoirs-in-progress.
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We have a gorgeous interview this week on Memoir Nation with poet, novelist, and now memoirist Rachel Eliza Griffiths. Rachel’s new memoir, The Flower Bearers, is about two incidents that happened in short succession—the death of her best friend, poet Kamilah Aisha Moon, and the stabbing of her husband, author Salman Rushdie. Her book and this interview are an exploration of the layers of grief, how we show our layers of experience on the page, and so much more. This memoir is also our book club pick on Memoir Nation this month (happening March 27), so if you love the interview, check out Memoir Nation and join us for Book Club. Details at: https://memoir-nation.mn.co
Rachel Eliza Griffiths is many things: a poet, a visual artist, and a novelist—and now a memoirist. She is a recipient of the Hurston/Wright Foundation Legacy Award and the Paterson Poetry Prize and was a finalist for a NAACP Image Award. Rachel is the author of several collections of poetry. Her third collection of poetry, Mule & Pear was selected for the 2012 Inaugural Poetry Award by the Black Caucus of the American Library Association. Her fourth collection of poetry, Lighting the Shadow was selected as a finalist for the 2015 Balcones Poetry Prize and the 2016 Phillis Wheatley Book Award in Poetry. Her debut novel, Promise, was a Kirkus Reviews and Chicago Public Library Best Book of the Year, and she just published her memoir, The Flower Bearers, earlier this year.
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This week Memoir Nation is tackling two areas of interest to most writers: writing residencies and book festivals. Guest Janine Kovac, in addition to being an author herself, adjudicates submissions for various residencies and is co-director of Litquake's Lit Crawl. As such, she reads hundreds of applications and submissions and has some pro tips on how authors should be thinking about their applications if they want to throw their hats in the ring. A great episode for anyone gunning for some private time away to write your work-in-progress or to be in the public eye to promote your latest book. Tune in or bookmark it for later!
Janine Kovac is a former professional ballet dancer who writes about power dynamics and women's bodies. Her most recent book is the memoir, The Nutcracker Chronicles: A Fairytale Memoir. Janine is the co-director of Litquake's Lit Crawl and an alumna of several writing residencies including Hedgebrook, MacDowell, Mesa Refuge, WordSpace Studios, Vashon Artist Residency, In Cahoots, and the Mineral School. She adjudicates submissions for several writing organizations including Litquake and has served on the jury for U.C. Berkeley's Leadership Award.
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Before memoir was the craze that it is today, there were writers who were defining the genre. Marya Hornbacher was one of them. Her two best-selling memoirs, Wasted and Madness, are two of the most influential memoirs of all time—giving rise to a whole slew of books not only on her topics of eating disorders and mental health, but about many challenging topics that later became collectively (and disparagingly) known as “misery memoirs.” Despite the judgments and the naysayers, these kinds of memoirs have outlasted the critiques—and prevailed. Marya Hornbacher was one of the trailblazers and she has some things to say about all of this and more. Marya will be teaching a class for Memoir Nation this June 11th called The "Give a Shit" Factor: Writing Memoirs That Matter, something she knows a thing or two about. Find the details at MemoirNation.com.
Marya Hornbacher is an award-winning journalist, New York Times bestselling author, and the recipient of a host of awards for her work, which include Wasted, Madness, Sane, and Waiting, and the novel: The Center of Winter. Shortlisted for the Pulitzer Prize, Marya has spent a prolific quarter century writing and teaching across genres. She has a popular Substack called Going Solo at the End of the World, and a new book coming out in 2027.
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