Joseph Lezza joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about losing loved ones, panic disorder and the stigma around anxiety, anger, shame, and the grieving process, discovering the genre he needed while at an MFA program, lyric essay, how story dictates form, what we can’t shake, and his memoir I'm Never Fine: Scenes and Spasms on Loss.

Also in this episode:

-grief as a shapeshifter

-memoir in essays

-gathering stories

Books mentioned in this episode:

• The Year of Magical Thinking and Blue Nights by Joan Didion
• Me Talk Pretty One Day by David Sedaris
• Born to Be Public by Greg Mania
• On Looking b Lia Purpura
• The Male Gazed by Manuel Betancourt
• High Risk Homosexual by Edgar Gomez
• Brown Neon by Raquel Gutiérrez
• Congratulations! The Best is Over by R. Eric Thomas
• The Groom Will Keep His Name by Matt Ortile

Also, some great craft books:

• Bending Genre by Nicole Walker, Margot Singer
• The Art of the Personal Essay by Phillip Lopate
• Crafting the Personal Essay by Dinty W. Moore
• Halls of Fame by John D'Agata

April 24, 2024

Joseph Lezza is a writer in New York, NY with an MFA in creative writing from The University of Texas at El Paso. His debut memoir in essays, I'm Never Fine: Scenes and Spasms on Loss (Vine Leaves Press), was a finalist for the 2021 Prize Americana in Prose and was named by Buzzfeed LGBTQ+ and Lambda Literary as a "Most Anticipated 2023 Release." His work has been featured in, among others, Longreads, Occulum, Variant Literature, The Hopper, West Trade Review, and Santa Fe Writers Project. His website is www.josephlezza.com and you can find him on all the socials @lezzdoothis.

Connect with Joseph:

Website: www.josephlezza.com

Social Media: https://linktr.ee/josephlezza

Substack: https://ladyindread.substack.com/

—

Ronit’s writing has appeared in The Atlantic, The Rumpus, The New York Times, 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 lives in Seattle with her family where she teaches memoir workshops and is working on her next book.

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Background photo credit: Photo by Patrick Tomasso on Unsplash

Headshot photo credit: Sarah Anne Photography

Theme music: Isaac Joel, Dead Moll’s Fingers