Karson Brown joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about crossing the Atlantic ocean on a 34-foot sailboat from Portugal when she was 29 years old, the 13 years it took to put her story into book form, the learning process of becoming a writer, offering a little more for readers and less for ourselves, staying focused on our throughline and honoring what memoir is, not sacrificing and abandoning our intuition, getting offers from 3 indie publishers, discovering how to slow down and sit with ourselves during the writing process, and her new memoir 48 Days to Barbados.

Also in this episode:

- not giving up

- memoir as opposed to journaling

- when our tactic becomes silence

Books mentioned in this episode:

Bird by Bird by Anne Lammott

West with the Night by Beryl Markham

The Bean Trees Barbara Kingsolver

Books by Joyce Maynard

Books by Alexandra Fuller

Books by Joan Didion

Karson Brown grew up sailing and living aboard boats in the Pacific Northwest. She turned twenty-one on a fishing vessel in the Bering Sea and crossed the Atlantic Ocean before turning thirty. Karson raised her two children along the shores of Vashon Island surrounded by a menagerie of critters. She is a writer, photographer, artist, and lifelong devotee of water. Karson is an alumna of Joyce Maynards, “Write By The Lake Workshop,” in Guatemala. She has four stories included in the Vine Leaves Press 50 Give or Take anthologies. She currently resides in the Pacific Northwest. 48 Days to Barbados is her debut memoir and will be released by Red Fern Press October 20, 2026.

Connect with Karson:

Website: karsonbrownarts.com

Instagram @ekarsonbrown

Facebook: Karson Brown

TikTok: @karsonbrown71

Purchase Book:

https://bookshop.org/beta-search?bkshp-astro=t&keywords=48+days+to+Barbados

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

Matt Fogelson joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about coming to grips with the death of his father, the struggle to not pass down the emotional distance he grew up with to his own son, grabbing emotions from scenes and seeing what germinates, finding the forward momentum and narrative drive for our memoirs, when clarity comes later, putting a parent on a pedestal, recognizing our behavior and changing the dynamic, trying to be emotionally present when we’re physically present, living without self-imposed constraints, searching for universal kernels in our work, using core themes as guideposts and touchstones, and his new memoir Restrung: Fatherhood in a Different Key.

Also mentioned in this episode: - writing during the pandemic - fatherhood and emotional intimacy - creating a memoir from a collection of essays

Books mentioned in this episode: - Angelea’s Ashes by Frank McCourt - Wild by Cheryl Strayed - Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls - The Liars Club by Mary Karr - Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry

Matt Fogelson is the author of the memoir Restrung: Fatherhood in a Different Key. His work has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, and TIME. He writes the Substack newsletter Fine Tuning, about music, memory, and parenting.

Connect with Matt: Website: https://www.mattfogelson.com/

Substack: https://mattfogelson.substack.com/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/mattfogelson/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/matt-fogelson-94200895/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/finetuningfan