Transcript for Writing Your Resilience Podcast Episode 94

Writing Through the Body: What Our Scars, Stretch Marks, and Memories Teach Us with Nina Lichtenstein

 Listeners, what role does the body play in your book? Is it something you use to show the story—or is it the portal to the story itself? In this episode of Writing Your Resilience, I talk with Nina Lichtenstein, author of Body, My Life in Parts, a memoir in essays that uses the body as both structure and storyteller. Each chapter—eyes, hands, heart, belly—opens a window into memory, identity, and transformation. Together, Nina and I explore how writing through the body can deepen our understanding of self, belonging, and resilience. As we prepare for this enlivening conversation, I invite you to take a deep breath, wiggle your toes and get ready for a conversation about what it means to write—and live—in a body. Let’s jump in. 

Lisa Cooper Ellison [0:00]
Well, hello, Nina. Welcome to the Writing Your Resilience podcast. I am so happy to have you on today.

Nina Lichtenstein [0:06]
Thank you for having me. This is kind of a wish come true, so I’m super excited to be here.

Lisa Cooper Ellison [0:12]
Well, that means a lot to me—and it meant so much to me to get a chance to read your book. I’m going to hold it up for anyone watching on YouTube. This is Body, My Life in Parts. I’m going to put it right in front of the camera. This is a really interesting container for story, so I’m excited to dive into it.

Before we do, I always like to give my guests a chance to tell us about their projects. What would you like us to know about your memoir?

Nina Lichtenstein [0:43]
I like to tell people the short version, which is that Body, My Life in Parts is a memoir in essays, and each chapter is named for a body part that I use as a portal toward memories and stories. That’s where I usually leave it. People are often curious, because, like you say, it’s a unique container. I love the interest it seems to pique when I describe it that way.

Lisa Cooper Ellison [1:14]
My interest was piqued when I saw that title—Body, My Life in Parts. I wondered, how is this going to work together? It’s such an interesting container.

When I talk about containers, I often think of the hermit crab essay, and this feels almost like a hermit crab memoir-in-essays. You have a very specific way of approaching the stories of your life, which allows you to do some fascinating things with time, structure, and storytelling. I’m curious—why did you decide to write from the perspective of body parts? How did this idea come about?

Nina Lichtenstein [1:56]
I’ll tell you, Lisa, it happened quite organically—no pun intended.

I had just started an MFA program. English is my second language—I grew up speaking Norwegian—and when I launched into creative writing, it was after a long career in academia. I call myself a recovering academic. I had completed a PhD and worked in higher education, but I found much more joy in creative writing, particularly in personal essays and memoir.

I felt compelled to enter an MFA program—not because I needed another acronym after my name, but because I wanted to learn, grow, and immerse myself in a language and community of writers. The program is here in Maine, and since I’d just moved here, it felt like the perfect opportunity to build connections.

When I entered the program, I didn’t have a specific project in mind, which many people do. They often arrive with something they’ve started or are eager to develop. I came in ready to explore—which was one of the benefits of this program. They encourage you to be multi-genre aware and to take classes outside your main focus.

As it turns out, deadlines are great for me. They get me cranking. My first packet was due—twenty pages—and about a week before the deadline, I still had nothing to hand in. Classic Nina.

Then I woke up with this incredible pain in my hip. As the monkey mind tends to do, I imagined the worst-case scenario. While worrying, I started making notes and doing some Googling about hips. I happened to discover Lucille Clifton reading her poem “Homage to My Hips” on YouTube.

That sparked something in me—this idea that I could write about my hips, the experience I was having, and the memories associated with them. I wrote that first piece for my packet, and if my advisor hadn’t said, “Give me more of this,” I might not have pursued it.

Two years later, at the end of the program, I had the messy first draft of what would become Body, My Life in Parts. That’s the book’s origin story.

I also came to understand why this structure worked for me. It suited my neurodivergence and the way I write—working on shorter pieces that require less prolonged sitting. It doesn’t mean I don’t have longer projects in mind, but for my first venture into creative writing, this format worked beautifully.

Lisa Cooper Ellison [5:34]
I love that story—and since Foxy is here, she concurs that this was a great way to approach your book.

What your story brings to mind for me is something I heard from Nick Flynn about ten years ago at a reading at UVA. He talked about the difference between poetry and more traditional, narrative-driven memoir. He said that when he’s writing a memoir or any kind of narrative-driven book, he has all these pages in his head that he has to keep track of, and they constantly want to fall apart—so he’s always trying to hold them together.

It requires a huge amount of psychic energy to maintain that kind of structure. A poem, on the other hand, he can finish in a day. I imagine you didn’t finish these essays in a day, but it’s a very different way of holding our creativity and sense of story.

Nina Lichtenstein [6:32]
Yes! In my MFA program, I also took playwriting—thinking it would help me with dialogue—and a fiction writing workshop. I’ll admit, I was petrified to read my classmates’ fiction because I didn’t feel equipped to understand it. But, of course, a story is a story.

They actually felt the same way about my nonfiction pieces—nervous about responding because “it’s true.” So, it became what I call a cross-genre workshop, and it was wonderful. It helped me understand the shared building blocks of a good story—structure, character, pacing—even across genres. That was a revelation.

Lisa Cooper Ellison [7:28]
That’s so good. I always encourage people to read across genres—and write across them too—for exactly that reason. It deepens your understanding of story and how different forms work.

Since you mentioned playwriting and dialogue, this feels like a great segue into talking about your essay “Skin.” You’re going to read an excerpt for us.

Before we started recording, you and I were talking about what makes a good reading. Some of our listeners are preparing to give readings as they promote their books. What tips do you have for them?

Nina Lichtenstein [8:17]
We were talking about how any kind of live storytelling—something I know you’ve done, and I’ve dabbled in as well—benefits from starting in scene.

If we can drop the audience directly into a vivid moment, we’re much more likely to captivate them and invite them into the urgency of the story. It’s more powerful than starting with philosophizing or big-picture ideas.

When I give readings, I think about the crowd and what will resonate. One of my favorite sections to read is from the “Hands” chapter—when I punch the guy in the bar—because it’s funny, and I love hearing people react.

For today, I chose an excerpt from the chapter called “Skin.” I love how many of the body parts in the book lend themselves to metaphor—having skin in the game, stretching yourself thin, or someone having your back. These phrases became portals to memory and story for me.

So, here’s the scene:

Tobias is eight days old, and his circumcision, or bris milah—Covenant of Circumcision—welcomes him into our Jewish community and the entire Jewish tribe. The ceremony and celebration are held in the synagogue where Dan and I belong. Friends, family, and our extended circle fill the sanctuary—nearly a hundred guests. My mother arrived from Norway eight days ago, the day I gave birth. She and I stand in the women’s section, two rows away from the stage where Rabbi Alter performs the circumcision. Our rabbi is also a mohel—a Jew trained in the practice of brit milah.

My father-in-law sits on a tall, carved wooden chair with regal red velvet upholstery, his firstborn grandson nestled on a pillow in his lap, a white silken prayer shawl draped over his shoulders, and his yarmulke perched on his bald, shiny head. My husband stands tall beside him, swaying slowly from side to side, clutching a prayer book—a siddur—to his chest. I can tell he is in a deep place, part anxious, part exhilarated.

Our rabbi speaks briefly to the gathering about how each baby is born with great potential—that we’re about to honor the covenant between Abraham and God, which has defined the Jewish people for millennia. Despite his beaming face and gentle voice, I worry my mother must think it all sounds strange. I glance at her and smile, hoping to soothe her discomfort. She doesn’t smile back.

When the rabbi turns to Toby, the room falls silent. The baby is quiet too, content and dozing because I’ve just fed him. But that quickly changes when his romper is unbuttoned and his diaper removed. The rabbi deftly prepares and snips my son’s foreskin. He yelps and begins to whimper. My mother-in-law, standing on my other side, takes my hand and squeezes it, smiling through tears of joy—a Jewish grandson. The baby’s crying stops within seconds as the rabbi touches a gauze pad soaked in sweet, kosher Manischewitz wine to his lips.

Then he loudly announces the baby’s Hebrew name—Tuvia Yakov Meir ben Chone Moshe. My son now has a Hebrew name for religious contexts and an English name that honors both his American and Norwegian heritage: Tobias Thor Lichtenstein.

I look at Dan, standing in front of the ark that holds the Torah scrolls, while our son’s godparent carries the baby toward me. I’m cold-sweating, sensing how foreign and difficult this must be for my mother, while at the same time feeling proud and deeply connected to my new Jewish community. Such mixed emotions—I’m dizzy. The moment feels surreal. My mother grips the back of the seat in front of her, fighting back tears. I think I hear her mumble, “Barbarians.”

Lisa Cooper Ellison [13:22]
That is such a good scene.

Nina Lichtenstein [13:24]
It’s a good scene, and it sets up the idea of “skin in the game”—what’s truly at stake for the narrator as her ethnically and culturally Norwegian family encounters her new Jewish traditions and community.

Lisa Cooper Ellison [13:48]
These two ideas butt up against each other, because this essay begins with a moment where the narrator gets a terrible sunburn as a child. I started to map just this one essay because I wanted to show listeners how complicated it is—in a good way.

There are good complications and bad complications in writing, and you’re able to navigate this in a way that really works. So, we start with a sunburn—we have childhood. Then we have the forty-year-old narrator in a dermatologist’s office, having this really intimate, interesting, and awkward experience of being totally photographed.

I was thinking about that for a while, as someone who’s recently been to the dermatologist. So, we have that moment, then we go back in time—the stretching of the body, the stretching of the self—and that leads us to the circumcision scene. Then we have this meditation on stretch marks and what happens to us as we age.

So, there are all these different time periods within just one essay, and many of your other essays do similar work—not in a cookie-cutter way, but through this idea of bending time or reorganizing it in ways we might not expect.

Nina Lichtenstein [15:16]
You know, this is really the beauty of sharing our work with the world—or any art, of course. The person who experiences the creation, whether it’s writing or painting, will see things we didn’t consciously realize.

I have to tell you, I didn’t approach each chapter thinking, let me find memories about hands from childhood, then from young adulthood, then from parenthood, and finally from aging. So much of it happened organically that it’s almost uncanny to realize it now.

When it came time to organize the chapters—something I know you were curious about—the editor and I didn’t decide to arrange them from top to bottom, or inside out. I do have “heart” as one of the parts, and technically, some people write about organs like lungs or ovaries. But I think “heart” is the only internal organ I include.

So that’s not how we organized it. Instead, we focused on the rate of revelation. Something that happens later in life—something that might lessen the reader’s curiosity if placed too early—was kept for later in the book. That was our primary organizing principle.

Within each chapter, though, we made conscious choices to weave together memories from different periods of life and to place them in an order that felt natural. I think when you start writing about memories linked to a body part, it’s only natural that moments from different ages surface. We’re probably trained, at least unconsciously, to think chronologically, so that might also influence it.

You asked if I had a favorite chapter. I’ll say this: someone reviewed my book shortly after losing her father, and she said one thing she loved was how the father of the narrator—my dad—appears in so many chapters and so many parts of my life. That layering creates a rounded image of him—a very loving and present father, but also a complex and complicated man.

That feedback meant a lot to me because I hadn’t thought about it consciously. I’ve also realized that my dad appears far more than my mom, which is an interesting reckoning with the writing self.

As for favorite chapters—well, I don’t have just one—but I’m especially fond of the ones involving my children. For example, in “Eyes,” I write about how they used to say I had eyes in the back of my head, which was a funny little thing when they were small. In “Breasts,” I explore the intimacy of nursing three children. In “Ears,” I write about dancing wildly to Edvard Grieg’s In the Hall of the Mountain King with them in our living room.

Those chapters that touch on raising my kids—that’s the beauty of memoir writing. It allows me to relive those tender moments. The same is true with my dad, who died in 2012. Writing about him gave me an opportunity to dwell with him again—to revisit and think about him more carefully and mindfully than I might if I were just reminiscing.

Those are my favorite parts because they gave me such a profound gift.

Lisa Cooper Ellison [19:36]
And I felt that—they were extremely alive. I could feel it in the descriptions, in the way you wrote about them.

We’re going to talk for just a second about “Vagina,” which was also very alive—but in a very different way.

Before we do, I want to say something about structure. I’m always looking at how people organize their work and what choices they make. As you said, the reader always brings part of themselves to the book—there’s what you intended and what we perceive.

I noticed that it begins with “Eyes” and ends with “Belly.” In addition to the moments where the narrator is raising her family and being pregnant—and all the ways that impacted her body and sense of self—she’s also a middle-aged woman.

As a middle-aged woman myself, on the cusp of menopause, I know how much our bodies change during this time. The belly is one of the places that changes the most, right? So, I found it fascinating that the book ends there—with the belly.

It felt like an interesting bookend, maybe even a commentary on what’s happening for this narrator—how she’s seeing herself as she moves through this stage of life.

You have so much great work in here. Let’s talk about “Vagina.” And then I want to hear what you’ve learned from writing this book—and, of course, you’re in your launch year in 2025, my friend!

Nina Lichtenstein [21:30]
So when you say, “I want to talk about vagina,” it makes me laugh. I can’t help but smile, because I have three sons—ages twenty-seven, twenty-eight, and thirty—and they all have copies of the book. I don’t necessarily expect them to read it, though.

My middle son was visiting a couple of weeks ago, and he picked up the book and started reading. Then he came to me and said, “So… I just read about your abortion.” My sons didn’t know about that—I was very young when it happened—and I’d never shared it with them. I figured some of those discoveries would happen through the book, since I write about it, though not in a sensational way.

Interestingly, I don’t think that story actually appears in the “Vagina” chapter—it comes up elsewhere. So, he says, “Then what’s in Vagina?” And I’m like, “You know what, maybe you don’t need to read that part, sweetheart.”

Lisa Cooper Ellison [22:35]
So yes, let’s talk about “Vagina.” I found it to be a really interesting essay because, of course, when you see that title, your mind starts imagining all the possibilities. But what I loved is that it’s such a loving, beautiful, intimate chapter.

That was my impression of it.

Nina Lichtenstein [22:56]
Well, that’s nice to hear. I think it starts with wanting my period. That story had been published before—in a Hippocampus anthology, if I’m not wrong—and also in an INK anthology, which connects to my newspaper roots. So, I linked it to coming of age.

Within that chapter, the pieces are arranged chronologically because that was an earlier moment—being maybe twelve or thirteen. From there, we move into a story from my first marriage, when we lived a relatively observant Jewish life. My former husband and I observed a tradition called taharat ha-mishpacha—loosely translated as the laws of family purity—which may sound a little strange. It involves not having sexual intercourse during your period and for seven days afterward.

In that way, it creates a real yearning to come back together. One of the points, obviously, connects to be fruitful and multiply—and that’s around the time many women, though not all (which can be a challenge), ovulate. But the story is also about what happens when things don’t go as planned, and I think that’s what makes it both tender and difficult.

In the end, it led me to stop observing that monthly ritual. What happened was, frankly, traumatic—the experience of having to involve the rabbi and the rabbi’s wife to decide whether I could go to the ritual bath (mikveh) before resuming sexual relations. Of course, the idea is much bigger than it might sound. It’s also about honoring the monthly cycle, rebirth, new beginnings, and learning—within a marriage—to connect in non-physical ways. Makeup sex can’t be the only way we resolve conflict.

There are so many facets. For example, some women who practice this tradition have discovered growths in the vagina or on the cervix precisely because you must check internally to be sure you’re not bleeding. To some listeners this may be like, whoa, but if they want a deeper explanation and understanding of the story—it’s in the book.

Lisa Cooper Ellison [26:00]
I would say, listeners, go ahead and read it, because you share this in such a respectful way. There’s nothing lascivious about it—it’s very intimate.

What I also appreciated is that it goes beyond even what you just said. If I were born Jewish, observing this might have meant something else. But when you convert, how do you uphold your identity as a convert? What does that mean for how you move within a religion—or any community?

Nina Lichtenstein [26:40]
I think that’s a big part of writing this book, actually—one of the big things we learn through writing. Although the book isn’t exclusively about my Jewish journey, I realized how inscribed it is—if you will—in my body and my actions.

Judaism is so much about what you do—the actions you choose and the traditions you follow—rather than waking up one morning and thinking, I believe, and then you’re Jewish. It’s the actions you’re willing to take on. Especially when you convert, the more you do these things, the more your identity anchors and strengthens.

My ex-husband wasn’t religious at all. He’d eat non-kosher food; it didn’t matter to his sense of identity whether he observed Shabbat or went to the movies or shopping. He had grown up with Jewish heritage and stories—he’d even faced antisemitism on the school bus—so he didn’t need rules or rituals to feel deeply Jewish.

But I did. Those practices anchored me—again.

Lisa Cooper Ellison [28:05]
That’s what I love about this piece—you take us on a journey that allows us to explore questions so much larger than any single scene. I love that.

As we begin to wrap up, I’m curious how you’re navigating your book launch, what you’ve learned along the way, and whether you have any exercises you’d like to share for the writers listening to this episode.

Nina Lichtenstein [28:37]
What I’ve learned—well, first of all, as you mentioned, this is the launch year. It’s not just the launch month. And I’ve realized how much I miss writing.

Unless you can afford to hire a publicist—and if you can, I highly recommend it—you end up doing so much yourself. It turns out I happen to be fairly good at it. I’m not afraid of social media; I know how to navigate Canva and design things. I’m good at communication, so it’s worked out, but I’ve learned that it’s a full-time job.

If you want to spread the word about your book and share it with different communities, it takes a tremendous amount of time. I’ve learned to be less afraid of asking for help. That started with blurbs. I even wrote a piece on the Brevity blog around the time Simon & Schuster announced they were doing away with blurbs—there was a lot of conversation about it, and I had just received my last one.

My point is, don’t be afraid to ask. The worst that can happen is someone says no, and then you move on. We already know what rejection means. If you’ve come this far and have a book coming out, you’ve faced a lot of rejections. You know how to pick yourself up and keep going.

I’d also say—there’s no such thing as starting too soon. Planning early, getting excited, gathering a team of helpers or friends who’ll stick their necks out for you—that makes a difference. It keeps you from feeling so alone.

And I’ll add this: as women, I think it’s important to be a little more shameless—like men often are. Not that all men are like that, but we tend to apologize too much. We shrink. If not when your book comes out, when? That’s the time to step forward.

I’ve also learned something very practical: I used to only use my Google Calendar—on my phone or computer—but I’ve transitioned to a paper calendar. Writing things down by hand, seeing them visually, and being able to pull it out anytime has been a huge shift for me.

As for exercises—in the back of my book, I’ve included body writing prompts. Whenever I give a workshop, even for people who haven’t read or bought the book, I share those prompts.

If you’re interested in mining body-centered stories and memories, here’s an exercise: choose any body part—say, your feet.

I like to begin with a three-minute mindfulness body scan. My mind tends to race, so this helps me settle and focus. Then I look at the body part and simply observe—what do I notice? Do I like them? Dislike them? Are there scars? Bunions? Pedicures? What stories do they carry?

Then I ask questions:
 Where have your feet taken you?
 What have they run away from?
 Do they hurt you?
 Can you count on them?
 Was there a time you couldn’t?

Sit with your body parts. Question them. Listen. Think: When was a time they surprised me? Protected me? Failed me?

For instance, the scene in my book where I punch a man in a bar—I never would’ve remembered that if my mentor hadn’t asked, “Have you ever used your hands to protect yourself?” Thankfully, I’ve never had to use them in a life-or-death situation, but I realized I had once used them to protect my pride after being insulted.

There are so many stories hidden in our bodies. Just say yes to them—and write. Eventually, some will lead you exactly where you need to go. And if you’re lucky, you might discover things about yourself—as I did.

Through writing this book, I confirmed what I’d long suspected: I have a classic ADHD personality. Had I not examined my life in this way, I might never have felt empowered to own it—or to seek a proper evaluation. That turned out to be surprisingly redemptive. And for that to happen through writing a book? Pretty wonderful.

Lisa Cooper Ellison [34:09]
Yes! That’s one of the great side benefits of examining your life through memoir—your life can change in profound ways because of what you discover or how you come to see yourself differently.

And I want to give a shout-out to the exercises in the back of your book, because, listeners, there aren’t just one or two pages—there are many. You could actually recreate your own version of Nina’s book simply by going through all these exercises. That’s another thing I love about it.

Nina Lichtenstein [34:48]
Yes! Someone came to one of my book events and told me she has a friend who lives far away. They haven’t seen each other in years, and she said, “I’m going to send her the questions from the back of your book, and we’ll exchange our answers as a way to reconnect.”

I thought that was such a beautiful idea.

Lisa Cooper Ellison [35:08]
Oh, I love that. What a wonderful way to not just write—but connect.

Nina Lichtenstein [35:14]
Exactly. And I’ll say this, Lisa—when I wrote this book, it all happened organically. The structure, the “parts,” the non-linear form—I didn’t plan to write a craft book.

But the more I talk about it with people like you, the more I realize it is a kind of craft book by example. I’m doing what I’m talking about and showing it in action. And maybe that’s the best possible outcome—that it inspires people to dive in and discover their own embodied stories.

Lisa Cooper Ellison [35:53]
Well, I can certainly say I was inspired, and I look forward to trying some of the prompts at the back of your book.

If listeners want to get a copy, what’s the best way to buy your book and learn about your launch events?

Nina Lichtenstein [36:11]
Lisa, my press is called Vine Leaves Press, and we always direct traffic to them—so visit vineleavespress.com.

If you’d like to support your local indie bookstore, I always recommend bookshop.org.

I also love selling books personally. It gives me so much joy to sign them and connect with readers. I like to say, “Have books, will travel!”

I’m also on Substack at The Viking Jewess and Other Curiosities, and on Instagram as @thevikingjewess. On Facebook, I’m Nina Boug Lichtenstein.

I’m the founder and director of Maine Writers Studio, my baby for the past three years, where I offer workshops, retreats, a literary salon, and an open mic in Brunswick, Maine, where I live.

And, of course, there’s my website: ninalichtenstein.com.

Lisa Cooper Ellison [37:19]
Well, you certainly are a busy lady! And listeners, if you didn’t catch all of that, don’t worry—all the links to Nina’s work and upcoming events are in the show notes.

Thank you so much, Nina—for writing this book, for being here, and for this lovely conversation. I’ve really enjoyed it.

Nina Lichtenstein [37:39]
Thank you so much, Lisa. And I hope that as you move through your life now, you might have a little more body awareness—in a different way.

Lisa Cooper Ellison [37:47]
Absolutely. Thanks.