Dr. Kara Zivin joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about maternal mental health and her own her mental health crisis during pregnancy and postpartum, how she became a patient and professor in the same health system, navigating shame and guilt around sharing a personal story, taking risks with our professional life, incorporating medical records and journal entries into a memoir narrative, grounding memoir in our own story, supporting women and families, the relief that comes from sharing the hard thing, increasing awareness and helping women to feel less alone, and her new memoir Persevered: A Maternal Mental Health Memoir.
Ronit's upcoming workshop: Writing Dynamic Memoir: From Lived Experience to Gripping Story https://www.lmcmurtrylitcenter.org/workshops/writing-dynamic-memoir-from-lived-experience-to-gripping-story
Also in this episode:
- claiming our stories
- letting go of an initial structure
- maternal mental health and mortality
Books mentioned in this episode:
- The Two Kinds of Decay by Sarah Manguso
- Tell Me Everything You Don’t Remember by Christine Hyung-Oak Lee
- The Suicide Index by Joan Wickersham
- You Could Make This Place Beautiful by Maggie Smith
- The Braille Encyclopedia by Naomi Cohn
- Hell Gate Bridge by Barrie Miskin
Kara Zivin, PhD, MS, MA, MFA, is a professor of psychiatry, obstetrics and gynecology, and health management and policy. She aims to increase public awareness about mental health conditions and to influence policy addressing them by combining research expertise (data) and personal narrative (story).
Longer: https://karazivin.com/about/
Connect with Dr. Kara Zivin
Website: www.karazivin.com
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/kzivin
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kara-zivin-ann-arbor/
Blue Sky: https://bsky.app/profile/kzivin.bsky.social
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/karazivin/
Purchase book:
https://www.ohioswallow.com/9780804012645/persevered/
https://www.amazon.com/Persevered-Maternal-Mental-Health-Memoir/dp/0804012644/
https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/persevered-kara-zivin/1148516116
https://bookshop.org/p/books/persevered-a-maternal-mental-health-memoir-kara-zivin/0f1698b9c560969c
https://www.booksamillion.com/p/Persevered/Kara-Zivin/9780804012645
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Ronit’s writing has appeared in The Atlantic, The Rumpus, The New York Times, Poets & Writers, 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 teaches memoir through the University of Washington's Online Continuum Program and also independently. She launched Let's Talk Memoir in 2022, lives in Seattle with her family of people and dogs, and is at work on her next book.
More about Ronit: https://ronitplank.com
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