151. Putting the Less Than Heroic Parts of Ourselves on the Page featuring Casey Mulligan Walsh

Casey Mulligan Walsh joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about the search for belonging in the wake of repeated loss, learning to live with grief alongside joy, finding a purpose for our story, homing in on the aboutness, patterns and themes in our memoir, managing flashbacks and whether or not to use them, setting up the essential question for your book, whether or not to have a prologue, landing on the structure, how our writing impacts others, tightening work, consolidating scenes, and cutting where necessary, embracing life in its messy complexity, and her new memoir The Full Catastrophe: All I Ever Wanted, Everything I Feared.

 

Ronit’s upcoming memoir course: https://www.pce.uw.edu/courses/memoir-writing-finding-your-story

 

Also in this episode:

-building a book launch team

-supporting other writers

-the challenges and benefits of critique groups

 

Books mentioned in this episode:

The Fact of a Body by Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich

Tap Dancing on Everest by Mimi Zieman

Love in the Archives by Eileen Vorbach Collins

Growth by Karen Debonis

Wild by Cheryl Strayed

Save the Cat! Writes a Novel by Jessica Brody

Seven Drafts by Allison K. Williams

The Memoir Project by Marion Roach Smith 

 

Casey Mulligan Walsh writes about life at the intersection of grief and joy, embracing uncertainty, and the nature of true belonging. She has written for The New York Times, HuffPost, Next Avenue, Modern Loss, Hippocampus, Barren Magazine, and numerous other literary journals and anthologies. Her essay, “Still,” published in Split Lip, was nominated for Best of the Net. Her memoir, The Full Catastrophe: All I Ever Wanted, Everything I Feared, is forthcoming from Motina Books on February 18, 2025. She is a founding editor of In a Flash literary magazine and serves as an ambassador and Board member for the Family Heart Foundation. Casey lives in upstate New York with her husband, Kevin and too many books to count. Find Casey at www.caseymulliganwalsh.com.

Connect with Casey:

Facebook @Casey Mulligan Walsh @Casey Mulligan Walsh, Author

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

X: http://x.com/@CMulliganWalsh

Threads @caseymulliganwalsh

BlueSky @caseymulliganwalsh

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/casey-mulligan-walsh-522ba231/

Get her book on Amazon: https://a.co/d/4ZyHXNR

Bookshop: https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-full-catastrophe-all-i-ever-wanted-everything-i-feared-casey-mulligan-walsh/21932235?ean=9798887840413

Also at your local independent bookstore and wherever books are sold.