Colin Dayan is the Robert Penn Warren Professor in the Humanities at Vanderbilt University.She’s written extensively about Haiti and Guantanamo Bay and has written not one but two memoirs. Colin chatted to me about her memoirs and how, if you spend a lot of time engaged in one type of writing to pay the bills as Colin did with academic writing and research, you should still go ahead and try on a completely different form of writing. After all, who knows where you’ll end up in 10 or 15 years, and by exploring different genres and formats, you could build a writing career that lasts a lifetime. I asked Colin about her research process, and we dig into how she approaches researching memoir versus writing something for an academic and formal audience.

In this episode, we discuss:

• Choosing topics for a book
• How to approach writing a personal essay
• The reaction of those featured in Colin's books
• Colin's tips for writing a memoir
• Picking a theme to structure your memoir around

Resources:

• Colin Dayan
• Marion Roach Smith episode

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