Grammar Girl here. I'm In Yon Fogarty, and today I'm here with Grant Falkner. Grant is the co-founder of Memoir Nation and also the co-host of that Memoir Nation podcast. He is the co-founder of the Flash Fiction Institute, the co-founder of 100-word stories. I mean, all these co-founder things. I think he works well with other people. And an executive producer on America's next great author. And it was the executive director of national novel writing math, Nanorimo, for 12 years. Grant, welcome to the Grammar Girl podcast. Thank you so much. And when I hear my bioret, I'm like, that's a lot of co-founding, you know, but it's much better than just founding, you know.

Yeah.

It's fun to do things with other people.

Well, I think that your memoir nation work is really interesting.

And we were sort of talking about that before when we were talking about having you on as a guest

and, you know, how writing memoir can be really different from writing other things. So can you

sort of talk us through that? Yeah, it's interesting to me because when I first started the podcast with

Brooke Warner, who co-founded Memor Nation with me, and we initially called it right-minded back when

you were our

first guest, I think, maybe second guest. Anyway, that was fun. But we rebranded at Memoir Nation

when we decided to launch Memoir Nation, the organization. And early in the podcast, you know,

I hadn't read a lot of memoirs. Brooke was kind of a resident memoir scholar. She's been very passionate about

them for a very long time. And so I used to just say, it's all storytelling, you know,

storytelling in memoir and storytelling in fiction. It's just pretty much the same, more or less.

And but then I wrote my own memoir, where I'm still writing it. And the more that I read other memoirs, I realize, yes, that that is true. It is storytelling in its fundamental form, but it's a different type of storytelling because you're telling your story and you're trying to tell the truth, you know, you're trying to have it be nonfiction. I think we all have storytellers'

brains, though, and, you know, there's a fallibility built into how we view the world, right?

I mean, you know, I'm sure you've experienced the same. Some people tell the different stories

about the same experience. Oh my gosh. I have a funny story about that. So I am adopted. And when I met my

biological parents separately, they had very different stories about the night I was conceived.

I won't go to the details, but like you wouldn't even think it was the same event.

That is so interesting. And I is so when it happens to you, I mean, it's, it's so perplexing, right? Because like, it seems like memory is recording, you know, and we're just recording the world. But memory is a story. And I've even heard that memories change every time you re-remember them. You're rewriting them. You're putting a re-story

or restoring them. I think Lydia, Nikovic coined that term. And yeah, and so I think like there

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