266. Rewilding Ourselves and Disrupting Deep Cultural Conditioning featuring Amy Irvine

Amy Irvine joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about maternal lineage and what gets handed down to us, exploring the impact of our women ancestors, feeling trapped by motherhood, reckoning with and disrupting deep cultural conditioning, living a remote life and how much of that world is not good for women, coping with undiagnosed postpartum depression, making meaning without appropriating other cultures, carrying stories of harm in our bodies, fearing we’ve passed trauma down to our children, writing the natural world, capturing wildness, rewilding ourselves, widening the lens on our story, and her new memoir Almost Animal: A Memoir of Motherhood, Wildness, and the American West.     Also in this episode: -plural marriage -reframing history -feeling stalked by Mormon ancestors   Books mentioned in this episode: -What My Bones Know by Stephanie Foo -Soil: The Story of a Black Mother’s Garden by Camille Dungy -The Bear River Massacre: A Shoshone History by Darren Parry -In the Eye of the Wild by Natsassja Martin   Amy Irvine is a sixth-generation Utahn who descends from the first Mormons to occupy the West. Her memoir Trespass: Living at the Edge of the Promised Land received the Orion Book Award and the Colorado Book Award. Her second book, Desert Cabal: A New Season in the Wilderness, is a feminist response to Edward Abbey’s Desert Solitaire, and during lockdown, Pam Houston and Irvine coauthored the epistolary Air Mail: Letters of Politics, Pandemics, and Place. Irvine’s essays have appeared in both The Best American Science & Nature Writing and The Best American Food Writing, as well as Orion, Outside, High Country News, Lit Hub, and Backpacker. She lives and writes on a remote mesa in southwest Colorado. Her memoir, ALMOST ANIMAL: MOTHERHOOD, WILDNESS AND THE AMERICAN WEST will be released on November 10th by Spiegel & Grau.   Connect with Amy: Website: https://www.amyirvine.com/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/amy.irvine.90295 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/junipergirl44/ Get the book: https://bookshop.org/p/books/almost-animal-a-memoir-of-motherhood-wildness-and-the-american-west-amy-irvine/b60f8eb9877eec31?ean=9781966302384 – 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