Kate Jackson joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about discovering the family you were raised in was not what you thought, mourning the life we didn’t get a chance to live, writing about the missing, if wholeness is possible, longing for family, how unknowing can be bewildering and shame inducing, when our identity flips, genetic privilege, untangling threads, writing like no one is reading, facing repercussions for telling our story, what we have permission to say, feeling we can own our story, and her new collection of 28 literary essays by adoptees, donor-conceived people, others who’ve learned about misattributed parentage Relative Strangers: Inheritance, Identity, and the Meaning of Kinship.
October 2026 book events for Relative Strangers: https://bkjacksonwriter.com/events/
Also in this episode:
-untangling threads
-when agents ghost
-simultaneously working on two projects
Books mentioned in this episode:
-On Writing by Stephen King
-Still Writing by Dani Shapiro
-Thinking About Memoir by Abigail Thomas
-Permission by Elissa Altmen
-Mothers of Sparta by Dawn Davies
-This Boys Life by Tobias Flynn
-And When Did You Last See Your Father by Blake Morrison
-Nick Flynn’s memoirs
B.K. (Kate) Jackson is an author; a developmental editor and certified book coach; and a journalist with bylines in HuffPost, The Los Angeles Times, The Sun, SurvivorLit, Whale Road Review, Hippocampus Magazine, WIRED, and more. She earned a BA and an MA from UCLA. Kate is the founder and editor of Severance (severancemag.com)—a magazine and community for adoptees and individuals who’ve discovered misattributed parentage. She’s the editor of the anthology Relative Strangers: Inheritance, Identity, and the Meaning of Kinship, and she's revising a memoir about maternal abandonment and family secrets. She lives in Milford, Pennsylvania. Find her at www.bkjacksonwriter.com; creativelyadhd.substack.com; and halfasorrow.substack.com.
Connect with Kate:
Website: www.bkjacksonwriter.com
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/b.k.jackson/
X: https://x.com/jaxbkjax
Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/bkjackson.bsky.social
Threads: https://www.threads.com/@b.k.jackson
Substack: https://substack.com/@bkjackson877028
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/kate.b.jackson/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/b-k-kate-jackson-50a6571b0/
Purchase Book:
www.bkjacksonwriter.com/book
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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
Subscribe to Ronit’s Substack: https://substack.com/@ronitplank
Follow Ronit:
https://www.instagram.com/ronitplank/
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https://bsky.app/profile/ronitplank.bsky.social
