70. Saying Goodbye and Why We Write About the Hard Things featuring Morgan Baker

Morgan Baker joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about motherhood and identity, giving back to ourselves and creating boundaries, confronting depression, worrying about our memoir’s structure later, juggling our jobs as writers, why we write about hard things, and her new memoir Emptying the Nest.

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Also in this episode:

-perceiving ourselves in new ways

-the gifts of teaching 

-letting go

Books mentioned in this episode:

A Three Dog Life by Abigail Thomas

Growing Up by Russell Baker

By the Iowa Sea by Joe Blair

In Love by Amy Bloom

The Suicide Index byJoan Wickersham

How to Make a Slave by Jerald Walker

Surviving the White Gaze by Rebecca Carroll

Morgan Baker is an award-winning writer and professor at Emerson College. Her work is featured in The New York Times Magazine, The Boston Globe Magazine, The Brevity Blog, Talking Writing, The Boston Parents’ Paper, The Martha’s Vineyard Times, The Bark, Modern Dog, Cognoscenti, and Hippocampus, among many regional and national publications. She is managing editor of The Bucket. She is the mother of two adult daughters and lives with her husband and two dogs in Cambridge, where she also quilts and bakes. Visit her at bymorganbaker.com.

Connect with Morgan:

Website: https://www.bymorganbaker.com

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

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/morgan.baker.737/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/morgan-baker-01446aa/

Get her book here: https://www.ten16press.com/shop 

Write Your Way with Morgan will be starting two 8-week workshops

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Ronit’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 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.

More about Ronit: https://ronitplank.com

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Background photo credit: Photo by Patrick Tomasso on Unsplash

Headshot photo credit: Sarah Anne Photography

Theme music: Isaac Joel, Dead Moll’s Fingers