Memoir Nation

Memoir Nation

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 Substackin’ at the end of each episode to talk about topics, ideas, trends, and writerly inspirations that Brooke and Grant are tracking in their weekly Substacks (Writerly Things and Intimations). 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.

Episodes

Grant Faulkner and Brooke Warner present: Write-Minded Is Now Memoir Nation

April 28, 2025 • 22 mins
We’ve been waiting a long time to make this announcement, and the day is finally here. Write-minded is rebranding as Memoir Nation—and along with Memoir Nation the podcast comes Memoir Nation the community and website, and an annual event we’ll be kicking off in January called JanYourStory. On this week’s episode, Grant and Brooke share the news, and talk about why they’re going this direction, and why they’re both so moved and ins...
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How to Read in Public, featuring Jorah LaFleur

April 21, 2025 • 46 mins
Writers, authors, you do not want to miss these great insights about reading on stage, taking up space, and generally being yourself—only amplified—when you read your work in public. Guest Jorah LaFleur brings a wealth of encouragement and permission, along with some great tips to improve your presence when you perform or read aloud. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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Write What You Know, featuring Betsy Lerner

April 14, 2025 • 45 mins
This week we’re featuring longtime agent and publishing pro Betsy Lerner on her debut novel, Shred Sisters. We talk about being an industry insider and whether that gives you a leg up, as well as the old adage to write what you know. Betsy shares with us how her lived experience shows up in this book, noting that Freud would have a field day—and before it’s all over, she offers generous and tactical marketing tips for authors. This...
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Brooke & Grant on Miranda July’s All Fours

April 7, 2025 • 32 mins
A few weeks back, Grant suggested Write-minded dedicate a whole episode to All Fours, by Miranda July—and we decided to do it. This week Brooke and Grant explore All Fours as a novel of a generation, and talk about who Miranda July is, why the book has hit such a zeitgeist moment, and whether publishers can anticipate or make these kinds of successes. Brooke has suggested that All Fours is the Fear of Flying of this generation, and...
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You’re Going to Have Feelings About Publishing, featuring Kate McKean

March 31, 2025 • 44 mins
Write-minded delves into publishing again in this week’s show, specifically focused on traditional publishing and the feelings that are part of the journey. Brooke and Grant connect with literary Kate McKean about her new book, Write Through It, which really is a roadmap to everything you want to know about how to stay the course on your publishing journey, and how to work through your feelings. There’s tons of good advice and chee...
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Shapeshifting, featuring Lidia Yuknavitch

March 24, 2025 • 43 mins
This week we invite one of our favorite authors, Lidia Yuknavitch, back to Write-minded to discuss her new book, Reading the Waves, as well as how we can re-envision and reimagine our past experiences through the practice of asking questions and reconsidering what we think we know. “Shapeshifting” is Lidia’s word, and the book (as well as this conversation) considers ways we can re-enter our own memories and rearrange the pieces so...
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Writing to Save Your Life, featuring Samina Ali

March 17, 2025 • 41 mins
This week’s episode tells the story of a dramatic and traumatic story, and how writing played a central role in recovery and changing the outcome of one author’s life. This week’s episode is an epic tale as much as it is interview, and it will change the way you think of the power of writing to charge your neurons and heal your mind—not to mention the way you think about willpower, writers’ block, and why writing is both personally...
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Hard-Won Wisdom, featuring Sari Botton

March 10, 2025 • 46 mins
If part of why you write is because you have some things to share from a life well- or hard- or fully lived, then you’re in good company. Personal writing is about connection, and making sense of our experience, and this week’s guest, Sari Botton, knows a thing or two about what brings writers to the page. She is a champion of personal writing and memoir, and is going to share about contributing, about her own writing process and w...
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The Suburban Novel, featuring Tom Perrotta

March 3, 2025 • 51 mins
There’s a caveat out the gate here, which is that in this week’s interview, Tom Perrotta stipulates that he writes about people and communities and the dramas that unfold—in places that just happen to be the suburbs. That said, we’re bringing you a great and often funny conversation with Perrotta about his decades of work, how his character Tracy Flick got caught up in the backlash of #MeToo, how he thinks about recurring character...
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Infusing Mystery into Literary Fiction, featuring Jean Kwok

February 24, 2025 • 43 mins
This week's guest is Jean Kwok, a writer known for writing literary thrillers, which is the blending of literary writing and mystery, resulting in tension-filled books with exciting twists. Jean brings fantastic insights into complex literary structures and the importance of knowing what you’re doing. A fun listen for anyone who loves their mysteries and thrillers wrapped up in a literary package. And this week’s episode comes with...
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How to Submit, featuring Dennis James Sweeney

February 17, 2025 • 48 mins
This week, Grant and Brooke talk with Dennis James Sweeney about his new book, How to Submit. If you've ever felt intimidated by the submissions process; wondered what some of the common pitfalls are when it comes to submitting, or if you need a reframe about how to think about submitting, this show is for you. Dennis has an encouraging and helpful way of submitting—thinking about it as based on community, conversation, and through...
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Why Scope Matters, featuring Tara Dorabji

February 9, 2025 • 49 mins
This week we’re focusing on a little celebrated but much important aspect of storytelling: your story’s scope. How much ground are you trying to cover and how do you execute the pacing? These are the questions you must answer if you know and understand your scope. This week’s guest, Tara Dorabji, has a new novel, Call Her Freedom, that spans more than five decades, and yet, it’s a relatively short book. And so, it packs a punch. Bo...
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Writing Characters Your Readers Will Care About, featuring Sadeqa Johnson

February 3, 2025 • 43 mins
This week we’re looking into the stories that inspire and move us, focusing on those that focus on everyday characters who are extraordinary in their very ordinariness. We speak to guest Sadeqa Johnson about the characters who’ve called to her, those voices that became well-rounded characters who she brought to life. This episode touches on a bit of magic, and what it’s like to listen to and get to know the characters who end up in...
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Writing Retreat Roundup, featuring Connie Hale and Ellen Sussman

January 27, 2025 • 49 mins
Are you considering doing a writers’ retreat this year? Whether you want to create your own, find something far-flung and exotic, or consider the writing retreat’s bigger cousin, the writers’ conference, this episode gives insights, definitions, and parameters for retreating. Guests Ellen Sussman and Connie Hale are both writing retreat leaders who share about their own programs and so much more. There are a lot of resources in thi...
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Creating the Heroes You Want to See in the World, featuring Lee Wind

January 20, 2025 • 46 mins
On this week’s show, we’re recognizing and honoring how far we’ve come in the world of fiction in the past decades since everyone in this week’s conversation remembers a time when there was no such thing as a gay protagonist. Guest Lee Wind talks to us about his new novel and his LGBTQ advocacy—for writers and readers. We also talk about James Bond, great books for queer youth, and why we love the Independent Book Publishers Associ...
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On the Merits of Not Letting the Past Stay in the Past, featuring Susan Lieu

January 13, 2025 • 43 mins
This week we touch upon the struggle that presents itself for memoirists who can’t or won’t let the past stay in the past, especially when other people wish you would. Guest Susan Lieu shares powerfully in this week’s show about how her mother became the central force and inspiration for her work after she died due to complications from a tummy tuck. In the process of writing about her mother and making sense of what happened, Susa...
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The Poem As Novel, featuring Forrest Gander

January 6, 2025 • 38 mins
We welcome you to 2025 with a show that explores the exploration of form. In this conversation with Pulitzer Prize-winning author Forrest Gander, we consider the nature of the writing journey—and its connection to landscape, the multiplicity of selves, and the kaleidoscopic experience of bringing together multiple eras of a lived life. Gander calls his new book a novel poem, and you’ll find out why, along with other beautiful insig...
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The Counter Revolution to Resolutions Continues, featuring Grant Faulkner and Brooke Warner

December 30, 2024 • 25 mins
Welcome to Write-minded's 7th New Year's show—where Grant and Brooke always circle around their challenge with resolutions, even as they make them and break them and every so often vow not to bother with them. This year they look back to certain resolutions declared and uncompleted, and grapple with the reckoning that must come when you assert such intentions out loud. And yet, Write-minded is also all about the fact that this writ...
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In Defense of Unsatisfying Endings, featuring Zahid Rafiq

December 16, 2024 • 38 mins
This week’s show focuses on endings, and beginnings. Guest Zahid Rafiq, who’s written a short story collection whose endings serve the stories and his characters, speaks to how he thinks about endings, including those that others might find less than satisfying. We’re defending a particular type of ending, those in which writers may feel less than compelled to tie their story in a bow for readers. Brooke points to a series of YouTu...
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Hybrid Writing for Hybrid Lives, featuring Faith Adiele

December 9, 2024 • 45 mins
This week’s show features guest Faith Adiele, who’s just released two chapbooks that are in conversation with one another. These books are a springboard for a conversation about hybrid writing, hybrid memoirs, the popularity of chapbooks, and hybrid forms. If you’re a writer who’s been told “you can’t do that,” this episode will be validating, if not vindicating. The publishing world is playing catch-up to all the creativity writer...
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