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Brooke Warner and Grant Faulkner

Memoir Nation: Weekly Inspiration for Writers is an extension of the Memoir Nation community hosted by Brooke Warner and Grant Faulkner, two friends and colleagues who bring a community-minded sensibility to the writing journey. Originally launched as Write-minded in 2018, this is a weekly writing podcast that focuses on memoir and personal writing, as well as industry trends and tips and resources for writers and authors. 

Memoir Nation features a segment called Book Alley at the end of each episode to talk about recent memoirs that authors have sent Brooke and Grant, or memoirs they've discovered that are thought provoking or have sparked inspiration. Brooke and Grant bring to this weekly podcast their deeply held belief that everyone is a writer, and everyone’s story matters. Discover more about Memoir Nation at memoirnation.com.

Write-minded: Weekly Inspiration for Writers

Memoir Nation explores the hardest things this week with guest Emily Rapp Black. Her new book is I Would Die If I Were You, part memoir, part how-to, that supports writers through writing trauma and the things that won’t let us go, and how to stay the course. In this week’s show, we talk a lot about process—doing the work, the permission to write what is calling to be written, and how to shake things up when you’re struggling. We talk about being in the mess, not worrying about your book being right for everyone, and how to grapple with the things other people say—like I would die if I were you. There is so much wisdom and grace in this interview, and in Rapp Black’s new book. In this week’s trend, we cover Sarah Wynn-Williams’s memoir, Careless People, in an effort to continue the upward sales trajectory of this book that Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg are desperate to silence. 

Emily Rapp Black is the author of Poster Child: A Memoir, The Still Point of the Turning World, which was a New York Times bestseller, Editor’s Pick, and a finalist for the PEN-USA Award; Sanctuary, a New York Times Editor’s Pick; Frida Kahlo and My Left Leg; and most recently, I Would Die If I Were You: Notes on Art and Truthtelling. A former Fulbright scholar, she was educated at Harvard, Trinity College-Dublin, Saint Olaf College, and the University of Texas-Austin. Her work has appeared in VOGUE, the New York Times, The Sun, TIME, the Boston Globe, the Los Angeles Times and other publications. She is a Professor of Creative Writing at the University of California-Riverside. 

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Emily Rapp Black on Writing the Hardest Things

This week’s show is a meditation on grief and the ways it weaves itself into our writing. Guest Siri Hustvedt says so many profound things about the writing process, about writing after loss, and about how to make sense of a life in the absence of a person who’s been part of your everyday for more than four decades. Hustvedt was married to the acclaimed novelist Paul Auster for 43 years, and her new book, Ghost Stories, is a book about loss, and a book that works to keep Auster alive on the page through his own words. The book has been widely compared to Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking, and for Memoir Nation provides a beautiful portal into the many permutations of loss. 

Siri Hustvedt is the author of a book of poetry, four collections of essays, two works of nonfiction, and seven novels, including the international bestsellers What I Loved and The Summer Without Men. Her most recent novel The Blazing World was long-listed for the Man Booker Prize and won The Los Angeles Book Prize for fiction. In 2012 she was awarded the International Gabarron Prize for Thought and Humanities and in 2019 princess asturias prize. She has a PhD in English from Columbia University and is a lecturer in psychiatry at Weil Cornell Medical College in New York. Her most recent book is Ghost Stories: A Memoir. 

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Siri Hustvedt on Grief as Unrequited Love

This week we’re taking a bit of a departure from all things memoir to celebrate independent media with Roxane Gay and Debbie Millman, who bought “The Rumpus” in 2025. We’re supporting their relaunch in this interview, and talking about the indie media landscape, some of their new initiatives, when they knew they were buying the magazine, and also the all-important role their dog Max plays in the new endeavor. We invite you to please support indie media in all the ways you can. Sign up to become a Rumpus member, and as Brooke and Grant suggest in their opening banter, small gestures go a long ways—like “Buy Me a Coffee” where you can tip Memoir Nation for the suggested amount of $5 if you like this or future shows. And thank you! 

Founded in 2009, “The Rumpus” is an influential independent online literary magazine dedicated to fostering community and championing diverse perspectives. For over 15 years, the publication has served as a premier platform for emerging and established voices, publishing original fiction, poetry, essays, interviews, comics, and cultural criticism that challenge, provoke, and inspire. Work published in “The Rumpus” has consistently earned the literary world’s highest honors, including Pushcart Prizes, PEN America awards, Best American anthology selections, and Best of the Net recognitions. This week’s guests are the new owners of “The Rumpus,” partners in life and in this collaboration—literary goddess Roxane Gay and brand strategist and visionary Debbie Millman. 

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Roxane Gay and Debbie Millman on the Importance of Indie Media (and Celebrating the Relaunch of “The Rumpus”)

So much of what’s funny stems from what’s terrible and tragic, and the funniest people are also often the darkest ones. This week we explore that truth with comedian Rosebud Baker, who talks with Grant Faulkner about her alcoholism, what happens to women when they become moms, and also her anger—and how she turns that into humor. This is a permission-giving show, as so many Memoir Nation episodes are. We invite anger and tragedy and hardship here, and also always the acknowledgment that writing memoir is hard work. On the trend we talk about the linear memoir and remind listeners that the elevation of one form doesn’t mean the collapse of another. It’s all there for our use, and your memoir knows what it wants to be! 

Rosebud Baker is a comedian, actor, and Emmy-nominated writer named to Variety's "10 Comics to Watch" and Vulture's “Comedians You Should and Will Know” lists. She wrote for Saturday Night Live from 2022 to 2025 and won a WGA Award for her work on Inside Amy Schumer. Her Netflix special The Mother Lode premiered in February 2025. Fully Baked is her debut memoir.

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Rosebud Baker on Tragedy + Time = Memoir

This week’s show is a nuanced exploration of the various and creative ways memoir can be an exploration of identity, culture, and history, and how in unearthing our own stories, we can discover so much about the world around us. Guest Beronda Montgomery has written a thoughtful and “thinking” memoir that has us ruminating on trees, legacy, ancestors, and who gets and is denied credit in our society. We learned so much from reading this book, and gained so much from being in conversation with Beronda. In the book trend this week, we talk about shorter books—the financial and attentional reason shorter might be better. 

Beronda L. Montgomery, PhD, is a writer, researcher, and scholar who pursues a common theme of understanding how individuals perceive, respond to, and are impacted by the environments in which they exist. Her primary laboratory-based research has been focused on the responses of photosynthetic organisms, like plants, react to external light cues. Beronda is author of two books When Trees Testify: Science, Wisdom, History, and America’s Black Botanical Legacy and Lessons From Plants. 

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Beronda Montgomery on Memoir as Testimony

This week’s episode will be a fast favorite because guest Ronit Plank is speaking the language of a memoir advocate. We get right to the heart of so many things that make memoir special and important. Ronit speaks about coming to memoir kicking and screaming, and how it opened her up, and how memoir makes us all more empathetic. A true memoir advocate, with her own popular memoir podcast, Let’s Talk Memoir, Ronit is a kindred spirit in this space. She’s also a new contributor to the Memoir Nation Community with her quarterly group, Mining the Depths, and she’s delightful to listen to. Let’s talk memoir, let’s talk advocacy—here on this week’s Memoir Nation. 

Ronit Plank is a writer, teacher, and editor whose work has appeared in The Atlantic, Poets & Writers, The Rumpus, Salon, Hippocampus, The New York Times, and elsewhere. Her memoir, When She Comes Back, was named a Book Riot Best True Crime Book, and won a 2022 Book Excellence Award and other indie awards. Ronit is also the author of the award-winning short story collection Home is a Made-Up Place and her work has been widely anthologized. She teaches memoir for the University of Washington’s Continuum Program, and she’s host of the podcast Let’s Talk Memoir and writes the Substack Let’s Talk Memoir. 

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Ronit Plank on Memoir Advocacy

Form, form, form. We can’t stop circling it on Memoir Nation because everyone has a different approach to it. Mostly we’re taught that once you know your form, you can pour your content into it. And yet, we keep hearing from authors whose process is the exact opposite—which is that form follows content. Today we talk with Eleni Sikelianos about the ways in which she followed her subject matter to find the form of her story, in addition to memoir as series, what it means to embody the life of an ancestor you never knew in your writing, and the role of photographs as narrative rather than decorative elements. A fascinating exploration! 

Born into a family of tree workers, bohemians, poets, ne'er-do-wells, visionaries, and small-time sort-of hustlers, Eleni Sikelianos is a poet, writer, collaborator, and "master of mixing genres." As a student of the poets of Naropa, she is a lineage-holder in the Outrider poetics family tree. Deeply engaged with ecopoetics, her work takes up urgent concerns of environmental precarity and ancestral work. She has published ten books of poetry (most recently, Your Kingdom, 2023) and three unclassifiable hybrid works, sometimes called nonfiction, sometimes memoirs, sometimes fiction: The Book of Jon and You Animal Machine, and Memory Rehearsal. 

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Eleni Sikelianos on How Subject Shapes Story

If you’re a regular listener of Memoir Nation, you know we love to cover memoir in all its changing and emerging forms. The micro memoir is a form all its own—different from the fragmented style that’s been so popular of late. In this week’s show, we’re going micro, exploring how writers can boil the essence of what needs to be said into the fewest number of words. We’ll talk about the form, its benefits for all writers, and how memoir keeps pushing the boundaries with our guest, Beth Ann Fennelly. And in this week’s book trend, we cover how Substack is changing the way we think about book tours. 

Beth Ann Fennelly was Poet Laureate of Mississippi from 2016-2021 and teaches in the MFA Program at the University of Mississippi where she is a four-time teaching award winner. She has published three poetry books: Open House, Tender Hooks, and Unmentionables. She’s also published a book of nonfiction, Great with Child, and a novel she co-authored with her husband, Tom Franklin, called The Tilted World. Her sixth book, Heating & Cooling: 52 Micro-Memoirs, was named an Atlanta Journal Constitution Best Book, a Goodreaders Favorite for 2017, and the winner of the Housatonic Book Prize. Her new book is The Irish Goodbye: Micro-Memoirs. 

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Beth Ann Fennelly on The Micro Memoir

This week on Memoir Nation we take a specific guest with a specific skillset/talent and look at ways to apply what he does to our broader writing community. Guest Brandon Deyette shares with us how he channels story by being hyper-attuned to his emotions, and Brooke and Grant speculate that this kind of attention is an emotional practice that any memoirist can cultivate. When you write memoir, you’re always embodying another voice—that voice of your earlier self, who in some cases is a near stranger to the person you are today. An interesting subject matter with a fun and eccentric guest. Enjoy! 

Brandon Deyette is a writer, co-author, and award-winning filmmaker whose work centers on translating lived experience into deeply resonant narrative. He is the co-author of Young Is Blessed, a memoir written alongside Young Bae— tattoo artist, entrepreneur, and star of VH1's Black Ink Crew—chronicling her journey from an abusive childhood in South Korea to becoming a celebrated entrepreneur and television personality. As a filmmaker, his projects have earned recognition at festivals including Palm Springs, Atlanta, and New York. His television credits include Emmy-nominated series on The Weather Channel, TLC, VH1, and OWN.​

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Brandon Deyette on Writing in Another Voice

It’s our 400th episode and we’re celebrating with celebrated food critic and author Ruth Reichl! Ruth wrote her first food memoir before food memoir was a thing, and she takes us back there to when bookstores didn’t know what to do with her work. Ruth is a pioneer of the food movement in America, and is known for her mission to demystify the world of fine cuisine. This is a generous interview, full of history and story—as well as some encouraging tips about the art of sensory writing. For Ruth, it’s all about creativity.

Ruth Reichl wrote her first cookbook in 1972. She spent the seventies as restaurant critic for New West Magazine and the eighties as restaurant critic and food editor of the Los Angeles Times. From 1993 to 1999 she was the restaurant critic for The New York Times before moving to Gourmet Magazine as Editor in Chief. A defining voice in American food writing and journalism over the past several decades, she’s written five memoirs, two novels and two cookbooks, edited a dozen books and hosted two television series. Her movie Food and Country is available on streaming and she produces a weekly newsletter, La Briffe, on Substack. The recipient of 7 James Beard Awards, including Lifetime Achievement, she is currently working on a sequel to The Paris Novel.

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Ruth Reichl on Writing You Can Taste (and it’s our 400th episode!)

A rocking ride through punk influence on prose and story, this interview with guest Joshua Mohr is, more than anything, about pushing your limits and getting out of your comfort zone. In his new book, Saint the Terrifying, Josh does a few things he’s never tried—and he walks us through why that’s been so invigorating, and how it’s pushed his limits as a writer. We delve into not outlining and the power of alternative histories, and get to hear about why Josh wrote this book wanting it to feel like it might fall apart at any moment.

 

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Don’t Let Your Comfort Zone Become Your Doom Zone, featuring Joshua Mohr

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