An Invitation to be Known: Erin Slaughter and Lena Ziegler discuss navigating disclosure, dignity, responsibility, compassion, and real-life risk in memoirs about trauma

On today's episode of The Lives of Writers, Erin Slaughter and Lena Ziegler interview each other about literary friendship, navigating disclosure, dignity, and responsibility in memoirs about trauma, writing with compassion about your previous self and real-life people who have harmed you, the emotional realities and real-life risks of publishing memoir, and more.

Erin Slaughter is the author of The Dead Dad Diaries (Autofocus Books, 2025). She is also the author of the short story collection A Manual for How to Love Us (Harper Perennial, 2023), and two books of poetry: The Sorrow Festival (CLASH Books, 2022) and I Will Tell This Story to the Sun Until You Remember That You Are the Sun (New Rivers Press, 2019). Her writing has appeared in Lit Hub, Electric Literature, CRAFT, The Georgia Review, Prairie Schooner, and elsewhere. Originally from Texas, she holds an MFA from Western Kentucky University and a PhD from Florida State University. She is currently Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Coastal Carolina University.

Lena Ziegler is the author of A Revisionist History of Loving Men (Autofocus Books, 2025). Her writing has appeared in Split Lip Magazine, Indiana Review, Literary Orphans, Miracle Monocle, Duende, Dream Pop Press, Anti-Heroin Chic, Gambling the Aisle, and others, and she has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She is a co-founder of the literary journal and press The Hunger. She holds an MFA from Western Kentucky University and a PhD from Bowling Green State University. She is the host of the music and literature podcast Reading Michael Jackson, available on all major podcast platforms. She lives in Pennsylvania with her husband. She believes in magic, the transformative power of language, and the resilience of the human heart. 

Both these books are available together as part of the Autofocus Fall 2025 box.

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Conversation topics include:

-- Becoming best friends and ideal readers a decade ago

-- Starting The Hunger journal and press after MFAs and going into PhDs

-- Their memoirs with Autofocus coming out a week apart

-- Non-judgement and trust as readers, audiences, and friends

-- Lena’s A Revisionist History of Loving Men, which deals with understanding sexual abuse in a context of normalized sexual violence

-- Erin’s The Dead Dad Diaries, which deals with the murder of her father by her stepmom when Erin was 16 (and its effects as she came of age in her twenties)

-- The dangers of memoir in creating a fixed narrative for the self

-- Navigating disclosure, dignity, and responsibility in memoirs about trauma

-- Memoir as the willingness to take up space 

-- The value in writing from personal experience

-- Capturing the messiness of your coming of age with compassion

-- The terminology victim and survivor and the complexity of human experience

-- Accepted or expected narratives of trauma / self-determining justice

-- Bringing compassion and humanity in writing to people who have harmed you

-- The emotional reality about publishing a personal book about family or that family may read

-- Bending form to tell these stories in memoir

-- Questioning the story you’re telling in memoir

-- The shifting nature of truth

-- More about the emotional reality about publishing a personal book about family or that family may read

-- Shame and healing (and not healing)

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Podcast theme music  by Mike Nagel, author of Duplex and Culdesac. Here's his music project: Yeah Yeah Cool Cool.

The Lives of Writers is edited and produced by Michael Wheaton.