Writing About Abandonment without Abandoning Yourself with Ronit Plank

Feb 1, 2024

01:03:37

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Let’s Talk Memoir host Ronit Plank joins the Writing Your Resilience Podcast to discuss writing about abandonment, the importance of understanding the context of your story, the challenges around writing about family, publishing with small presses and much more.

Here are a few questions to ponder as you listen to this episode: Have you ever written about someone who's abandoned you? What kind of feedback did you get? Do you wonder how to do this without making them a monster or abandoning yourself? Ever wonder what it might be like to publish this work, or where you might publish it?

Ronit Plank’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, 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.

Episode Highlights:

8:00 Lessons on writing about abandonment

14:00 The power of context

20:30 The challenges of publishing stories about complex characters

29:15: How to tell if your project is complete

35:01 Finding your story’s emotional truth

40: Publishing with small presses

Resources mentioned in this episode:

Courtney Maum post on hiring a publicist.

Hot Sheet Article on Books Being Sold by Word of Mouth

Ronit’s essay “How to Approach Family and Friends About Your Memoir

Ronit’s essay “I want to heal my son so badly”