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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

This week’s episode is a timely one—an interview with Jose Antonio Vargas, who outed himself as an undocumented immigrant when he started his nonprofit, Define American. His memoir is Dear America, which was updated last year to include new material for living in Trump’s America. In this interview, Jose shares his experiences with ICE and being undocumented in this country, as well as his insights on the Black/white binary, the construction of race, and so much more. We recorded this episode the day after International Human Rights Day—and Jose’s interview, book, and experience gives voice to the realities of who is being targeted by our draconian immigration policies and how it feels. An important listen. 

Jose Antonio Vargas is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, Emmy-nominated filmmaker, and Tony-nominated theatrical producer. A leading voice for the human rights of immigrants, he founded the nonprofit immigrant storytelling organization Define American, and he explores all facets of immigration as host of its YouTube show and podcast Define American with Jose Antonio Vargas. His best-selling memoir, Dear America: Notes of an Undocumented Citizen, was published in 2018, with an updated edition in 2025. His second book, White Is Not a Country, will examine America's foundational Black and White racial binary, and where everyone else fits within and outside that binary.

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Jose Antonio Vargas on Life in a Country That Says You Don’t Belong

Memoir Nation is ringing in the new year with some of our greatest hits. We’ve gone into the archives and chosen a clip from a handful of our favorite guests over the years. Listening to each of these memoirists speak about memoir, writing, and the gifts and challenges of the genre is so inspiring—and we hope this hour of insight will be some fuel for your own writing tank. We’re in the first week of our JanYourStory free writing challenge, and it’s not too late to join. Come check out the Community tab on MemoirNation.com. 

Mary Karr, Jeannette Walls, Kiese Laymon, Abigail Thomas, Elizabeth Gilbert, Ashley C. Ford, Firoorzeh Dumas, Dani Shapiro, Ingrid Rojas Contreras, and Maggie Smith are all extraordinary memoirists who’ve graced our show in the past eight years. Check out their books, their social media, and their interviews in our archives. 

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Memoir Nation Greatest Hits, 2018-2025

JanYourStory is starting this week! And since this show falls at the end of 2025 and the beginning of 2026, Grant and Brooke are picking up from where they left off last week (how to start) to focus on how to keep going. Questions of fear and readiness (or lack thereof) are addressed, but the primary message of this week’s show is that if you say you want to write a memoir, you can and you will. That said, we all need some tricks and tips, some accountability and community, and a little bit of spirit and magic, too. Tune in and write with Memoir Nation in January, too! 

Brooke Warner and Grant Faulkner are the cohosts of the Memoir Nation podcast and the cofounders of Memoir Nation, which is hosting the inaugural writing challenge, JanYourStory, running January 1-31, 2026. Join us here.

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Grant and Brooke on How to Keep Doing What You Say You Want to Do—and Write and Finish Your Memoir (JanYourStory Prep)

This week we’re in full prep mode to write write write in January for our JanYourStory writing challenge. With that in mind, Brooke and and Grant tackle beginnings. How to start isn’t limited to how to get started. Starting involves starting to write each day, and how to start thinking about writing, and ways to start a memoir. We talk about all this and more, with an eye on the new year and throwing down a lot of content in January. Let’s go!

Brooke Warner and Grant Faulkner are the cohosts of the Memoir Nation podcast and the cofounders of Memoir Nation, which is hosting the inaugural writing challenge, JanYourStory, running January 1-31, 2026. Join us here.

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Brooke & Grant on How to Start or Restart Your Memoir (JanYourStory Prep)

This week’s interview with the cofounders of SheWrites.com, Kamy Wicoff and Deborah Siegel-Acevedo, is especially touching for Brooke because these two women are where it all started. This week’s interview is about why community matters as told through the histories and sensibilities of two community champions who started something that lit the literary world on fire in 2009. SheWrites back then was a little bit like Substack is today, but with small breakout groups and a lot of meet-ups happening in the real world. The feminist sensibility of SheWrites was what drew Brooke to the platform, and to Kamy and Deborah in those early days when she was a Senior and then Executive Editor at Seal Press—and this origin story is both a walk down memory lane and an inspiring episode on the enduring power of community. 

Kamy Wicoff is a writer, former publisher, and psychotherapist with a degree in social work. Kamy holds an MFA in Creative Nonfiction from Columbia and is the author of several books, including the novel Wishful Thinking and the nonfiction book I Do But I Don’t: Why the Way We Marry Matters, and has contributed to multiple anthologies, most recently Feminists Reclaim Mentorship: An Anthology. Kamy is the cofounder of She Writes Press. She serves as a trustee on the board of the Brooklyn Public Library and lives with her husband and their four sons in Brooklyn. 

Deborah Siegel-Acevedo, PhD is a Visiting Scholar in Gender & Sexuality Studies at Northwestern University and the author of Sisterhood, Interrupted and co-editor of the literary anthology Only Child. She is a regular on Chicago’s “live lit” storytelling stages. Deborah’s essay “My Husband, the Reluctant Barista” just appeared this past October in the Modern Love column at The New York Times. Her op-eds and essays on gender, motherhood, family, feminism, and writing have appeared in Slate, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Guardian, and elsewhere. She’s a TEDx speaker, a longtime coach and champion of writers, and her coaching company, Girl Meets Voice, Inc., has supported hundreds of established and emerging writers. Together, they cofounded SheWrites.com in 2009. 

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Kamy Wicoff and Deborah Siegel-Acevedo on The Power of Community (JanYourStory Prep)

This month we’re doing a series to get our listeners in the mindset to write! Once you have a goal and a deadline (last week’s show), the next hurdle you will invariably face is time—lack thereof or mismanagement or both. Don’t worry, this week’s guest, Laura Vanderkam, has got your back. There are such practical tips and helpful reframes in this episode. If you’re not planning to write with us in January, maybe this will help you venture to give it a shot. You can write in the nooks and crannies. You can make the very best use of time confetti. You can do the things you say you want to do—if you change how you look at how much time you have and plan accordingly. You can, you can, you can. 

Laura Vanderkam is the author of several time management and productivity books, including the forthcoming Big Time: A Simple Path to Time Abundance (May 5, 2026), along with Tranquility by Tuesday, Juliet’s School of Possibilities, Off the Clock, I Know How She Does It, What the Most Successful People Do Before Breakfast, and 168 Hours. Her work has appeared in publications including the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Fast Company, and Fortune. She is the host of the podcast Before Breakfast and the co-host, with Sarah Hart-Unger, of the podcast Best of Both Worlds. She lives outside Philadelphia with her husband and five children, and blogs at LauraVanderkam.com.

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Laura Vanderkam on Making Time to Write (JanYourStory Prep)

Through the month of December, Memoir Nation podcast is hosting a series called JanYourStory Prep to get listeners ready and excited to participate in our January writing challenge to write 500 words a day every day in January. Inspired by Grant’s 12 years as Executive Director of NaNoWriMo, JanYourStory is for memoirists, but anyone can join this free challenge. Instead of writing 60K words in November as was the case with NaNoWriMo, we’re inviting writers to write 15K words in January. Many of the principles and values of NaNoWriMo are buoying this event, which is why we’re so grateful to have the blessing, support, and wisdom of Chris Baty, who joins the show this week to talk about why writing challenges are helpful and should always be grounded in fun, and what he’s learned about writing and writing in community since he accidentally founded NaNoWriMo in 1999. 

Chris Baty’s idea for National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) sprang into the world in 1999 with 21 friends writing novels together in the month of November. He watched the event grow to more than 300,000 writers in 90 countries. He’s currently working on a novel about an assistant librarian trying to return a DVD in post-apocalyptic Canada. He’s also the author of No Plot? No Problem! and the co-author of Ready, Set, Novel. In 2025, Chris launched NaNo2 with a group of other volunteers in the wake of NaNoWriMo closing its doors—and he’s happy to take the credit we’re giving him for being the father of it all. 

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Chris Baty on The Magic of a Goal and a Deadline (JanYourStory Prep)

This week’s Memoir Nation is an onstage interview with Brooke and guest Susan Orlean, author of the new memoir, Joyride. This interview was a LitQuake event that happened in late October in Oakland, California. Susan is a delightful storyteller on the page and on the stage. There are some not-to-be-missed stories about working for Robert Gottlieb and Tina Brown at The New Yorker; what it felt like to have Meryl Streep play her in the movie, Adaptation; and insights about whether or not she could have the career she’s had if she were starting today. Thank you to LitQuake and Susan for allowing us to repurpose this interview—and Happy Thanksgiving week to all. 

Susan Orlean is the bestselling author of The Orchid Thief, The Library Book, and eight other works of nonfiction. A longtime staff writer for The New Yorker, she’s known for her vivid storytelling, deep curiosity, and ability to illuminate the extraordinary in the ordinary. Her work has been widely anthologized and adapted for film, including the Oscar-winning Adaptation. She is one of the most influential nonfiction storytellers of our time.

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Susan Orlean on Writing the Story of a Life Well Lived

Memoir Nation guest Beth Macy’s new memoir, Paper Girl, offers us the opportunity to dive into a social-cultural discussion this week as we explore the forces that seek to divide us, and also that seek to prevent pathways out of poverty. This is an important if hard conversation about subjects close to Beth’s book and her life—about the safety nets that are no longer there for the poor; about the legs up people are no longer getting; and about the resentment that’s been sowed as a result. Today’s show reminds us that memoir is many things, and that what we choose to write about can both get us into trouble and set us free. 

Beth Macy reported and wrote for The Roanoke Times for a quarter-century before leaving in 2014 to focus on book writing. She’s the author of Dopesick, which was made into a Peabody Award-winning series for Hulu. She’s also the author of Raising Lazarus and Factory Man. Her books examine the forces eroding American society, such as addiction, offshoring, and economic inequality. Paper Girl is her first memoir.

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Beth Macy on Writing to Explore Why We’re So Divided

This week we delve into all the ways memoir can be transformative. In framing her own memoir as an act of service, Julie Lythcott-Haims helps us to contextualize what your memoir is for, who it’s for, and whether you’re ready to write it for others, or if it needs to stay with just you, at least for a while. This is a powerful and impassioned conversation about memoir, why we write, and what we write for. Julie also shares about how prescient her memoir, Real American, was—as she was writing it in 2016 with the rise of Trumpism, and what it meant to be part of a chorus of voices writing about experiences of race and racial identity in America. 

Julie Lythcott-Haims is a writer, speaker, teacher, mentor, and activist. The New York Times bestselling author of How to Raise an Adult, which inspired a widely viewed TED Talk. Her award-winning memoir, Real American, explores her experience as a Black and biracial person in white spaces. Her third book is Your Turn: How to Be an Adult. Julie earned a B.A. from Stanford, a J.D. from Harvard Law, and an M.F.A. in Writing from California College of the Arts. She also holds an Honorary Doctor of Letters from the University of Puget Sound. She lives in Palo Alto, where she serves on the City Council, advocating for housing, equity, climate, and youth mental health. Julie and her lifelong partner Dan are parents to two twentysomethings.

 

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Julie Lythcott-Haims on Writing as an Act of Service

This week's guest Ben Purkert, author of the newly released novel, The Men Can’t Be Saved, gives us some insight into the art of writing complex characters, including the downright unlikeable ones. Atrocious acts and bad behavior are at the center of storytelling, and when constructed well, supposedly unlikeable characters are often more gripping and memorable than likable ones. We’re titillated and drawn forth by a character’s conflict, bad behavior, and perhaps even downfall. A good author challenges their readers to be interested in their unlikeable characters—even through their flaws.

 

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The Art of Writing Unlikeable Characters, featuring Ben Purkert

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