251. Mining Opening Pages for Impact featuring Deborah K. Shepherd

Deborah Shepherd joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about the large age gap in her first marriage and having mixed feelings about the love story of her youth, the titillation of secrecy and huge risks she took in her personal life, how women were seen, feeling protective of our younger selves, power imbalances in relationships, complicated mother-daughter dynamics, not being sure she could write this book, asking a lot of questions of herself and on the page, thinking about the reader, and her new memoir An Old Man’s Darling.   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: - opting for a prologue - finding a community of memoirists - working with a developmental editor   Books mentioned in this episode: - Writing Hard Stories by Melanie Brooks - Motherland by Elissa Altman - Fierce Attachments by Vivian Gornick   Deborah K. Shepherd's memoir about her age-gap first marriage, An Old Man's Darling, has just been published by Heliotrope Books. Her first novel, So Happy Together, came out in 2021, when she was 74. Her essays have appeared in Oldster Magazine; Motherwell ; Herstry; InShort Journal; FauxMoir ; Eat, Darling, Eat, and more. She earned a Master of Social Worker degree in 1992 and spent much of her career focused on the prevention of domestic violence and sexual assault and the provision of services to survivors. The mother of two and grandmother of two, Deborah lives in Maine with one husband and one sweet, jaunty rescue dog. You can find her at deborahshepherdwrites.com   Connect with Deborah: Website: deborahshepherdwrites.com Facebook: Deborah K. Shepherd Author Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/dkshdw74/?hl=en – 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