“Dreams never lie”: An interview with Orenda Fink
by Lydia Abedeen and Alexia Woodall
Prairie Schooner Assistant Nonfiction Editors Lydia Abedeen and Alexia Woodall recently spoke to Orenda Fink about essay writing. Fink is the author of The Witch’s Daughter, which was a finalist for the 2025 Southern Book Prize. Fink is the guest judge for our 2026 Summer Creative Nonfiction Contest. Click here for full guidelines on how to submit.
Lydia Abedeen & Alexia Woodall: In The Witch’s Daughter, memories often feel fluid rather than fixed. They are shaped as much by emotion and phenomenology as by chronology. While writing, did you find yourself becoming more aware of memory as something constructed, interpreted, or even imaginative? How does that awareness affect the way you think about nonfiction as a genre?
Orenda Fink: I took cues from two of my favorite memoirists, Mary Karr and Jeannette Walls. I tried my best to follow Karr’s advice from The Art of Memoir: honor the truth as best you can—otherwise, it’s fiction, not memoir. At the same time, I recognize that memory can be faulty and filtered through our egos; two people can remember the same event very differently.
That’s one reason I had my sister do the first edit of the book. I trust her, and I took seriously moments when she said, “I remember that differently,” or “Let me offer something else that happened that you may not recall.” We would talk it through and come to an agreement, because we’re both fairly agreeable people.
Karr does allow for some imagination, but only for inconsequential details that help set the tone for the reader. For example: what the sky might have looked like on a dark summer night in Alabama, what bird might have been singing, or how the moon appeared. These are the kinds of details I believe you can ethically imagine in a memoir—very little beyond that.
LA & AW: Tell us about the process of writing your memoir. Where did you start? How did you balance your comfort with the truth of your lived reality?
OF: I started writing what became my memoir about ten years before it was published. At first, I was writing about losing my beloved senior dog, whose death brought on a near mental breakdown. I shared a few pieces with my friend and mentor, the great Timothy Schaffert, and in perfect Timothy fashion, he took a sip of his gin martini and said, “Honey, this book is not about your dog. It’s about your mother.”
That was enough to make me quit writing for a few years.
But after a health scare, I got serious about putting words on the page again. What was my life about? What had I experienced? What was my relationship with my mother—and with the world? I took Timothy’s advice and began collecting childhood memories. Those vignettes led me to a literary agent, and about eight years later, I finally made sense of it all. This was during a very tumultuous time right after I went no contact with my parents. Maybe the hardest year of my life. I wrote furiously so that I wouldn’t forget. And maybe so I wouldn’t go back. There wasn’t much comfort in the writing. But it was something I felt compelled to do for my own sanity.
LA & AW: Your music and writing explore themes of transformation, identity, and reinvention. In what ways do you think nonfiction is uniquely suited to capturing the ways people continue to change over time? Can this change be captured even after the story ends?
OF: Nonfiction is special in that it allows you to speak directly from the heart about how you experience the world. And as humans, we’re drawn to transformational arcs, whether they’re positive or negative. We’re especially partial to the hero’s journey—the wrestling with some metaphorical demon, some blind spot, and the realization that, oh, it was X I needed all along.
I had a dream the other night that I was furious with my husband because my dog needed to go to the vet and he wouldn’t give me the car keys. It turned out I had the keys in my purse the whole time. I love dreams—I study them for a living—and this one really struck me as mirroring that hero’s journey. What are you looking for or demanding from others that you’ve had all along? That’s the story we’re trying to tell, I think, whether it’s fiction or nonfiction.
How do you capture change after the story ends? I think it’s by allowing some ambiguity in the ending. You can end with a question, or with a single scene that says: this is where I’ve landed, for now. But I don’t really know how the future will unfold. Because that reflects life, right?
LA & AW: I’d love to know your relationship to Jungian psychoanalysis and how it’s influenced your writing.
OF: I completed my Jungian coaching certification after writing my memoir, but before that I had spent ten years in therapy with a Jungian-informed psychotherapist. That work changed my life and ultimately led me to pursue my own certification.
As a writer, studying Jung has affirmed my intuition that life itself is symbolic of an inner state where the stakes are just as high. Our reality is filtered through our egos, and the more identified we are with them, the more susceptible we are to tragedy because we become stuck in what is essentially an illusion. Breaking free from that egoic illusion is part of a character’s transformational arc. What does the character learn that changes their view of themselves and the world? Jung would call that individuation from the ego.
I also bring dreams into my writing as a way to offer clues to an underlying truth in the unconscious mind, because that’s what they are. Someone can say one thing in the waking world, but their dreams may say something quite different. And dreams never lie.
LA & AW: What advice would you give to someone who wants to write their own memoir?
OF: My biggest piece of advice is to write your first draft as if no one will ever read it. Otherwise, you’ll censor yourself and lose the truth of your story. It feels scary, but you have to do it. You can decide what to cut or edit later. You can even decide that no one ever reads it but you. But you have to start with the most honest version of your story possible.
Make sure you understand your own blind spots and shortcomings—how you might have gotten things wrong, just like everyone else in the story. No one wants to read the story of someone who was always right about everything.
And maybe most importantly, after you’ve spit out your first draft, write your second one from a God-like perspective. Zoom way, way out from your story and see yourself as the sad lost character you are. What does your arc offer to the world? What have you learned that you think will help others? This will help you develop your guiding light: your theme.
Orenda Fink is a musician, songwriter, performer, writer, and certified Jungian depth coach specializing in shadow work, dream interpretation and narcissistic abuse recovery. Her work has been profiled in NPR, Vanity Fair, and more. She has been writing, recording, and touring since 1997, most notably with the bands Azure Ray, O+S, and the Casket Girls. Her first book, The Witch’s Daughter, is a memoir detailing life as the child of a mother with an undiagnosed personality disorder. It was a finalist for the 2025 Southern Book Prize. Born and raised in the South, Orenda now resides in California’s Mojave Desert with her husband, Todd Fink of The Faint, and their dog, Grimm.
Lydia Abedeen is a PhD student in creative writing at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. She received her MFA and MA at Northwestern’s Litowitz program. She studies cults, ghosts, and the effects religious trauma has on women. A Tin House scholar, her writing has been supported by the University of Iowa, Sundress Academy of the Arts, and the Watering Hole. Her writing is published in Split Lip, Hayden’s Ferry Review, The Rumpus, and elsewhere. She is on submission for her debut horror novel PROPHET GIRL, and was a National Poetry Series finalist in 2024. Lydia is a religious cult survivor.
Alexia Woodall is a second-year MA English student at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Her specialization is in creative writing with an emphasis on fiction, CNF, and eating disorder studies. Her work has appeared in The Nebraska Poetry Society and UNL’s undergraduate literary journal, Laurus. She is currently working on her debut novel, as well as various short stories and essays.