Have you signed up to be a DIY MFA Radio Insider yet? This is an exciting new monthly newsletter especially for our podcast listeners. Every month, you’ll get an email from our podcast producer with recaps of the most recent episodes, a curated Listening List of episodes on a particular theme, and other fun goodies we only share via email. Best of all, it’s free to join! The theme for April is Word Choice and Micro Craft, and you can become an insider by signing up with your email at diymfa.com/insiders.

In this episode Leslie Karst and Lori discuss:

• Letting go of ego in order to follow your dreams.
• The importance of perseverance
• How the writing mindset for memoir is different from that of mystery.

Plus, her #1 tip for writers.

About Leslie Karst

The daughter of a law professor and a potter, Leslie Karst waited tables and sang in a new wave rock band before deciding she was ready for a “real” job and ending up at Stanford Law School. It was during her career as a research and appellate attorney in Santa Cruz, California, that she rediscovered her youthful passion for food and cooking, at which point she once again returned to school—this time to earn a degree in culinary arts. Now retired from the law, Leslie spends her days penning the Sally Solari culinary mystery series, as well as cooking, gardening, cycling, and singing alto in her local community chorus. She and her wife and their Jack Russell mix split their time between Santa Cruz and Hilo, Hawai’i.

You can find her on her website or follow her on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

Justice is Served

Leslie was a small-town lawyer who was good at a job she hated and had taken up cooking as a way to spice up the daily grind. Spice is exactly what she got when her offer to cook for Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and her husband was accepted. Leslie was terrified – she had never thrown a high-stakes dinner before! 

What follows is a lighthearted account of Leslie’s journey following this challenge – including a new unexpected connection with her partner and her parents, an inspiring trip to Paris, mouthwatering recipes, Ginsburg’s transformation from Jewish girl from Flatbush to one of the most celebrated justices in our nation’s history, and the dinner itself. 

A heartfelt story of simultaneously searching for delicious recipes and purpose in life, Justice is Served is an inspiring reminder that it’s never too late to discover—and follow—your deepest passion.

If you decide to check out the book, we hope you’ll do so via this Amazon affiliate link where, if you choose to purchase via the link, DIY MFA gets a referral fee at no cost to you. As always, thank you for supporting DIY MFA!

Link to Episode 457

(Right-click to download.)

If you liked this episode…

Head over to iTunes, Stitcher Radio, Spotify, or Google and subscribe so you’ll be first to know when new episodes are available.

Also, remember that sharing is caring so if you know anyone who might enjoy this podcast, please tell them about it or leave us a review so other listeners will want to check it out.

Until next week, keep writing and keep being awesome!

The post Episode 457: Take the Leap: Chase Your Passion, Quit Your Job, and Write a Memoir – Interview with Leslie Karst appeared first on DIY MFA.

1. Write from the right state of mind 

Chances are the difficult subjects you’re writing about helped shape you into the resilient and inspirational person you are today. So, while the book is still just a thought in your mind, before you write your first word, sit for twenty minutes in meditative silence, thanking the antagonist for the role they played in your awakening. (I never thought I’d be able to do this exercise, but I did!) 

Sharing your story with awareness will guide your hand in writing a soul-stirring work of art as opposed to an angry, vindictive account of what happened to you.

2. Go deep, not wide 

Choose one or two specific people as your target audience and write with only them in mind. It’s paralyzing to be preoccupied with what to say or how to say it so that it lands with everyone. 

I wrote my memoir hoping to reach a good friend and her twenty-year-old daughter. For years I witnessed them struggling with distressing circumstances and dysfunctional relationships, and I knew from experience they were stuck in this pattern because they weren’t taking an honest look within. Because I was determined to connect with them on the deepest level, eager for them to see themselves in me, and hopeful they’d be inspired to heal, the words flowed through me with ease.

3. Lay it all out 

Don’t let fear or shame hold you back from writing difficult scenes in your early drafts. Putting it all down on the page will help illuminate important components of your story that are too significant to keep hidden in the dark. 

Vulnerability and universal human experience are at the intersection where we connect. There are readers out there who need your honesty to heal their pain. I avoided writing a particular scene in my memoir and it still haunts me. I should have written it out, even if I decided to cut it from the final draft. At the very least, it would have been therapeutic to process it. Stay tuned, it might turn up in future material.

4. Shake it off 

Trauma is stored in the body and writing a memoir can trigger old wounds. There were days I emerged from my office rattled by the experience. Worse, there were days I acted out from my pain. I needed a way to decompress, otherwise I risked creating a future just like my past. 

Long walks calmed my overactive nervous system and with each quickened step, I shed a layer of anguish. Brisk walks brought me peace and helped me write with a clear mind and healed heart. Dancing can be fun too! Or running (but not for me).

5. Submit selflessly 

Send your completed manuscript out in the world with the intention of helping others heal. Yes, it’s fun to imagine the best-seller list, the movie rights, or the interview with Oprah, but deep down you know that’s not the point. I submitted my memoir that covered difficult subjects with the hope that if only one reader could find peace from my story, then my purpose would be fulfilled. I believe it’s our inner light that gets the green light.

There’s power in your story. Use it to heal the world.

Francesca Miracola is the author of I Got It from Here: A Memoir of Awakening to the Power Within, She Writes Press, April 2023. Francesca is a Life Coach, and her practice is based on the principles of A Course in Miracles. She founded Protagonist Within, LLC because she believes in order to be the protagonist of your own story you must look within to heal. She is a wife, a best friend, and above all, a mother. 

You can find Francesca on her website.

The post #5onFri: Five Things to Consider When Writing a Memoir That Covers Difficult Subjects appeared first on DIY MFA.

I truly hope that it will help other memoir writers out there and that you’ll check out her memoir because it is amazing.

About Eden Boudreau

Eden Boudreau was born and raised in a small rural area just outside Halifax. In 2016, she relocated to Ontario with her husband and three sons. As a bisexual, polyamorous woman who has survived her fair share of adversity, Eden’s work draws on her life experiences to inspire vulnerable and relatable stories. Her essays have been featured in Flare, Today’s Parent, and Runner’s World, amongst others. She is the host and creator of the podcast, Dear Lonely Writer, aimed at destigmatizing mental health struggles during the writing process. Boudreau lives in Georgina, Ontario. Crying Wolf is her first book.

You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.

You can also follow her publisher, Book*hug Press on Twitter and Instagram.

About Crying Wolf

It’s a tale as old as time. Girl meets boy. Boy wants girl. Girl says no. Boy takes what he wants anyway.

After a violent sexual assault, Eden Boudreau was faced with a choice: call the police and explain that a man who wasn’t her husband, who she had agreed to go on a date with, had just raped her. Or go home and pray that, in the morning, it would be only a nightmare.

In the years that followed, Eden was met with disbelief by strangers, friends, and the authorities, often as a result of stigma towards her non-monogamy, sex positivity, and bisexuality. Societal conditioning of acceptable female sexuality silenced her to a point of despair, leading to addiction and even attempted suicide. It was through the act of writing that she began to heal.

Crying Wolf is a gripping memoir that shares the raw path to recovery after violence and spotlights the ways survivors are too often demonized or ignored when they belong to marginalized communities. Boudreau heralds a new era for others who were dismissed for “crying wolf.”

After all, women prevailing to change society for others is a tale as old as time, too.

Interview with Eden Boudreau

Lori Walker: First of all, I’d love to hear more about your journey to becoming a writer. How did you get your start? What was that moment you knew? In chapter three of Crying Wolf, you talk about how you had wanted to be a writer since you were a kid, but you took a longer route to get there. Walk us through that a bit.

Eden Boudreau: I used to think that I had a sort of unconventional journey to publication, but the more I talk to other writers, the more I’ve realized that we all found our way here when and how it was meant to happen.

As you mentioned, I’ve said before that I have wanted to be a writer since I was just a kid but money was not something we had in surplus when I grew up and university was out of the question after I graduated high school, so I took the route that made the most sense financially and went into the beauty industry. But after over a decade of working in that career, relocating from Halifax, Nova Scotia to just outside Toronto, Ontario and the life-changing aftermath of my assault, it felt like the right time to start finally pursuing my real passions.

In Crying Wolf, I dedicate a good portion of the latter half of the book detailing how I went from journaling to blog posts to a whirlwind writers retreat with Margaret Atwood, so I won’t spoil it for any readers but the thing that really got me started on my road to publication was writing personal essays about some of my life experiences. It was not only cathartic, but it allowed me to hone and refine my practical skill as a self-taught writer and my individual voice.

And after a few years of freelance work, and working with a terrific writing mentor, Chelene Knight, I felt ready to start sharing my story on a larger scale. Which is when I approached the publishers at Book*hug Press with my proposal for Crying Wolf.

LW: What does a typical day of writing look like for you?

EB: Well, I’m a mom before a writer so, my day generally starts with a full cup of coffee and the happy chaos of getting my three sons up and out the door. After they are off to school, I will generally split up the day between my freelance marketing clients and writing. Like many of us, I’m not at the stage yet where I can write full time yet, which means I have to be very dedicated and precious about the time I set aside for it or it could easily get pushed to the back burner.

When it comes to writing time, usually early afternoon or late evening, I sit down at my desk with my laptop, a notepad, and headphones. Being diagnosed late in life with ADHD, I have always struggled with focusing on tasks and not feeling incredibly overwhelmed by big projects. So, two things are very important when I write: Having my pink noise playlist in my headphones and breaking my writing up into small, manageable chunks for each day.

Instead of giving myself a lofty word count or even planning to tackle a chapter a day, I break everything down into really bite-size pieces. I might make a goal of finishing only two scenes that I’ve been working on or going over just two pages of line edits. When I’ve accomplished them, I cross them off a list in my notebook and add two more goals.

It may seem like a slow progress, but since my brain can so easily get overwhelmed and delights in the serotonin boost of accomplishing something, these small tasks actually make my writing process significantly quicker than if I attempted to just attack the project as a whole.

LW: You open Crying Wolf with an author’s note about the reliability of memory and truth, and how some people will remember events differently, but it doesn’t invalidate your own truth. Why did you think that was important to include and how does it tie into your overall goal for writing this memoir?

EB: For me, it was important to make this note for two reasons. In Crying Wolf, I get really honest about my childhood and family dynamics, and how they contributed to some of my internalized trauma as an adult. And I don’t think I’m alone in having experienced conversations with family members who remember certain life events entirely differently than you do, but that doesn’t mean that those moments didn’t impact you negatively and being allowed to own that truth is one of the first steps toward healing.

It was also, in a way, a direct message to any survivors reading my book. I was telling them, “I believe you.” Because so often survivors of sexual violence will have every single detail of their story, no matter how benign pulled apart and twisted in a way that fits the narrative of the perpetrator and it was important to recognize how backwards that is from the very beginning.

LW: Sticking with the topic of memory, what was your process for collecting and organizing your memories around this very traumatic experience? And how did you keep it from becoming overwhelming to relive these experiences?

EB: In the beginning, it was a daunting process. Thankfully, I had a very wonderful therapist who had kept quite detailed records of our conversations, which proved to be incredibly helpful when I was looking back at that time. Using those records along with journals and letters I had written to myself, during some of the darkest times, I was able to create a sort of patchwork timeline that I could work off of when I was initially drafting the memoir.

Being that I wrote Crying Wolf so closely after it happened in 2017, I think that contributed to being able to access those memories with such clarity. However, that didn’t make the process any less difficult emotionally.

Throughout writing it, I had to make a concerted effort to reach out or lean on my support system when it felt overwhelming, as well as giving myself the permission to walk away from the page when I needed to.

LW: I think something a lot of memoir writers, myself included, struggle with is dialogue because we don’t have a transcription of past conversations. How did you approach recreating scenes and conversations in Crying Wolf?

EB: Dialogue is probably the most difficult part of memoir because it’s not a place that you can take liberties with, not only for legal reasons but for ethical ones too.

What I found to be the best approach when it came to dialogue was, less is more. If I came to a conversation that I knew was really important to the scene or chapter, I would first reach out to the person involved (if possible) and try to piece together what we both remembered of what was said. If that option wasn’t available or too many chunks were missing from my memory, I would turn inward and instead show what I was feeling in that moment. How what was said made me feel and how that would affect the trajectory of my story.

LW: One of the things that really struck me is the voice. It is so open, relatable, and approachable. I felt like I was having drinks with a friend and hearing her story. A lot of people don’t necessarily think about this when it comes to writing a memoir—that you have to craft the narrative voice the same way you do for writing fiction. How did you create that for the page?

EB: When I first started writing, there was a lot of imitation, especially when I was working on the multiple fiction projects that will never see the light of day. I would write in similar styles to what I was reading because I didn’t know what my own voice was yet. But when I was writing the personal essays and having to be really vulnerable about difficult topics, I realized quickly how imperative it was that I write in a voice that made my reader comfortable, otherwise the material might just be too hard to digest.

I want my writing to be a conversation in a way. Something that probes the reader to think deeper about what they are reading and allows them to grow their perceptions along with the story.

LW: Crying Wolf is your first book. You also have had a number of essays published in various publications, and you host a podcast about writing and mental health. Can you talk a bit about how all of these things work together in your writing career and where you want to go from here?

EB: Advocating for better mental healthcare has always been an important issue for me. As someone who grew up in a province with very high addiction and self-harm rates, as well as having seen the generational trauma that can be caused by lack of access to support, medical care and open conversations surrounding mental health, sharing my personal experiences in my essays and book felt like a necessary use of my skill as a writer.

And starting the podcast was my way of giving other creatives a safe platform to have an even broader conversation about sort of taboo topics like imposter syndrome, financial struggles in the early stages of publication, family/work/life balance, etc.

It’s a theme that I hope to continue exploring with my writing in the future, whether it be memoir, podcasting or fiction.

LW: A lot of authors are creating playlists to accompany their books, but this being a reading column, I’d like to know what your “reading playlist” is. What three or so other memoirs would you recommend to people after reading Crying Wolf?

EB: Ooooh, great question! I would have to say, Still, I Cannot Save You by Kelly S. Thompson. It is an honest, funny and heartbreaking memoir that explores Kelly’s relationship with her older sister, Meghan. Tested by addiction, abuse, and illness, the sisters’ relationship crumbles, only to be rebuilt into an everlasting bond. 

Also, Superfan: How Pop Culture Broke My Heart by Jen Sookfong Lee, which is a beautifully intimate memoir-in-pieces using one woman’s life-long love affair with pop culture as a revelatory lens to explore family, identity, belonging, grief, and the power of female rage. 

And last but not least, Open: An Uncensored Memoir of Love, Liberation and Non-Monogamy by Rachel Krantz. It is an unprecedented exploration of polyamory and gaslighting, from an award-winning journalist chronicling her first open relationship with unflinching candor as she explores this fast-growing movement.

Lori Walker is the Operations Maven at DIY MFA. She is also the producer and co-host of DIY MFA Radio and editor-in-chief of DIYMFA.com, among other roles. Lori is a copyeditor for Amanda Filippelli and collaborating fellow for The Poetry Lab. She writes personal essays and memoir in Tulsa, where she lives with her husband and cat, Joan Didion. You can follow her on Instagram at @LoriTheWriter.

The post The Book Nook: Interview with Eden Boudreau appeared first on DIY MFA.

Have you signed up to be a DIY MFA Radio Insider yet? This is an exciting new monthly newsletter especially for our podcast listeners. Every month, you’ll get an email from our podcast producer with recaps of the most recent episodes, a curated Listening List of episodes on a particular theme, and other fun goodies we only share via email. Best of all, it’s free to join! The theme for February is Crafting a Series, and you can become an insider by signing up with your email at diymfa.com/insiders.

In this episode Courtney Maum and Lori discuss:

• The challenges of getting to the absolute truth in nonfiction.
• How her copy editing career affects her creative endeavors.
• Using frustration as her muse.

Plus, her #1 tip for writers.

About Courtney Maum

Author of five books, including the game changing publishing guide Before and After the Book Deal and the memoir, The Year of the Horses, (chosen by The Today Show as the best read for mental health awareness), Courtney is a writer and book coach hellbent on preserving the joy of art-making in a culture obsessed with turning artists into brands. 

A nominee for the Joyce Carol Oates prize and the host of the monthly “Beyond Fiction” conversation series at Edith Wharton’s The Mount, Courtney’s essays and articles on creativity have been widely published in outlets like The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and The Guardian, and her short story This is Not Your Fault was recently turned into an Audible Original. 

A frequent interviewer of high-profile writers such as Anne Perry, Ottessa Moshfegh, and Edouard Louis, Courtney is also the founder of the learning collaborative, The Cabins. You can sign up for her publishing newsletter and enroll in her online writing classes at CourtneyMaum.com, or follow her on Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, and Substack. She’s happy to be here.

The Year of the Horses

Sharp, heartfelt, and cathartic, The Year of the Horses captures a woman’s journey out of depression and the horses that guide her, physically and emotionally, on a new path forward.

At the age of thirty-seven, Courtney Maum finds herself in an indoor arena in Connecticut, moments away from stepping back into the saddle. For her, this is not just a riding lesson, but a last-ditch attempt to pull herself back from the brink even though riding is a relic from the past she walked away from. She hasn’t been on or near a horse in over thirty years.

Although Maum does know what depression looks like, she finds herself refusing to admit, at this point in her life, that it could look like her: a woman with a privileged past, a mortgage, a husband, a healthy child, and a published novel. That she feels sadness is undeniable, but she feels no right to claim it. And when both therapy and medication fail, Courtney returns to her childhood passion of horseback riding as a way to recover the joy and fearlessness she once had access to as a young girl. As she finds her way, once again, through the world of contemporary horseback riding―Courtney becomes reacquainted with herself not only as a rider but as a mother, wife, daughter, writer, and woman. Alternating timelines and braided with historical portraits of women and horses alongside history’s attempts to tame both parties, The Year of the Horses is an inspiring love letter to the power of animals―and humans―to heal the mind and the heart.

If you decide to check out the book, we hope you’ll do so via this Amazon affiliate link where, if you choose to purchase via the link, DIY MFA gets a referral fee at no cost to you. As always, thank you for supporting DIY MFA!

Link to Episode 449

(Right-click to download.)

If you liked this episode…

Head over to iTunes, Stitcher Radio, Spotify, or Google and subscribe so you’ll be first to know when new episodes are available.

Also, remember that sharing is caring so if you know anyone who might enjoy this podcast, please tell them about it or leave us a review so other listeners will want to check it out.

Until next week, keep writing and keep being awesome!

The post Episode 449: Genre Hopping, Process, and Time Management: The Life of a Working Writer – Interview with Courtney Maum appeared first on DIY MFA.