Katy Grabel joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about a childhood immersed in professional magic, when a parent’s dream because ours, wanting to be famous, searching hard for self, trying to understand the allure of our parents’ choices, using journals to familiarize ourselves with our emotional life from the past, what drives someone to want to be a magician, seeing the whole person when writing about loved ones and accepting their good and their bad, going deep, not including everything just because it’s a true story, waiting to publish a memoir until after loved ones are gone, drawing parents carefully and with love, and her new memoir The Magician's Daughter.
Also in this episode:
-being honest with ourselves
-accepting imperfections
-knowing what you want to say
Books mentioned in this episode:
-Riding the White Horse Home by Teresa Jordan
Katy Grabel lives in Taos, New Mexico, where she fits right in as the daughter of the Human Cannonball. A former newspaper reporter, her stories about professional magic have been published in ZYZYYVA and New Millennium Writings. She shares her time between an old rambling adobe house in Taos with her guitar, fancy dreams and penchant for dancing in her kitchen, and a lovely book-filled casita in San Miguel de Allende in Mexico. She has always seen herself as a magician’s assistant, taking notes, and believes daughters of magicians—even more than sons—must make their own way:
Daughters must decide whether to be the willing assistant, command the spotlight, or turn away with a story untold. And all will be lost unless we recognize the resiliency and strength of our mothers as they lay down on the sawing table. Yet who can deny, late at night, when the dark is crowded by our failures, that every daughter of a magician must find her own magic.
Connect with Katy:
–
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/
https://www.facebook.com/RonitPlank
https://bsky.app/profile/ronitplank.bsky.social
Background photo credit: Photo by Patrick Tomasso on Unsplash
Headshot photo credit: Sarah Anne Photography
Theme music: Isaac Joel, Dead Moll’s Fingers
