52. Approaching Traumatic Material with Complexity and Compassion featuring Brittany Means

Brittany Means joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about growing up vagrant, writing about child sexual abuse, how she started with the scenes that haunted her, depicting traumatic material with complexity and compassion, leaning into her narrative voice, when she felt like a writer with a capital “W”, and her new memoir Hell If We Don’t Change Our Ways. 

Also in this episode:

-reconnecting with your body when writing traumatic material

-asking yourself really hard questions

-why our stories matter

Memoirs mentioned in this episode:

Darkroom by Jill Christman

Heavy by Kiese Laymon

In the Dream House by Carmen Maria Machado

Brittany Means is a Chicana writer and editor living in Albuquerque, NM. A graduate of Iowa's MFA Nonfiction Writing Program, Means has worked with Inara Verzemnieks and Kiese Laymon. She has received several awards for her work, including the Magdalena Award, Geneva Fellowship, and Grace Paley Fellowship at Under the Volcano.

Connect with Brittany Means:

Website: www.brittanymeans.com

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/BrittanyMeansIt/

Twitter: http://twitter.com/BrittanyMeansIt/

Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/BrittanyMeansIt/

Get Brittany’s book: https://bookshop.org/p/books/hell-if-we-don-t-change-our-ways-a-memoir-brittany-means/19712130?ean=9798985282894

–

Ronit Plank is a writer, teacher, and editor whose work has been featured in The Atlantic, The Washington Post, The New York Times, Writer’s Digest, The Rumpus, American Literary Review, Hippocampus, The Iowa 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 a 2021 Best True Crime Book by Book Riot and was a Finalist in the National Indie Excellence Awards, the Housatonic Book Awards, and the Book of the Year Awards. Her fiction and creative nonfiction have been nominated for Pushcart Prizes, the Best of the Net, and the Best Microfiction Anthology, and her short story collection HOME IS A MADE-UP PLACE won Hidden River Arts’ Eludia Award. She is creative nonfiction editor at The Citron Review and lives in Seattle with her family where she is working on her next book.

More about Ronit: https://ronitplank.com

Sign up for monthly podcast and writing updates: https://bit.ly/33nyTKd

Follow on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ronitplank/

More about WHEN SHE COMES BACK, a memoir: https://ronitplank.com/book/

More about HOME IS A MADE-UP PLACE, a short story collection: https://ronitplank.com/home-is-a-made-up-place/

Connect with Ronit:

https://www.instagram.com/ronitplank/

https://twitter.com/RonitPlank

https://www.facebook.com/RonitPlank

Background photo: Canva

Headshot photo credit: Sarah Anne Photography

Theme music: Isaac Joel, Dead Moll’s Fingers