Jo-Anne Berelowitz joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about cultural displacement and longing for home, exploring the experience of Jews in South Africa, struggling with heritage, having origins in a country drawn along racist lines, feeling you need to be exportable to survive, dislodging a parent from a pedestal, establishing dynamics and patterns early in a memoir, developing the skills to tell an extended narrative, writing about ourselves in the third person, diving into a history she had once suppressed, and her new memoir Somewhere I Belong: A Story of Country, Family, Home, and Jewish Identity.
Also in this episode:
- going with an independent publisher
- trying to leave siblings out of a memoir
- prejudice in the publishing world about Jewish writers
Books mentioned in this episode:
Middlemarch by George Eliot
Daniel Deronda by Geroge Eliot
Zakhor by Yosef Yerushalmi
Reading Writing and Leaving Home by Lynn Freed
Jo-Anne Berelowitz is a writer and art historian whose work explores identity, family, cultural displacement, and longing for home. Born and raised in Durban, South Africa, she emigrated to California in 1977, earned her MA in Art History from Stanford University, her PhD from the University of California at Los Angeles, and her MFA in Creative Writing with an emphasis on nonfiction from the Rainier Writing Workshop. She was, for many years, senior art historian at San Diego State University. Her art history essays have appeared in Genders, Society and Space, The Oxford Art Journal, The Journal of Modern Jewish Studies, The Canadian Journal of Comparative Literature, and elsewhere. In 2018, she was awarded the Wabash Prize for Literary Nonfiction. She now resides in Austin, Texas.
Connect with Jo-Ann:
Website: https://www.joanneberelowitz.com
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/joanne_berelowitz/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/jberelow
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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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