1. Memoir Monday, a weekly curation of the best personal essays from around the web brought to you by Narratively, The Rumpus,  Granta, Guernica, Oldster Magazine, Literary Hub, Orion Magazine, The Walrus, and Electric Literature. Below is this week’s curation. ⬇️

2. First Person Singular, featuring original personal essays.

3. The Lit Lab, featuring interviews—The Memoir Land Author Questionnaire—and essays on craft and publishing. There are also weekly writing prompts and other exercises from, ahem, a New York Times bestselling ghostwriter of memoirs (that’s me) exclusively for paid subscribers.

4. Goodbye to All That, where I continue to explore my fascination with the most wonderful and terrible city in the world, something I began doing with two NYC-centric anthologies, Goodbye to All That, and Never Can Say Goodbye.

   ---

   “I appreciate you shining light on writers and their work, so here's a monthly thank you.” - , paid subscriber. You, too, can support the hard work of producing Memoir Land five days a week…

   Subscribe now

Click here to get more out of this post by reading it online rather than in your inbox.

Essays from Partner Publications…

Metmorphosis

by

“The roads are deserted. Heatwaves simmer ghostly above the asphalt while the power lines hum over our heads and a chickadee dee-dees to some bird-love in the forest. We have the place to ourselves, it seems. The world.”

Electric Literature

Boxing: Against the Games We Are Given

by

“‘Writing is a game to me,’ I told my philosopher-friend as we shared a lukewarm Ursus, a beer named Bear. ‘Writing is a game that cannot be won, and there is no end to it. Those who believe they can win it with a bestseller are playing a different game…a Disneyland game.’”

Guernica

What I Did for Love #2: Say it Out Loud

by

“I’d failed the love test. You pass the love test by getting married and staying married, by having children. You pass the love test through one great love, by being consistent, loyal, true. I’d been the broken-hearted teen who goes on to have a lot of adventures because when you start with a broken heart, most of the love stuff looks like play-pretend.”

Oldster

The Power of a Number: Erin Vincent on Grief, Loss, and a Fixation on Fourteen

by Erin Vincent

“Sometimes I imagine what it would look like if I could cut the number fourteen from my life and create a whole new story. So many possibilities, but maybe not a hundred thousand billion of them.”

LitHub

Essays from around the web…

Mom and Dad: The Center of My Life

By

“I was robbed of so many things that day. My parents won’t be at my wedding, they won’t get to hold their future grandchild, and they won’t get to see me have the successful career I’m still seeking. It simultaneously breaks my heart and enrages me.”

Substack

Surrogacy Nearly Destroyed Our Marriage. It Also Brought Us Back

by

“We thought finding a gestational surrogate would be the hardest part. Turns out, we were wrong. Instead, we were totally unprepared for the ways surrogacy was going to change our marriage.”

Self Magazine

Learning to Love the Hyphen: Bangladeshi-American

by

“At the beginning of class four, after moving to a new school, a white kid names Taylor looked at me during roll call and said ‘Istiaq? What kind of a name is...Istiaq?’ His tone suggested it was ridiculous that such a name could exist.”

The Daily Star

Language Lessons: Fluency inside and outside immigration court

by

“I am pleased with myself that I figured out how to say “Do you have a lawyer?” on my own, before I got the booklet. It was the first sentence in Spanish that I ever spoke to one of our neighbors. The two of us had left court and exited the building together. I waited until we were safely on the sidewalk before speaking the sentence I had been practicing. “Tienes abogado?” My neighbor’s face brightened and then she looked sad again when she realized that her response went way beyond my well-meaning Spanish.”

Lopsided

Changing My Hair Color Used to Be an Act of Rebellion. Now I Know It Means So Much More

by

“There were countless things out of my control because of the divorce, but my hair was one thing I had complete control over. I couldn’t change my custody schedule. I couldn’t change how my husband was parenting our children in his home. I couldn’t change where the military was sending him. But I could change my hair. I could change who I saw in the mirror. I could change the identity I had lost in my marriage and find the sense of self I needed in order to move on with my life.”

Open Secrets Magazine

Downpour: An Anatomy of Emotional Weather and the Sky’s Oldest Lesson—that Everything Changes State

by Marie Anne Arreola

“On the table: yesterday’s newspaper, the landline off its hook. My aunt’s voice fraying over static as she told us my grandmother had been washed away by another kind of flood. Grief rearranged itself into weather, something you prepare for with small rituals: folding tea towels, slicing fruit, anything to keep the hands from drowning.”

ANMLY

Brain Baby (an audio essay)

By

“We're transferred to a radiology oncologist, who is excited about the new technology available to treat brain tumors. It's targeted, more precise than ever. He tells us this while Emma falls over in the patient room, yelps in pain. He draws us pictures on the white board. A circle to represent her brain. A square around the circle. Lots of arrows. A graph showing follow up treatment schedules and potential outcomes. He describes these next few days as being marked by layers and layers of uncertainty.”

Susurrus

Homesick in My Own Hometown

by

“It’s a surprising feeling to be homesick in the town where you grew up. I was raised in Concord, Massachusetts, and born on April 19th, so Patriots’ Day and all the parades and celebrations always felt like they were for me—at least that’s what my parents told me. But today, it’s not quite the same. The town looks familiar, but the familiar faces are gone. I no longer run into old neighbors, parents’ friends, or childhood classmates. It leaves an emptiness and a longing that can only be described as homesick—it’s the only word that fits.”

What We Keep

🚨Announcements:

📢 THIS SATURDAY: Don’t Miss the 2026 Live Personal Storytelling Summit—where I will be on ’s Identity Panel

Tickets are NOW ON SALE for personal storytelling summit Open Secrets Live 2026! The event will take place Saturday, May 2, from 10 a.m.-6 p.m., with a ticketed after party from 6-8 p.m., at Symphony Space’s Leonard Nimoy Thalia Theatre, 250 W. 95th Street, New York (95th and Broadway).

Learn More/Sign Up

📢 From : Three new workshops, all 20% off until the end of April…

Everything but the Book: This three-week bootcamp will demystify all of the questions and tasks and expectations that swirl around in the background as you prepare to try to land a book deal. With segments on platform, submission materials, and submission strategies, writers will leave with clear and actionable plans for everything else they should be thinking about and working on while they finish their manuscripts.

Learn More/Sign Up

Essay Revision Intensive: A three-hour session in which writers break down an essay draft that's been giving them trouble, and build it back up better than ever. Come with an essay you've been struggling with, leave with a polished revision—and tools you can use again and again.

Learn More/Sign Up

Art and the Self: Writing Personal/Critical Essays: In this three-hour generative session, read and discuss examples of personal/critical essays—essays that engage with art as a way to articulate something personal—and generate new writing that incorporates both art criticism and memoir.

Learn More/Sign Up

📢 Submissions Are Open at

is considering essays of up to 1500 words and micro-essays between 500 and 800 words for her excellent magazine, .

“What to send: Sharp, personal narratives with an evocative spin on existential-leaning themes. Stories about the horror and the hilarity of being in the world. The profound and the absurd; the texture, the nuance; a particular way of seeing. How we change, or don’t change; how the world changes, or fails to. How people try. Moments of discovery conflict with the old narrative and challenge a long-held belief. Little things are big. Not everything aligns. Nothing resolves neatly. Make meaning out of chaos, but leave us wondering what happens after it ends.”

Learn More/Submit

📢 From Orion Magazine: Environmental Writers’ Workshop June 14-19, 2026 at Omega Institute

Join a community of writers, improve your craft, and reimagine how you think about nature. Guided by award-winning instructors, the Orion Environmental Writers’ Workshop provides an intimate space to connect with writers, artists, and editors, spark creativity, and renew, illuminate, and deepen your relationship with place. This week-long workshop is cosponsored by the Omega Center for Sustainable Living.

You’ll be studying with: , , , Maria Pinto, Roger Reeves, , and .

Learn More/Sign Up

📢 From The Oxford American—2026 Home Double Issue: Call for Submissions

The Oxford American is now accepting pitches for our special Summer/Fall 2026 double issue dedicated to Home. It’s an idea as gloriously complicated as the South itself, and we’re interested in works across genres that tackle it from all angles. We think of home as our region, but also as our physical houses and apartments. Home can be our sanctuary, but also our cage. It can represent our connection to a community, and can be troubled by violence, displacement, and loss within that community. It’s deeply personal, but always political…

Learn More/Submit

📢 From and Elizabeth Voetsche: Beyond the Noise—A Yoga + Writing Retreat in the Hudson Valley August 27-30

Four days of yoga + guided writing in an intentionally intimate group. You’ll return to what’s true for you and leave with real momentum on the page and in your life. Peel away from the demands of day-to-day life and chart your own unique path forward in the Catskill Mountains. Here, you’ll have the opportunity to pause and reconnect with yourself and your creative purpose.

• Dates: Aug 27–30, 2026

• Where: Spruceton Inn, West Kill, NY

• Group size: Only 7 guests (intimate by design)

• Rooms: All private rooms

• Includes: Lodging + all meals + daily yoga + daily writing sessions

• Investment: $3,000 (includes $500 deposit to secure your spot)

  Learn More/Sign Up

📢 From Writing Co-Lab: Peitho's Gift Writing Retreat in Crete, Greece

Join us for a week-long writing retreat at a lovely hotel on a quiet beach on the southern coast of Crete. Away from the crowds, Peitho’s Gift offers writers a peaceful place close to nature and steeped in history to connect with their creative spirit and partake in the joys of an intentional creative community. Your facilitators, Trish Fancher and Brian Gresko, will provide a structure designed to help you maximize your day’s productivity. The mornings are free for writing and enjoying the sea, while afternoons provide opportunities for socializing, and the day ends with writing salons and local delicacies.

Learn More/Apply

📢 Attention Publications and writers interested in having published essays considered for inclusion in our weekly curation:

By Thursday of each week, please send to memoirmonday@gmail.com:

1. The title of the essay and a link to it.

2. Your name and Substack profile link, if you have one, so I can tag you in the post.

3. A paragraph or a few lines from the piece that will most entice readers.

   Please be advised that we cannot accept all submissions, nor respond to the overwhelming number of emails received. Also, please note that we don’t accept author submissions from our partner publications.

   Subscribe now

   ---

Notebooks! Shirts! Mugs! Get Your Memoir Land Merch!

Memoir Land Merch

1. Memoir Monday, a weekly curation of the best personal essays from around the web brought to you by Narratively, The Rumpus,  Granta, Guernica, Oldster Magazine, Literary Hub, Orion Magazine, The Walrus, and Electric Literature. Below is this week’s curation. ⬇️

2. First Person Singular, featuring original personal essays.

3. The Lit Lab, featuring interviews—The Memoir Land Author Questionnaire—and essays on craft and publishing. There are also weekly writing prompts and other exercises from, ahem, a New York Times bestselling ghostwriter of memoirs (that’s me) exclusively for paid subscribers.

4. Goodbye to All That, where I continue to explore my fascination with the most wonderful and terrible city in the world, something I began doing with two NYC-centric anthologies, Goodbye to All That, and Never Can Say Goodbye.

   Subscribe now

***Thanks to everyone who suggested personal essays in the comments of last week’s crowd-sourced edition of Memoir Monday! Lots of great recommendations in here:

Click here to get more out of this post by reading it online rather than in your inbox.

Essays from Partner Publications…

My Absolutely Chaotic Adventures at Sea During the Summer of 1984

by

“This was the summer of 1984. Dominic and I were 20. Tom was in his late 40s, ex-Royal Navy, tight and wiry like a featherweight fighter, with a bashed-in boxer’s nose. We’d met him in Athens while we were sleeping rough by the port. One night, he burst out of the Plum Pudding Pub, a way station for captains and crew, belting a sea shanty, tripped over our belongings and fell face-first into a bush. We helped him up. He launched into a far-fetched saga involving buoys, knots and his need for extra hands to get his yacht to the Atlantic. We said yes before he could change his mind. By the next afternoon, we were on a ferry to Kusadasi on the Turkish coast, all expenses paid. I was thrilled — one step further from home.”

Narratively

Running Behind

by Stephanie Wambugu

“I began analysis to sort out certain ideas I had about my parents and to address the sudden oppressive fear of dying that overtook me when I turned twenty-five years old. I was also a bit worried that once my novel was published, people I knew would read it and come away thinking I was a crazy person or a sexual deviant, or both. I explained all of this to my analyst during our early sessions, hoping we would go through my list of concerns in a straightforward and efficient way, not realizing that this wasn’t at all how the process would work. Instead of focusing on my stated motivations for beginning treatment, I spent a great deal of time in these conversations thinking about, and apologizing for, my chronic lateness.”

Granta

Observations from Inside Immigration Court

by

“ICE regularly detains people in these very hallways, often violently separating children from their parents. It doesn’t matter if the judge has granted a continuance, or if there is no history of arrest—according to official records, more than 70% of those held by ICE nationwide have no criminal record. People leave the courts jubilant that a judge has granted them more time to make their cases, only to be taken by ICE in the hallway.”

Electric Literature

Raising Mom

by

“We watched our mother mature—into her own woman rather than our abusive father’s beleaguered wife. She went through many phases—beginning with attending Co-Dependents Anonymous meetings, which helped her immeasurably. Her anxiety disorder lessened. We noticed her voice changing and lowering as she moved through a new kind of puberty.”

Oldster

How Writing Helped Me Heal After a Trauma

By

“On June 4, 2015, I was sexually assaulted and nearly murdered. I went to bed in the evening, the way I always did. I read. I turned out my lamp. In the dark, I listened to the train in the distance, the one that rumbled past every night at ten-thirty. I woke in a hospital two days later with no memory of what had happened to me, in a body that I could no longer make work. ‘Someone broke into your house and attacked you,’ a nervous-faced resident told me. She was young. Maybe unaccustomed to giving bad news.”

LitHub

Essays from around the web…

I Never Stopped Wanting a Mother

By

“In 2009 my adoptive mother had been gone for nearly ten years. I had learned how to live without her, but not how to stop wanting a mother. I was living in New York City in an apartment with a radiator that ticked all hours of the day. I’d been sitting at my kitchen table, looking up at the clock above the stove blinking 12:00 a.m., when I realized it had been a decade since she’d been gone. Her death awakened the ache I had carried inside me since childhood — and it only grew sharper.”

Dame Magazine

Homecomings: I was invited to go back to my high school to talk about my work and was asked about despair. The students surprised me and I surprised myself.

by

“I didn’t know what was possible for me back then, when I was 17, but I was trying to learn what was possible and how to change what I feared, to have more of the life I wanted. I was learning how to live. Most of my life in this country when I think about it has been spent trying to keep myself and those I love safe from violence because of who we are and who we love. Much has changed, but that remains at the core of what I am still doing. That I was even invited back and treated with this kind of respect tells me that for all the hate being summoned back right now, we still live in the changed world, the one that has marshaled so much venom.”

The Querent

My Father and the Mushrooms: For decades, my dad was consumed by alcoholism and anger. I hoped psychedelic therapy could change him.

by John O’connor

“My father was psychedelically naïve, as unlikely a psychonaut as there ever was, a man who never took a puff of the “catnip” making the cocktail-party rounds in the ’70s and who once grounded me for a month after finding a roach in my corduroys. His decision, in 2023, to agree to psychedelic-assisted therapy may have been a desperation lob, one that seemed to raise, in his mind, the possibility of a reconciliation with my sisters.”

NYMag/Intelligencer

I Wrote a Polyamory Memoir. You’ve Probably Never Heard of Me

by

“Most importantly, I categorically declined all press requests to include my partners in photo shoots and interviews. ‘Your book stands on its own. Your writing speaks for itself,’ my husband said. ‘Why do they need a man’s voice to legitimize a woman’s story?’ When West’s husband, musician Ahamefule Olou, sent a scathing email to Slate journalist Scaachi Koul for her profile of West, the public crashout made me glad to have decided on these boundaries in advance.”

Open Secrets Magazine

A Trip to the Land of Disability

by

“Walking is my gym and my chapel, both locomotion and devotion. I like it fast but pause for oddities and marvels--two insects fighting to the death at my feet, a love note painted overnight on a planter at the liquor store. I don't know where I am until I've walked the place, whether it's my home for the weekend somewhere new or my neighborhood of more than 20 years. Nothing ever stays the same for long. I smile at a baby in a pram. Next thing I know, he's pedaling a tricycle.”

Amazement Seeker

Origin Stream

By

“Once, a black bear also ambled by. I knew he was an adolescent by his walk. He walked just like my teen children—part bravado, part insecurity. I stood watching, realizing there was an entire world that lived in the woods mostly unseen. Like the salmon under the surface.”

Passages North

What I Was Thinking at the Lunch Table

by

“My brimming eyes wandered. To the Sunkist fruit snacks I wanted to apply as chewy press-on fingernails. To the Japanese kids’ dark boxes filled with neat, colorful compositions of vegetables, fish, rice, and things I didn’t recognize. To Timmy Lee Edmond’s cafeteria pizza, which he sauced, to my shock, with ketchup. Timmy was a new arrival from England, and I assumed it was customary, or at least acceptable, to put ketchup on pizza in the faraway place that had given him his accent and his red mullet. He was the epitome of what I called, in my head and to my sister, a “Ketchup Kid”: pale-faced with semi-permanent pink condiment stains about the corners of the lips. One day, our feet touched under the table, accidentally, and then we tapped them together a few more times, on purpose, sharing tight-lipped smiles.”

Formal Assignment

Becoming a Viral Poet Ruined My Idea of Love

by

“When Seeley returned thoroughly sunburnt from Ecuador that fall, we began to plan our future together. Seeley bought a 1998 Toyota 4 Runner for us to travel the country in. I saved up some money and quit my unfulfilling post-grad job in finance to go with them. We went from calling each other 'boyfriends,' to 'partners,' to unofficial 'wives.' Throughout our numerous adventures—like a two-month long road trip from New York to Los Angeles and volunteering on organic farms together—I learned that the English language has limits. The way Seeley holds me at night, extends kindness to my family and friends, and affirms my non-binary identity defies language. When I asked my mother what she thought of Seeley, she only said, 'Well, they’re your person.’”

The Queer Love Project

Resilience in the City of Ghosts

by

“Jazz surges over my body, stealing the air from my lungs. It catches in my throat, in a gasp suspended between grief and joy. I want the music to cleanse me—baptize me of the ghosts hanging heavy on my body, slowly eating me alive.”

Eclectica

Artful: How To Navigate 1591.7 Centimeters

by C. Zhang

“My neighbor seems kind. He cleans the sink and always smiles at me shyly when we mix up our spoons in the same slot on the drying rack. Isn’t it an intimacy, being unable to distinguish between our own forks and the forks of a near stranger?”

Split Lip Magazine

I Wanted To Know My Brother Better. When He Died, I Realized a Painful Truth

by

“A blue breathing tube emerged from my brother’s mouth like a tentacle. My mother had died years earlier, and what that experience had taught me was that when a family member is on the edge of death, you don’t leave anything unsaid. But with my brother, it was different. I couldn’t explain to him my biggest fear—that I had never truly known him.”

Newsweek

Northern Waters

by

“I slipped into the tub and pressed myself against the white porcelain. Every inch of me up to my chin submerged. My skin was hot velvet under my palm and pulled my hands along my inner curves, around the friendly dough of my too-soft abs, under the weight of my breasts. I inhaled the steam, then let my arms go limp, felt the fullness of my lungs float me toward the surface. The cold air tickled my nipples when they rose above the waterline...”

KHÔRA

🚨Announcements:

📢 Don’t Miss the 2026 Live Personal Storytelling Summit—where I will be on ’s Identity Panel

Tickets are NOW ON SALE for personal storytelling summit Open Secrets Live 2026! The event will take place Saturday, May 2, from 10 a.m.-6 p.m., with a ticketed after party from 6-8 p.m., at Symphony Space’s Leonard Nimoy Thalia Theatre, 250 W. 95th Street, New York (95th and Broadway).

Learn More/Sign Up

📢 Submissions Are Open at

is considering essays of up to 1500 words and micro-essays between 500 and 800 words for her excellent magazine, .

“What to send: Sharp, personal narratives with an evocative spin on existential-leaning themes. Stories about the horror and the hilarity of being in the world. The profound and the absurd; the texture, the nuance; a particular way of seeing. How we change, or don’t change; how the world changes, or fails to. How people try. Moments of discovery conflict with the old narrative and challenge a long-held belief. Little things are big. Not everything aligns. Nothing resolves neatly. Make meaning out of chaos, but leave us wondering what happens after it ends.”

Learn More/Submit

📢 From Orion Magazine: Environmental Writers’ Workshop June 14-19, 2026 at Omega Institute

Join a community of writers, improve your craft, and reimagine how you think about nature. Guided by award-winning instructors, the Orion Environmental Writers’ Workshop provides an intimate space to connect with writers, artists, and editors, spark creativity, and renew, illuminate, and deepen your relationship with place. This week-long workshop is cosponsored by the Omega Center for Sustainable Living.

You’ll be studying with: , , , Maria Pinto, Roger Reeves, , and .

Learn More/Sign Up

📢 From The Oxford American—2026 Home Double Issue: Call for Submissions

The Oxford American is now accepting pitches for our special Summer/Fall 2026 double issue dedicated to Home. It’s an idea as gloriously complicated as the South itself, and we’re interested in works across genres that tackle it from all angles. We think of home as our region, but also as our physical houses and apartments. Home can be our sanctuary, but also our cage. It can represent our connection to a community, and can be troubled by violence, displacement, and loss within that community. It’s deeply personal, but always political…

Learn More/Submit

📢 From and Elizabeth Voetsche: Beyond the Noise—A Yoga + Writing Retreat in the Hudson Valley August 27-30

Four days of yoga + guided writing in an intentionally intimate group. You’ll return to what’s true for you and leave with real momentum on the page and in your life. Peel away from the demands of day-to-day life and chart your own unique path forward in the Catskill Mountains. Here, you’ll have the opportunity to pause and reconnect with yourself and your creative purpose.

• Dates: Aug 27–30, 2026

• Where: Spruceton Inn, West Kill, NY

• Group size: Only 7 guests (intimate by design)

• Rooms: All private rooms

• Includes: Lodging + all meals + daily yoga + daily writing sessions

• Investment: $3,000 (includes $500 deposit to secure your spot)

  Learn More/Sign Up

📢 From : “Memoir Showers: Water the Garden of Your Story”

This April, join us for “Memoir Showers.” Write to our daily prompts each day in April to keep your writing momentum going.

You’ve got nothing to lose and your memoir to gain. It’s free! Join us!

Learn More/Sign Up

📢 From Writing Co-Lab: Peitho's Gift Writing Retreat in Crete, Greece

Join us for a week-long writing retreat at a lovely hotel on a quiet beach on the southern coast of Crete. Away from the crowds, Peitho’s Gift offers writers a peaceful place close to nature and steeped in history to connect with their creative spirit and partake in the joys of an intentional creative community. Your facilitators, Trish Fancher and Brian Gresko, will provide a structure designed to help you maximize your day’s productivity. The mornings are free for writing and enjoying the sea, while afternoons provide opportunities for socializing, and the day ends with writing salons and local delicacies.

Learn More/Apply

📢 Attention Publications and writers interested in having published essays considered for inclusion in our weekly curation:

By Thursday of each week, please send to memoirmonday@gmail.com:

1. The title of the essay and a link to it.

2. Your name and Substack profile link, if you have one, so I can tag you in the post.

3. A paragraph or a few lines from the piece that will most entice readers.

   Please be advised that we cannot accept all submissions, nor respond to the overwhelming number of emails received. Also, please note that we don’t accept author submissions from our partner publications.

   Subscribe now

   ---

Notebooks! Shirts! Mugs! Get Your Memoir Land Merch!

Memoir Land Merch

Readers,

As I mentioned in last week’s “Memoir Monday” roundup, I’m at the Southern Vermont Writers’ Conference this week leading an essay writing workshop, and short on time to read personal essays. So I thought this might be a good opportunity for an “open thread,” in which I invite all of you to comment with the personal essays that have moved YOU the most—recently, or ever. This has worked well during other weeks I was away.

So, in the comments tell me:

What have been your favorite personal essays lately? What are your all-time favorite essays, published at any time? Include the titles, author names, and publications associated with each of them, and if there’s a link you can share, please add that, too. You can share as many as you want. ***If you’d like to include one personal essay of your own, make sure you also include at least one by someone else.***

Leave a comment

Thanks for filling in for me this week while I’m away! I’ll be back Monday, April 20th with another regular edition of the Memoir Monday weekly personal essay roundup.

- Sari Botton

Notebooks! Shirts! Mugs! Get Your Memoir Land Merch!

Memoir Land Merch

1. Memoir Monday, a weekly curation of the best personal essays from around the web brought to you by Narratively, The Rumpus,  Granta, Guernica, Oldster Magazine, Literary Hub, Orion Magazine, The Walrus, and Electric Literature. Below is this week’s curation. ⬇️

2. First Person Singular, featuring original personal essays.

3. The Lit Lab, featuring interviews—The Memoir Land Author Questionnaire—and essays on craft and publishing. There are also weekly writing prompts and other exercises from, ahem, a New York Times bestselling ghostwriter of memoirs (that’s me) exclusively for paid subscribers.

4. Goodbye to All That, where I continue to explore my fascination with the most wonderful and terrible city in the world, something I began doing with two NYC-centric anthologies, Goodbye to All That, and Never Can Say Goodbye.

   Subscribe now

***Because I’ll be away leading a workshop at a writing conference next week, the next edition of “Memoir Monday” will be crowd-sourced. Get ready to share you favorite essays that were published recently, or ever…

Click here to get more out of this post by reading it online rather than in your inbox.

Essays from Partner Publications…

Goodbye, Mermaids

by Christie Chapman

“We brought our daughter in for the six-hour cochlear-implants surgery when she was 13 months old. Tiny blue hospital gown, treaded socks in the smallest size that were still comically large on her. She carried her frog puppet into the operating room with her. She wasn’t supposed to, but the doctors broke protocol because she was scared.”

Electric Literature

Pita

by Christina Hartzell

“Amazon bought my hometown. Another Amazonification of an American town, not headline news, not news at all at this rate. A proposed three-million square-foot fulfillment center on part of the 250 acre property that makes up the old horse race track, my town’s one and only historical landmark. “America’s Favorite Playground”, as it was once dubbed, the Atlantic City Race Course was host to thousands of thoroughbreds and hundreds of thousands of sports betters. A 1966 postcard I found on eBay describes the race track “most picturesque”. Mays Landing, my hometown about 20 miles away from the actual Atlantic City, serves as a perfect locale for Amazon’s next fulfillment center, according to the mayor…”

The Rumpus

A Tulip Tree in Winter: On the Delicate Timing of Things

by

“Palms flat against the trunk, I notice my hands have turned cold. A memory arrives unbidden. One afternoon, an elderly neighbor, a dear friend I brought meals to from time to time, looked at me from across her kitchen table, her gaze lingering on the uncertain rise of my belly. “The delicate timing of things can be too much to bear,” she said softly. I forced a smile.”

Orion Magazine

Baby Girls: An excerpt of Bridgett M. Davis’s “Love, Rita: An American Story of Sisterhood, Joy, Loss and Legacy”

By

“Rita was born when our parents were struggling so bad, the only place they could afford to live was on a street called Delaware, in a cold-water flat within an over-crowded ramshackle tenement on Detroit’s dangerous side of town, with rats and roaches everywhere, fire a constant danger, and coals to heat the furnace a rare luxury. It was bad.”

Oldster

Essays from around the web…

Craigslist Made Me Rich. Giving the Money Away Is Easy.

By

“I grew up in Morristown, N.J. My dad served in World War II and my mom was a bookkeeper. I’m not a jet, yacht or vacation home guy. I like buying books and I have a really nice house, but that’s about it. It’s always been my attitude that others could benefit from what I didn’t need. Rich people never seem all that happy, either. When I became accidentally wealthy it meant a lot to me that I could help people who were less lucky.”

New York Times/Opinion

One Publix After Another: A family vacation in Singer Island, Fla. ends in a new personal reckoning.

by A.J. Daulerio

“I told Julieanne that every time I pass a Publix, it makes me uneasy, a reminder of that long stretch of personal upheaval I’m still processing, sometimes healthily, but sometimes not. As we drove by what felt like the fourth one in under ten minutes on the way back to Mangrove Bay, Julieanne was forced to comment. ‘Jesus, there are so many of them.’”

The Small Bow

How I Became a Filmmaker

by

“To this day, I feel a pang every time I watch a documentary about artists and they describe the moment when they first became part of a creative community, when nobody was doing it for the cash yet, nobody had betrayed a trusted collaborator or called someone else a sellout. At the time, it all seemed tentative and terrifying, impossible and inevitable. In total, this period lasted only a year or so, but it felt much longer, or maybe wider, because it was when I really fell in love with movies. It was also the first time that I felt like someone worth knowing.”

The New Yorker

Going to the Go-Go’s: A concert, a critic, a coke habit, and how the beat goes on

by

“The Go-Go’s were something of an anomaly at the time—an all-female band—and despite the frothy femme image they were reluctantly shoved into by the media, they had preserved a rebellious edge and a firm resistance to patriarchal mores, ways, and means that resonated deeply with my misfit teenage spirit. That night, they showed me that women could (literally) band together and make art without giving a shit what guys thought. Being in that crowd that night felt more like being in a movement than just taking in a concert.”

How I Learned

Swimming at Dawn: First I Pretended to Be A Morning Person, Then I Became One

by

“Crissa is not a natural morning person. I was never a morning person either. My whole life B.S. (Before Swimming), I resented duties such as going to work and children that interfered with my preferred midnight to 8 sleep routine. Now that I have adult children and a writer’s life, which means I can make my own schedule, I could return to sleeping late if I felt like it. Instead, I’m getting up earlier than I ever have.”

Words & Water

My Year’s Long Fight to Say “They”

By

“Making a living as a freelancer means meekly accepting the requested edits and moving on. This is how queerness and gender nonconformity wind up being controlled in elite literary circles. If you can’t use someone’s pronoun, they can’t be written about. Their life is quietly stricken from the record. Gatekeepers don’t outwardly shun gays and theys. We’re welcome to the banquet, but there are rules about how we can refer to ourselves, and hidden trip wires. We’re supposed to be grateful and comply with this erasure of queer life.”

The Nation

I Spent $2,000 on a Birthday Gift for My Boyfriend—His Face Fell When He Opened It

by

“I arranged for the print to arrive unframed, since Drew’s an artist who’s very particular about frames, on his birthday. I was giddy, pushing aside my heartache and focusing on the impending arrival of the new artwork I anticipated hanging proudly from his bedroom wall (we have separate bedrooms). I didn’t realize how much was at stake for me, emotionally, until the huge box arrived during an afternoon of hectic meetings for him.”

Newsweek

What I Talk About When I Talk About My Neurodivergent Husband

by

“One of Kevin’s greatest moments of understanding came in our couples counselor’s office when he vocalized his frustration with our son’s behavior. ;How can he forget what we remind him of every day? Why does he challenge everything we ask of him? I’m sure he’s been untruthful,’ he said, incredulous. ‘Do you not understand that I’ve been asking myself those questions about you for the past 20 years?’ I responded. I watched his reaction and saw the pain come over his face. No, he had never realized how, for me, this was round two of raising a neurodivergent person to adulthood.”

Open Secrets Magazine

Differential Force

by

“Set a bike loose, riderless, with a gentle slope beneath it to give it speed, and the bike will remain upright regardless of terrain. Rough road or no, the bike will correct itself when the world goes wobbly and all sense would suggest that it should fall to the ground. Scientists have been trying to explain the mystery of bicycle self-stability since the 19th century. The key to this enigma, they believe, is that when a riderless bicycle tips, it steers itself into the fall. A bike that cannot bend in the direction of its own disaster is unable, given the way the world spins, to set itself right again.”

Pacifica Review

Doctors dismissed my agonizing symptoms for years — my misunderstood condition affects 190M people

by

“It’s easy to focus on anxiety when a patient is an overachiever from an immigrant home. It’s easy to zoom in on the ovaries of a married woman in her reproductive age, even if she tells you she’s not looking to have kids. It’s easier to count follicles during ultrasounds than to count days of missed school, missed work and missed fun.”

New York Post

Hand Me Down Stories

by

“Great Grandma used a razor strap of Loddick’s, and in her fear and pain, her bewilderment before this son whom alcohol had stolen, she brought the strap down upon him until she had exhausted herself, then crumpled into a heap beside the bed, her breath ragged, the boy-man dead to her pleas, and the devil himself might have given in if he could have.”

TNWWY

Mothering, 21st Century Edition

by Alina Zollfrank

“Because I’d startle awake to rattling sounds and to mocking silence; Because I’d fly across the room – Are you breathing? – Because I’d hear them call out, ill; Because I’d dash and line up for night duty, dry tears, change sheets, bring fever meds and drinks and lollipops; Because I’d hold them, pop them into showers and whisper, there, there, it will get better, this cough will go away; Because I earned a medal for catching vomit – in bowls, bags, even my baggy bra;”

Reckon Review

🚨Announcements:

📢 Don’t Miss the 2026 Live Personal Storytelling Summit—where I will be on ’s Identity Panel

Tickets are NOW ON SALE for personal storytelling summit Open Secrets Live 2026! The event will take place Saturday, May 2, from 10 a.m.-6 p.m., with a ticketed after party from 6-8 p.m., at Symphony Space’s Leonard Nimoy Thalia Theatre, 250 W. 95th Street, New York (95th and Broadway).

Learn More/Sign Up

📢 From Narratively Academy, Writing the “What If”—Speculative Nonfiction Workshop starting April 7th.

In this 6-week workshop at Narratievly Academy, led by author Haley Swanson, writers will explore how to bend the boundaries of nonfiction and incorporate speculation into essay and memoir. $495.

Learn More/Sign Up

📢 From Orion Magazine: Environmental Writers’ Workshop June 14-19, 2026 at Omega Institute

Join a community of writers, improve your craft, and reimagine how you think about nature. Guided by award-winning instructors, the Orion Environmental Writers’ Workshop provides an intimate space to connect with writers, artists, and editors, spark creativity, and renew, illuminate, and deepen your relationship with place. This week-long workshop is cosponsored by the Omega Center for Sustainable Living.

You’ll be studying with: , , , Maria Pinto, Roger Reeves, , and .

Learn More/Sign Up

📢 From The Oxford American—2026 Home Double Issue: Call for Submissions

The Oxford American is now accepting pitches for our special Summer/Fall 2026 double issue dedicated to Home. It’s an idea as gloriously complicated as the South itself, and we’re interested in works across genres that tackle it from all angles. We think of home as our region, but also as our physical houses and apartments. Home can be our sanctuary, but also our cage. It can represent our connection to a community, and can be troubled by violence, displacement, and loss within that community. It’s deeply personal, but always political…

Learn More/Submit

📢 From Off Assignment, “Writing the Mundane“ with Heather Radke, with Ross Gay, Leslie Jamison, Elissa Gabbert, & Aimee Nezhukumatathil

Nonfiction so often gravitates toward the loudest, most dramatic moments in life: illness, trauma, transformation. But what about the small, glimmering ones? Trying to coax a child to sleep, buying candy at the corner store, the way light falls across a kitchen table. These daily, seemingly insignificant experiences can hold surprising aesthetic and political power. To write the mundane is to look again at what usually escapes notice, and to find meaning in the ordinary. Led by Heather Radke with class visits from Ross Gay, Leslie Jamison, Elissa Gabbert, & Aimee Nezhukumatathil, this course asks: How might paying attention to the most ordinary moments in life help us all write about the most extraordinary parts of living?

Tuesdays: April 7-28 // 7 - 9:30 p.m. EST $450 (Memoir Monday readers can use code MEMOIR20 for 20% off)

Learn More/Sign Up

📢 From and Elizabeth Voetsche: Beyond the Noise—A Yoga + Writing Retreat in the Hudson Valley August 27-30

Four days of yoga + guided writing in an intentionally intimate group. You’ll return to what’s true for you and leave with real momentum on the page and in your life. Peel away from the demands of day-to-day life and chart your own unique path forward in the Catskill Mountains. Here, you’ll have the opportunity to pause and reconnect with yourself and your creative purpose.

• Dates: Aug 27–30, 2026

• Where: Spruceton Inn, West Kill, NY

• Group size: Only 7 guests (intimate by design)

• Rooms: All private rooms

• Includes: Lodging + all meals + daily yoga + daily writing sessions

• Investment: $3,000 (includes $500 deposit to secure your spot)

  Learn More/Sign Up

📢 From Sneaker Wave Magazine: Keeping Your Story In Balance April 16th

Join sneaker wave magazine on Thursday, April 16, at 5 pm pacific time / 8 pm eastern time for a 90-minute live course on “Keeping Your Story in Balance.” All four of our editors will teach from examples in the magazine, their work, and other beloved texts demonstrating how to balance exposition, scene, and summary, and when to break for reflection. 

Participants will leave the class with actionable tools for how to revise and structure their own work for greater clarity and impact.

Buy Tickets Now!

Learn More/Get Tickets

📢 From : “Memoir Showers: Water the Garden of Your Story”

This April, join us for “Memoir Showers.” Write to our daily prompts each day in April to keep your writing momentum going.

You’ve got nothing to lose and your memoir to gain. It’s free! Join us!

Learn More/Sign Up

📢 From Writing Co-Lab: Peitho's Gift Writing Retreat in Crete, Greece

Join us for a week-long writing retreat at a lovely hotel on a quiet beach on the southern coast of Crete. Away from the crowds, Peitho’s Gift offers writers a peaceful place close to nature and steeped in history to connect with their creative spirit and partake in the joys of an intentional creative community. Your facilitators, Trish Fancher and Brian Gresko, will provide a structure designed to help you maximize your day’s productivity. The mornings are free for writing and enjoying the sea, while afternoons provide opportunities for socializing, and the day ends with writing salons and local delicacies.

Learn More/Apply

📢 Attention Publications and writers interested in having published essays considered for inclusion in our weekly curation:

By Thursday of each week, please send to memoirmonday@gmail.com:

1. The title of the essay and a link to it.

2. Your name and Substack profile link, if you have one, so I can tag you in the post.

3. A paragraph or a few lines from the piece that will most entice readers.

   Please be advised that we cannot accept all submissions, nor respond to the overwhelming number of emails received. Also, please note that we don’t accept author submissions from our partner publications.

   Subscribe now

   ---

Notebooks! Shirts! Mugs! Get Your Memoir Land Merch!

Memoir Land Merch

1. Memoir Monday, a weekly curation of the best personal essays from around the web brought to you by Narratively, The Rumpus,  Granta, Guernica, Oldster Magazine, Literary Hub, Orion Magazine, The Walrus, and Electric Literature. Below is this week’s curation. ⬇️

2. First Person Singular, featuring original personal essays.

3. The Lit Lab, featuring interviews—The Memoir Land Author Questionnaire—and essays on craft and publishing. There are also weekly writing prompts and other exercises from, ahem, a New York Times bestselling ghostwriter of memoirs (that’s me) exclusively for paid subscribers.

4. Goodbye to All That, where I continue to explore my fascination with the most wonderful and terrible city in the world, something I began doing with two NYC-centric anthologies, Goodbye to All That, and Never Can Say Goodbye.

***Thanks to everyone who recently became paid subscribers. 🙏 I could still use more support. If I’ve featured your work or that of your publication’s contributors…if you’re a publicists whose clients I’ve regularly featured…if you just want to help me keep doing ALL THIS and paying contributors, please consider becoming a paid subscriber…*

Subscribe now

Click here to get more out of this post by reading it online rather than in your inbox.

Essays from Partner Publications…

I Found Out the Truth of the “Most Haunted House in Canada”

by Ann McDougall

“Ghosts have been with us for at least 3,500 years. And in all that time, human interest in them has never waned. A few months after I began working at Todmorden Mills, a newly hired manager called me in for a meeting so we could get to know one another. We chatted about our backgrounds, our skills and interest in museums, and of course, ghosts. I told her about my very vague feeling of being watched in the grey house and about the stories others had told me. She nodded seriously. “So . . . have you heard about Mackenzie House?””

The Walrus

Big Sis

by

“Having never been “a boy’s boy” who liked being out in the streets playing stickball or skelley, or throwing soda bottles at water rats on Riverside Drive like my brother, I always preferred the company of girls (and later women). They never teased me for being chubby, would rather talk than fight, and weren’t trying to watch baseball, Westerns, or war movies on television.”

Oldster

Instructions for Repairing a Robot Black Boy

by Martheaus Perkins

“Do you think they cried? All the disappeared Black men who share my round cheeks and songful eyes. Or do you think they swigged their lives down like Irish car bombs with stoney faces? According to my family’s women, they’d often leave in autumn when even the trees were indecisive about what direction to die in.”

Electric Literature

On Feeling Left Out of the Anthropic Settlement (Because They Ignored My Book)

By

“So…my work was in LibGen. But it’s not in the Works List. I can only conclude that Anthropic COULD HAVE downloaded my book but…somehow chose not to? Is this human discretion? Does this mean someone at Anthropic was clicking through different PDFs, looked with human eyes at my book’s cover and description and said, no, we won’t be needing a riveting and vivid account of the creation of the most important part of modern finance, and the fascinating, quixotic character who drove it. That doesn’t sound very contributive to the sum of human knowledge. …That’s so much worse.”

LitHub

Essays from around the web…

Whitney and Me (An Excerpt of Phases: A Memoir)

By Brandy

“Watching how Whitney wielded her instrument, how her voice reached into people’s chests and rearranged things inside them, flipped a switch deep within me. I knew with bone-deep certainty what I wanted — no, what I was born to do. I was born to sing like Whitney. I was born to make people feel the way she made me feel. ‘Mom,’ I whispered that night as she tucked me in, my heart still racing with revelation. ‘I’m gonna be just like Whitney Houston when I grow up.’”

The Cut/NYMag

Life isn’t about what we lose. It’s about what we keep

by

“The first time I held the black-and-white photograph of my mother feeding my father a piece of their wedding cake in 1949, I was hooked. Right then I knew I was destined to be a keeper — a collector of artifacts and stories. I should clarify that I’m not a hoarder. But I do have boxes and boxes of photos, old wedding invitations, college term papers, playbills, and children’s drawings. I have dozens of telegrams, postcards and birthday cards from family members long gone. I have stacks of handwritten letters from high school and college friends; page after page of long updates about nothing.”

WBUR/Cognoscenti

Soy Yo — Soy Ustedes

by

“I am the Pesah Seder during which my mother and aunt invite the hungry, the stranger, in Ladino. Todo el ke tiene ambre, venga i coma; todo el ke tiene nesesita, venga i koma del Pesah. I am the Kol Nidre prayer my hunted and haunted Spanish ancestors whispered – consumed by the guilt of conversion or the prospect of burning alive at the stake. I am The Star-Spangled Banner, for which my father placed his hand over his heart and sang out proudly. I am Guantanamera, the passionate version my mother sang at one of my parents’ parties”

Taking a Stab

Burn This

by

“My arm has a topography all its own, a map of suffering rendered in flesh. A mottled and discolored amoeba-shaped scar along my bicep, and its companion down the length of my forearm, are souvenirs of a morning that started like any other. I was dressed for breakfast in the blue plaid bell-sleeved shirt, soft like a baby’s bunting. I leaned in to smell fresh ground beans in the cone of the Melitta pot on the gas range. My shirt grazed the gas burner.”

Dorothy Parker's Ashes

My Adoptive Father Abandoned His Other Children. Understanding Why Changed Everything for Me

by

“Growing up in a foster home and being adopted already made me feel like an outsider, and I wanted to feel a sense of normalcy, so I preferred to imagine my father just starting his life with us—even though I knew about his other kids. He’d been married once before, and he had two grown children: a son who lived back East, and a daughter, who also lived in California. I would soon discover that my father had even more lives and habits that belonged to his life before me.”

The Queer Love Project

The Perfect Temperature of Coffee

By

“My husband is grading in the other room; I’m reading on the sofa. My own grades have just been submitted. In this free moment, I have no interest in turning on the news to be bombarded with the fear and turmoil it will bring into my space. I miss informational news; I miss the feeling that you’ve acquired something anew about the world. Instead, I listen to my husband typing, and later I hear him laugh. The sound is short and brisk, but true. It is the joyful sound of a professor whose student has learned a lesson well.”

Moonpark Review

When Our Words Become a Commodity

by

“Would our words become a commodity, publicly traded, like a stock? Would they yield merchandise like T-shirt sayings, coffee mugs, bumper stickers?…Who do our written words belong to? Once published they become a product—vendible, material, and for a lucky few, evergreen. I’m of the “No Expiration on Dreams” philosophy. I’ve picked out the artwork for Paper Bags greeting cards, sticky notes, and guest towels. They’re embellished with: Thank you for loving me.”

Brevity

Please Don’t Tell Me How to Feel About My Breast Cancer

by

“What I need, what I want, is my body back. A body that betrayed me after I consciously nourished it, moved it, and self-cared the hell out of it. A body that has been sliced open, divvied up, and rearranged like cuts of cattle. A body that was forced to age prematurely and shoved into early medical menopause because the cancer fed off my estrogen and progesterone—the same hormones that miraculously made my child. When the chemicals that create life try to kill you, reconciling irony becomes a new maddening breast cancer symptom.”

Open Secrets Magazine

Why Are the Happy Times Sad?

by

“But when my mind goes back to that drive in 1996, to my father and me listening to Memphis lose to Drexel on the radio, my heart aches in a way I never could have understood when I was young. It is akin to heartbreak but also something worse, because when a woman broke my heart, I healed and found another. When your father leaves, you don’t get another one.”

Substack

I was ghosted at 54. Here’s why I choose to think of it as empowering

by Kelly O'Connor

“I’ll never know what happened to him, but I’ve decided my ghost story is a comedy, which feels empowering. I tell it with humor, and people always respond with laughter and empathy. No matter how old we get, one of the best parts of dating is telling friends your stories. I have an amazing group of women from home, whom I consider “million-dollar therapy”. We support each other, deal with life’s absurdities together and laugh about how we are now the same age as The Golden Girls, but with better hair. Looking back after almost a year, I don’t regret what happened. I took a risk trying to connect with someone I cared about, and it didn’t work out. But in the end, I tried to be kind – and there’s power in that, not shame.”

The Guardian

🚨Announcements:

📢 Don’t Miss the 2026 Live Personal Storytelling Summit—where I will be on ’s Identity Panel

Tickets are NOW ON SALE for personal storytelling summit Open Secrets Live 2026! The event will take place Saturday, May 2, from 10 a.m.-6 p.m., with a ticketed after party from 6-8 p.m., at Symphony Space’s Leonard Nimoy Thalia Theatre, 250 W. 95th Street, New York (95th and Broadway).

Learn More/Sign Up

📢 From Orion Magazine: Environmental Writers’ Workshop June 14-19, 2026 at Omega Institute

Join a community of writers, improve your craft, and reimagine how you think about nature. Guided by award-winning instructors, the Orion Environmental Writers’ Workshop provides an intimate space to connect with writers, artists, and editors, spark creativity, and renew, illuminate, and deepen your relationship with place. This week-long workshop is cosponsored by the Omega Center for Sustainable Living.

You’ll be studying with: , , , Maria Pinto, Roger Reeves, , and .

Learn More/Sign Up

📢 From The Oxford American—2026 Home Double Issue: Call for Submissions

The Oxford American is now accepting pitches for our special Summer/Fall 2026 double issue dedicated to Home. It’s an idea as gloriously complicated as the South itself, and we’re interested in works across genres that tackle it from all angles. We think of home as our region, but also as our physical houses and apartments. Home can be our sanctuary, but also our cage. It can represent our connection to a community, and can be troubled by violence, displacement, and loss within that community. It’s deeply personal, but always political…

Learn More/Submit

📢 From : A Book Proposal Generator with

“In order to demystify this seemingly overwhelming task, I’m thrilled to offer the Book Proposal Generator. Beginning with an overview of the anatomy of the book proposal by looking at several different examples, this generator will be broken up into eight weekly sessions. Each week, we will be discussing and going over one element of the book proposal in detail…By the final session, each student will have a complete book proposal, and will be ready to take the next step on the path to publication.”

8 Sessions: Saturdays, April 4-May 23 12:00-2:00pm ET $500

Learn More/Sign Up

📢 From and Elizabeth Voetsche: Beyond the Noise—A Yoga + Writing Retreat in the Hudson Valley August 27-30

Four days of yoga + guided writing in an intentionally intimate group. You’ll return to what’s true for you and leave with real momentum on the page and in your life. Peel away from the demands of day-to-day life and chart your own unique path forward in the Catskill Mountains. Here, you’ll have the opportunity to pause and reconnect with yourself and your creative purpose.

• Dates: Aug 27–30, 2026

• Where: Spruceton Inn, West Kill, NY

• Group size: Only 7 guests (intimate by design)

• Rooms: All private rooms

• Includes: Lodging + all meals + daily yoga + daily writing sessions

• Investment: $3,000 (includes $500 deposit to secure your spot)

  Learn More/Sign Up

📢 From Sneaker Wave Magazine: Keeping Your Story In Balance April 16th

Join sneaker wave magazine on Thursday, April 16, at 5 pm pacific time / 8 pm eastern time for a 90-minute live course on “Keeping Your Story in Balance.” All four of our editors will teach from examples in the magazine, their work, and other beloved texts demonstrating how to balance exposition, scene, and summary, and when to break for reflection. 

Participants will leave the class with actionable tools for how to revise and structure their own work for greater clarity and impact.

Buy Tickets Now!

Learn More/Get Tickets

📢 The Motherlode Retreat, April 26-30, Boyds Mill, Pennsylvania

Have you or someone you know found it challenging to write about your relationship with your mother? KindWrite Studio co-founder and award-winning writer and instructor Diana Friedman hosts The Motherlode Retreat, where we explore those messy and challenging relationships with our mothers and how to master writing about them.

At the Motherlode, we tackle this subject from various angles by exploring topics such as:

• The Mother Wound. What is it, how does it manifest for us each, and how do we write about it?

• How do unbalanced narratives from our mothers haunt us, and how do we move past them in our writing?

• How can we bring our mothers to life on the page when we remain emotionally connected and activated by them?

• How can we transform our mother-offspring experiences into powerful narratives?

Held at the Highlights Foundation, run by Boyd’s Mill, the retreat is located in a bucolic setting which offers fresh, healthy food, en suite private rooms, and plenty of trails and walks outdoors. You’ll receive professional writing instruction, build camaraderie with other writers, tuck into curated meals, and have sustained time to focus on your work.

The Motherlode Retreat is open to writers at all levels and working in all genres: memoir, fiction, poetry, plays, screenplays, as well as anyone seeking to use writing to explore their matrilineal relationship.

Learn More/Sign Up

📢 From Off Assignment: “Writing Queerness”

As queer writers, we are often writing against normative narratives…So, what do we want to write towards? What are the constricting stories and expectations that we can release to forge our own queer literary paths? How do we write in alignment with our own power, experience, and desire? How do we resource the queer imagination to create our stories? In this course — led by Joss Lake and with visits from guest authors Benedict Nguyễn, Andrea Lawlor, Zefyr Lisowski, and Denne Michele Norris — we will identify tropes and flattening narratives that hold us back, and examine techniques and strategies towards empowerment on the page. We’ll explore how we can use our own lived experience in our fiction and non-fiction, getting at the texture of our own queer communities and relationships. We’ll look at forces that work on the queer imagination, including elements of myth, horror, and fantasy, and how to weave them into literary fiction. And we’ll dive into bringing queer relationships onto the page in their messiness and eros. The course is an invitation to step into your authenticity as a queer writer.

Dates: Mondays: Mondays: April 6-27 // 7 - 9:30 p.m. EST

Price: $420 (Memoir Monday readers can use code MEMOIR20 for 20% off)

Learn More/Sign Up

📢 From Writing Co-Lab: Peitho's Gift Writing Retreat in Crete, Greece

Join us for a week-long writing retreat at a lovely hotel on a quiet beach on the southern coast of Crete. Away from the crowds, Peitho’s Gift offers writers a peaceful place close to nature and steeped in history to connect with their creative spirit and partake in the joys of an intentional creative community. Your facilitators, Trish Fancher and Brian Gresko, will provide a structure designed to help you maximize your day’s productivity. The mornings are free for writing and enjoying the sea, while afternoons provide opportunities for socializing, and the day ends with writing salons and local delicacies.

Learn More/Apply

📢 Attention Publications and writers interested in having published essays considered for inclusion in our weekly curation:

By Thursday of each week, please send to memoirmonday@gmail.com:

1. The title of the essay and a link to it.

2. Your name and Substack profile link, if you have one, so I can tag you in the post.

3. A paragraph or a few lines from the piece that will most entice readers.

   Please be advised that we cannot accept all submissions, nor respond to the overwhelming number of emails received. Also, please note that we don’t accept author submissions from our partner publications.

   Subscribe now

   ---

Notebooks! Shirts! Mugs! Get Your Memoir Land Merch!

Memoir Land Merch

1. Memoir Monday, a weekly curation of the best personal essays from around the web brought to you by Narratively, The Rumpus,  Granta, Guernica, Oldster Magazine, Literary Hub, Orion Magazine, The Walrus, and Electric Literature. Below is this week’s curation. ⬇️

2. First Person Singular, featuring original personal essays.

3. The Lit Lab, featuring interviews—The Memoir Land Author Questionnaire—and essays on craft and publishing. There are also weekly writing prompts and other exercises from, ahem, a New York Times bestselling ghostwriter of memoirs (that’s me) exclusively for paid subscribers.

4. Goodbye to All That, where I continue to explore my fascination with the most wonderful and terrible city in the world, something I began doing with two NYC-centric anthologies, Goodbye to All That, and Never Can Say Goodbye.

***Thanks to everyone who recently became paid subscribers. 🙏 I could still use more support. If I’ve featured your work or that of your publication’s contributors…if you’re a publicists whose clients I’ve regularly featured…if you just want to help me keep doing ALL THIS and paying contributors, please consider becoming a paid subscriber…*

Subscribe now

Click here to get more out of this post by reading it online rather than in your inbox.

Essays from Partner Publications…

Obliscence

by Veronica Vo

“My mother wanted me to be different from her, to be better. Evidence of this pleased her, such as my living alone, traveling alone, even an ability to read music. Similarities between us upset her, like poor eyesight, gray hair, a fear of driving.”

Electric Literature

Transference in the Afternoon

by Jesse Barron

“The more we talked, though, the more it seemed like Pollack was struggling as much as I was to explain his motives. He knew fragments of the answer. He knew how the rules of the APA applied to the timeline of events. He knew how the courts might view sexual contact in the office. He knew the right terms: enactment, regression, supervision, boundary, transference. But there were two parts of himself that never seemed to integrate—he had stopped seeing Kling in order to devote himself to his family, then filed a lawsuit which subjected his family to the glare of the tabloids. In one of our last conversations, I told Pollack how frustrating I found this. ‘I’m going to make a suggestion you may not like,’ I told him. ‘Which is that I don’t think you fully understand this part of the story either.’”

Granta

Reclaiming My Roti

by

“When my rotator cuff tore, I couldn’t roll a roti. That loss—perhaps small to some—broke something in me. It wasn’t just about food. It was about pride, identity, agency, and joy. When you’ve spent a lifetime using your arms without thought, the absence of that kind of mobility feels like an amputation of ease itself. The shock isn’t momentary—it renews with every small task.”

Oldster

When the Fountain Runs Dry: On Aging, Immortality and the Illusion of Everlasting Youth

By

“Five months after her terminal diagnosis, I am living in a hotel in Portland, Oregon for the month with my dad and my mother so she can partake in their Medical Aid in Dying program. I am answering an email from my publishing team about possibly changing the title of my novel. The Fountain might not be great for Google-abilty, I’m told, being such a common word and all. I am confirming a wheelchair delivery via text with our newly assigned hospice nurse. My dad is sorting dinner and my mother is with him in the adjoining room next door. She has one week to live until her chosen death day. I do the mental math and realize that by this time next year my book will be out, that she will have been gone for a whole year and both things feel impossible to me right now. Unreal.”

LitHub

Essays from around the web…

My Season of Ativan: Both of my parents were in hospice, on opposite coasts. Then I found out that I had breast cancer.

By Amanda Peet

“I admire people who can sit with uncertainty in matters of life and death. I’m not one of them. I suck at mindfulness. I run scenarios, even for minor matters that are not exactly my business and hard to predict—like whether some entitled little lax bro is going to break my daughter’s heart. I know that worrying is a waste of time and that it has no bearing on probability, but I can’t help it. A therapist once gave me wise counsel during a bout of insomnia: thinking is not your friend.”

The New Yorker

The World Is an Easier Place Without You In It

by Karen Shepard

“What you have seemed consistently interested in is focusing your attention on me, or Emmett and me, or Lucy and me. I can’t divide things that way; I think of my family as a whole. I want you to be part of the whole, not something that works to divide it. I’ve never wanted to exclude you from it. I am who I am because of you. I’ve always hoped that you’d find my family a warm and nurturing and desirable place to be. I’ve always hoped my happiness would bring you happiness.”

The Paris Review

How Sunita Williams became the star of the 2026 Kerala Literature Festival

by

“I listen closely for anything that would explain why, at a literature festival where novelists had flown in from careful geographies of solitude, an astronaut with no book to sign is the star attraction. Have we assembled in Kerala’s 38-degree heat to fall in love with space again, like children pleading for a new pack of glow-in-the-dark stickers? Perhaps we are hoping Williams can give us some hint as to why we are here in the first place, sealed inside this one lone blue spinning home.”

The Nod

The Shape Of A Girl

by Aastha

“I didn’t grow up thinking I was autistic. I grew up thinking I was difficult. That I asked too much, felt too much, needed too much. So I shrank. Twirled my hair into knots. Picked my fingers raw. Spoke only when I knew I’d be right. My brother’s autism was seen. Mine was absorbed. His came with therapies. Mine came with silence.”

Motley Bloom

Deconstructing Paradise

by

“Several years ago at dusk, I was coming home from a baseball game at Dodger Stadium, turning left at the well-traveled Venice intersection of Rose and Hampton. As I completed the turn, I heard a blood-curdling scream, and I looked to my left as I hit the brakes. A rusted-out Pontiac—’70s, I knew right away—was turning east on Rose. A girl was hanging onto the wide-open rear passenger door. 'My babies,' she screamed. 'My babies!'”

Los Angeles Times

The Toughest Age

By

“When your daughter turns nine you will look at every boy, every man with smoldering suspicion. You will reject sleepover requests from all but the most trusted of her friends. Build a firewall around her childish ways.”

SmokeLong Quarterly

Unraveling the Puzzle of the Two Paintings My Mother Gifted Me Upon Her Death

by

“So given that light, The Two Sisters and Owl Steals Baby are right in keeping. Here you are, darling; in my death I deliver another two cryptic crossword clues for you to figure out and decide that I loved you, which I know she did, and that I tried to protect you, which I know she didn’t. As if the entire thing was a Sunday morning puzzle, and not a life-ruining box of complex PTSD that I have had to unpack and made sense of. It’s hard not to feel that she didn’t care. It’s easy to surmise that her complex desire to stay in the dark trumped everything. I know that throughout almost all of my 54 years with her, she neither saw nor heard me, and these two paintings sum that up. But luckily for both of us, her legacy of message wasn’t the end.”

Open Secrets Magazine

Community Attic

by

“Now, back on the main floor, I savor the familiar smell of mothballs competing with perfume and pipe smoke, fragrances that cling lovingly to objects last used so many years ago. The building shelters personal and community mementoes and lessons. At the same time, it is an active construction zone and ongoing art installation. One could spend a lifetime here and never know all the stories it holds.”

Academy of the Heart & Mind

I Know You're Going to Look at Me That Way: On Ani DiFranco's "You Had Time"

by

“‘You Had Time’ does something essential for a sad song: it’s impossible to hear it without surfacing your own heartbreak. Writing about it, I’ve found myself putting words to why two people I once loved very much decided not to love me anymore. The stumbling keyboard at the beginning provides, as advertised, time to consider the pain of an off-key relationship. And you can do a lot of thinking in two and a half minutes.”

March XNess

🚨Announcements:

📢 Don’t Miss the 2026 Live Personal Storytelling Summit—where I will be on ’s Identity Panel

Tickets are NOW ON SALE for personal storytelling summit Open Secrets Live 2026! The event will take place Saturday, May 2, from 10 a.m.-6 p.m., with a ticketed after party from 6-8 p.m., at Symphony Space’s Leonard Nimoy Thalia Theatre, 250 W. 95th Street, New York (95th and Broadway).

Learn More/Sign Up

📢 From , Launching a Book Without a Big PR Budget: March 28

Writing a book—that’s the fun part. Meanwhile, the word “marketing” sends a shiver down the spine of many a creative writer. But it doesn’t have to. This three-hour seminar, led by novelist Namrata Poddar, will guide you through the many pathways to launch a book, especially for early career writers who have neither a large platform nor the access to a big budget to pay for promotion services.

Learn More/Sign Up

📢 From The Oxford American—2026 Home Double Issue: Call for Submissions

The Oxford American is now accepting pitches for our special Summer/Fall 2026 double issue dedicated to Home. It’s an idea as gloriously complicated as the South itself, and we’re interested in works across genres that tackle it from all angles. We think of home as our region, but also as our physical houses and apartments. Home can be our sanctuary, but also our cage. It can represent our connection to a community, and can be troubled by violence, displacement, and loss within that community. It’s deeply personal, but always political…

Learn More/Submit

📢 From : A Book Proposal Generator with

“In order to demystify this seemingly overwhelming task, I’m thrilled to offer the Book Proposal Generator. Beginning with an overview of the anatomy of the book proposal by looking at several different examples, this generator will be broken up into eight weekly sessions. Each week, we will be discussing and going over one element of the book proposal in detail…By the final session, each student will have a complete book proposal, and will be ready to take the next step on the path to publication.”

8 Sessions: Saturdays, April 4-May 23 12:00-2:00pm ET $500

Learn More/Sign Up

📢 From at Kripalu: Permission—The new memoirist and the courage to create

Join award-winning author, Elissa Altman, as she teaches you how to marry writing to contemplation and create narrative art from your experience. You will:

• Explore the creation of engaging personal storytelling and memoir.

• Focus on overcoming ancient shame narratives and make meaning out of chaos.

• See the truth and healing potential in your words.

Learn to move beyond the constraints of fear to a place of profound awareness that the stories we carry are ours and make us who we are. Come with a willingness to unravel issues of truth and permission on the page, and an acknowledgement that the impulse to tell one’s story must be honored.

March 27–29, 2026 Starting at $349

Learn More/Sign Up

📢 From Sneaker Wave Magazine: Keeping Your Story In Balance April 16th

Join sneaker wave magazine on Thursday, April 16, at 5 pm pacific time / 8 pm eastern time for a 90-minute live course on “Keeping Your Story in Balance.” All four of our editors will teach from examples in the magazine, their work, and other beloved texts demonstrating how to balance exposition, scene, and summary, and when to break for reflection. 

Participants will leave the class with actionable tools for how to revise and structure their own work for greater clarity and impact.

Buy Tickets Now!

Learn More/Get Tickets

📢 The Motherlode Retreat, April 26-30, Boyds Mill, Pennsylvania

Have you or someone you know found it challenging to write about your relationship with your mother? KindWrite Studio co-founder and award-winning writer and instructor Diana Friedman hosts The Motherlode Retreat, where we explore those messy and challenging relationships with our mothers and how to master writing about them.

At the Motherlode, we tackle this subject from various angles by exploring topics such as:

• The Mother Wound. What is it, how does it manifest for us each, and how do we write about it?

• How do unbalanced narratives from our mothers haunt us, and how do we move past them in our writing?

• How can we bring our mothers to life on the page when we remain emotionally connected and activated by them?

• How can we transform our mother-offspring experiences into powerful narratives?

Held at the Highlights Foundation, run by Boyd’s Mill, the retreat is located in a bucolic setting which offers fresh, healthy food, en suite private rooms, and plenty of trails and walks outdoors. You’ll receive professional writing instruction, build camaraderie with other writers, tuck into curated meals, and have sustained time to focus on your work.

The Motherlode Retreat is open to writers at all levels and working in all genres: memoir, fiction, poetry, plays, screenplays, as well as anyone seeking to use writing to explore their matrilineal relationship.

Learn More/Sign Up

📢 From Off Assignment: “Writing Queerness”

As queer writers, we are often writing against normative narratives…So, what do we want to write towards? What are the constricting stories and expectations that we can release to forge our own queer literary paths? How do we write in alignment with our own power, experience, and desire? How do we resource the queer imagination to create our stories? In this course — led by Joss Lake and with visits from guest authors Benedict Nguyễn, Andrea Lawlor, Zefyr Lisowski, and Denne Michele Norris — we will identify tropes and flattening narratives that hold us back, and examine techniques and strategies towards empowerment on the page. We’ll explore how we can use our own lived experience in our fiction and non-fiction, getting at the texture of our own queer communities and relationships. We’ll look at forces that work on the queer imagination, including elements of myth, horror, and fantasy, and how to weave them into literary fiction. And we’ll dive into bringing queer relationships onto the page in their messiness and eros. The course is an invitation to step into your authenticity as a queer writer.

Dates: Mondays: Mondays: April 6-27 // 7 - 9:30 p.m. EST

Price: $420 (Memoir Monday readers can use code MEMOIR20 for 20% off)

Learn More/Sign Up

📢 From Writing Co-Lab: Peitho's Gift Writing Retreat in Crete, Greece

Join us for a week-long writing retreat at a lovely hotel on a quiet beach on the southern coast of Crete. Away from the crowds, Peitho’s Gift offers writers a peaceful place close to nature and steeped in history to connect with their creative spirit and partake in the joys of an intentional creative community. Your facilitators, Trish Fancher and Brian Gresko, will provide a structure designed to help you maximize your day’s productivity. The mornings are free for writing and enjoying the sea, while afternoons provide opportunities for socializing, and the day ends with writing salons and local delicacies.

Learn More/Apply

📢 Attention Publications and writers interested in having published essays considered for inclusion in our weekly curation:

By Thursday of each week, please send to memoirmonday@gmail.com:

1. The title of the essay and a link to it.

2. Your name and Substack profile link, if you have one, so I can tag you in the post.

3. A paragraph or a few lines from the piece that will most entice readers.

   Please be advised that we cannot accept all submissions, nor respond to the overwhelming number of emails received. Also, please note that we don’t accept author submissions from our partner publications.

   Subscribe now

   ---

Notebooks! Shirts! Mugs! Get Your Memoir Land Merch!

Memoir Land Merch

1. Memoir Monday, a weekly curation of the best personal essays from around the web brought to you by Narratively, The Rumpus,  Granta, Guernica, Oldster Magazine, Literary Hub, Orion Magazine, The Walrus, and Electric Literature. Below is this week’s curation. ⬇️

2. First Person Singular, featuring original personal essays.

3. The Lit Lab, featuring interviews—The Memoir Land Author Questionnaire—and essays on craft and publishing. There are also weekly writing prompts and other exercises from, ahem, a New York Times bestselling ghostwriter of memoirs (that’s me) exclusively for paid subscribers.

4. Goodbye to All That, where I continue to explore my fascination with the most wonderful and terrible city in the world, something I began doing with two NYC-centric anthologies, Goodbye to All That, and Never Can Say Goodbye.

***Thanks to everyone who recently became paid subscribers. 🙏 I could still use more support. If I’ve featured your work or that of your publication’s contributors…if you’re a publicists whose clients I’ve regularly featured…if you just want to help me keep doing ALL THIS and paying contributors, please consider becoming a paid subscriber…*

Subscribe now

Click here to get more out of this post by reading it online rather than in your inbox.

Essays from Partner Publications…

Year of the Rat

by

“I was undercover in the British far right for more than a year, pretending to be a racist named Chris while feeding information back to my colleagues at HOPE not hate, an anti-fascist organisation. I put my normal life as a journalist on hold to spend time among racists…For a year, I was constantly frightened. It felt like there was an exclamation mark stamped onto my brain. Exposure was my biggest worry…”

Granta

I Wrote a Popular Book about Going Sober. Then I Relapsed.

by

“When I began to relapse—slowly, then instantly—I had a big conundrum. Most addicts, unlike me, haven’t told the entire world of their sobriety and then published a book about it. Still, this doesn’t mean my situation wasn’t relatable—I later realized that I chose that as my unique excuse only because it was the easiest explanation. And I did genuinely feel Shame about first going public about my recovery and then relapsing . . . repeatedly.”

The Walrus

The Good Old Days?

By

“We imagine we live in an age of monumental change, and we do. But haven’t we always? Just now, the hot topic is artificial intelligence, ‘A.I.’ How far that seems from my grade school days, when Miss Knudsen would hover over me, inspecting and clucking her tongue at my slow progress with the Palmer method of handwriting. Yet has our rush into the era of cybernetics been any more dramatic than the one from my grandmother’s automobile ride, to Neil Armstrong’s moon-walk toward the end of her life?”

Oldster

Tales From Ground Zero of Europe’s Heroin Epidemic

by Jonathan Tepper

“All the men on the farm were young. I had met old alcoholics, but never old heroin addicts. Some died quickly overdosing; others died slowly from things like hepatitis C. Yonkis who mixed alcohol with heroin were more likely to throw up, sometimes choking on their vomit in their sleep. I had seen others overdosed in the ditches by the Gypsy camp, and I told myself that they were frozen in a deep dream.”

LItHub

Essays from around the web…

Eating With My Daughter and My Zepbound

By

“I took my first shot, and the results were instant. The food-anxiety issues I’ve dealt with for most of my life just seemed to vanish within a few days. Suddenly, this fear I’ve always had — that I need to eat unless I wanted some disaster to befall me or that there’s a possibility it might be a long time before another meal presented itself — vanished. I can’t even begin to explain how liberating that has been because, even five months later, I’m still processing it.”

The Cut/NYMag

Ten Years After Being Buried Alive, I Address My Sister-Wife Through Our Mother's Bodies

by Lydia Abedeen

“You started your menses at eight years old. I remember how you were unable to look me in the eye when you told me. You refused to speak about it, even though we shared most things, including our husband.”

Split Lip Magazine

Larry called me to complain about one of my stories. Then we became friends.

by Deborah Becker

“Larry was not perfect. He could be obstinate and gruff, sometimes downright difficult. One of his last voicemails to me was a message he wanted me to pass along to WBUR news managers about what he felt our coverage of the Middle East was lacking. But he could also be sweet. ‘I’m grateful for our friendship, you know.’ he said softly in one of our last phone conversations. ‘You’ve been kind to me, and I appreciate that.’”

WBUR/Cognoscenti

Turning 50 Was a Bitch, But Now I’m a Lot Less of One

by

“All my life, I’ve been an optimist. Looking on the bright side might as well be my brand. “There’s no such word as can’t!” I’m fond of chirping at my daughters. Whenever I hear someone use the term “toxic positivity,” I worry that they’re talking about me. Except I don’t really worry. I’m not a worrier. “Worrying is like praying for things you don’t want,” I always say, as if I’m some sort of unflappable sage. But 2025, the year that I, along with Gen X icons “Saturday Night Live” and Drew Barrymore, turned 50, managed to kick that BS right out of me.”

Jenny Magazine

Why I’ll Never Leave a Bag Unattended Again

by

“After I turned the car off, I raced to the front desk to report what happened and to see if anyone had turned my luggage in. While they called housekeeping, I glanced toward the street where the snow was accumulating. I didn’t have the money to get stuck here and stay another night. I was daunted by the sum already on my credit card. I wouldn’t be able to pay off what was on there unless I figured out how to get more clients. This prospect felt unlikely given the competition results.”

Open Secrets Magazine

I Never Stopped Wanting a Mother

By

“I had flown across the country expecting to be made whole and instead met a woman who could not, or would not, let me in. I wanted her to rescue me from the ache I carried, and she couldn’t.”

Dame Magazine

Prepper husband, Optimist Wife: On NICU nights and everyday miracles.

by

“We felt unlucky with Fiona’s diagnosis. But there are so many one-in-five-thousand conditions: earthquakes, illnesses, storms, accidents. The unlikely eventually add up to the inevitable — a reality that washes me in grief some days. I try to remind myself that improbable gifts find us, too. A sweet conversation with a stranger. A poem or a song that flashes into recognition when we need it most. A first kiss that lingers. It was unlikely that I’d meet Jacob when I did, and then get pregnant with depleted hormones and one functioning fallopian tube. But here I am, crying a mother’s tears with every tragedy that crosses the headlines.”

Prism

Just Looking

by

“When I'd just started a five-mile run on country dirt roads, a rangy young man bumped out of the driver's seat of a parked pick-up truck. Clean-cut, earnest, he held a cell phone face up as if it were a disappointing report card. I assumed he was lost, needing directions. In the rural hills where I live, postal addresses don't match the
boundaries of towns, and visitors can get confused. ‘You know the lot on Old Main Road that has a chain across the drive and a No Trespassing sign?’ he asked. I thought and nodded. He extended his phone. ‘Is this you?’”

Hollow and Sky

Between the Lines of Mariah Carey's "Without You"

by

“Before Mariah Carey sings ‘Without You’ at Proctor’s Theater in the summer of 1993, she tells the audience of young people at her feet that the song always made her cry when she was a little girl. She says it in a soft, less assured voice than we’ve since come to know. As I watch the performance on YouTube now, all I can think about is how in the year that she said this, I was a little girl. And that year, more than anything, I wanted no one to see me cry.”

March XNess

Dear Jennifer Coolidge

by

“I have a complicated relationship to the phrase guilty pleasure, Jennifer Coolidge. Or maybe it’s not so complicated at all: I hate it. Guilty pleasure implies hierarchy, denotes shame, grants permission to allow the opinions of others to shape personal feelings around one’s own viewing preferences. I would like to propose that we release shame from the experience of consuming art that truly moves us. Why waste energy on feeling guilty about loving a film that brings you joy? What if—just as an experiment—we let the things we love lead us forward, lead us through?”

Bright Wall Dark Room

The Quiet Grief of Being Left Behind

by Mike Dlott

“On December 29, I opened my phone and stared at the message thread with Ben. A birthday text should have been simple. I typed a line, deleted it, and typed it again. I told myself to keep it light. I promised myself not to ask for anything.”

Chicago Story Press

🚨Announcements:

📢 Don’t Miss the 2026 Live Personal Storytelling Summit—where I will be on ’s Identity Panel

Tickets are NOW ON SALE for personal storytelling summit Open Secrets Live 2026! The event will take place Saturday, May 2, from 10 a.m.-6 p.m., with a ticketed after party from 6-8 p.m., at Symphony Space’s Leonard Nimoy Thalia Theatre, 250 W. 95th Street, New York (95th and Broadway).

Learn More/Sign Up

📢 From The Oxford American—2026 Home Double Issue: Call for Submissions

The Oxford American is now accepting pitches for our special Summer/Fall 2026 double issue dedicated to Home. It’s an idea as gloriously complicated as the South itself, and we’re interested in works across genres that tackle it from all angles. We think of home as our region, but also as our physical houses and apartments. Home can be our sanctuary, but also our cage. It can represent our connection to a community, and can be troubled by violence, displacement, and loss within that community. It’s deeply personal, but always political…

Learn More/Submit

📢 From : A Book Proposal Generator with

“In order to demystify this seemingly overwhelming task, I’m thrilled to offer the Book Proposal Generator. Beginning with an overview of the anatomy of the book proposal by looking at several different examples, this generator will be broken up into eight weekly sessions. Each week, we will be discussing and going over one element of the book proposal in detail…By the final session, each student will have a complete book proposal, and will be ready to take the next step on the path to publication.”

8 Sessions: Saturdays, April 4-May 23 12:00-2:00pm ET $500

Learn More/Sign Up

📢 From at Kripalu: Permission—The new memoirist and the courage to create

Join award-winning author, Elissa Altman, as she teaches you how to marry writing to contemplation and create narrative art from your experience. You will:

• Explore the creation of engaging personal storytelling and memoir.

• Focus on overcoming ancient shame narratives and make meaning out of chaos.

• See the truth and healing potential in your words.

Learn to move beyond the constraints of fear to a place of profound awareness that the stories we carry are ours and make us who we are. Come with a willingness to unravel issues of truth and permission on the page, and an acknowledgement that the impulse to tell one’s story must be honored.

March 27–29, 2026 Starting at $349

Learn More/Sign Up

📢 The Motherlode Retreat, April 26-30, Boyds Mill, Pennsylvania

Have you or someone you know found it challenging to write about your relationship with your mother? KindWrite Studio co-founder and award-winning writer and instructor Diana Friedman hosts The Motherlode Retreat, where we explore those messy and challenging relationships with our mothers and how to master writing about them.

At the Motherlode, we tackle this subject from various angles by exploring topics such as:

• The Mother Wound. What is it, how does it manifest for us each, and how do we write about it?

• How do unbalanced narratives from our mothers haunt us, and how do we move past them in our writing?

• How can we bring our mothers to life on the page when we remain emotionally connected and activated by them?

• How can we transform our mother-offspring experiences into powerful narratives?

Held at the Highlights Foundation, run by Boyd’s Mill, the retreat is located in a bucolic setting which offers fresh, healthy food, en suite private rooms, and plenty of trails and walks outdoors. You’ll receive professional writing instruction, build camaraderie with other writers, tuck into curated meals, and have sustained time to focus on your work.

The Motherlode Retreat is open to writers at all levels and working in all genres: memoir, fiction, poetry, plays, screenplays, as well as anyone seeking to use writing to explore their matrilineal relationship.

Learn More/Sign Up

📢 From Prose Playground: EDITORS AND WRITERS with NYT Editor and Guests: A Dynamic Conversation on the Art of the Essay

Join in on four intimate 2-hour conversations and essay writing instruction with Peter Catapano, a veteran New York Times editor and his guests: Margaret Renkl, Darcey Steinke Tim Kreider, and JoAnna Novak.

*Participants will be automatically entered to win a FREE EDIT OF AN ESSAY by Peter Catapano. One writer, weekly, has a chance to win!

Thursdays: March 19th-April 9th $149

Learn More/Sign Up

📢 From Off Assignment: “Writing the Book Proposal”

A book proposal must do the seemingly impossible: Pitch a project that doesn’t fully exist, while anchoring it in practical details like structure, audience, and timeline. It must function as sales document, project plan, and creative vision—all at once. How to craft such a thing?

This five-week Masters’ Series course, led by essayist and journalist Raksha Vasudevan and featuring guest authors Elisa Gabbert, Anni Liu, Noelle Falcis-Math, and Lauren Markham, will unpack why proposals matter, how publishers evaluate them, and how this strange hybrid document can actually support the creative process rather than stifle it. The course includes close readings, structured assignments, and sample proposals that led to book deals.

By the end, students will have a working draft or detailed outline of their proposal (25–35 pages, not including sample chapters), and a deeper sense of how to shape it into something that excites agents, editors, and themselves. Open to writers at any stage, this course is designed to transform the proposal from a daunting publishing requirement into a generative, guiding force for the book to come. Scholarships are available, and asynchronous participation is welcome.

Dates: Mondays July 14 - August 11, 7-9 p.m. EST.

Price: $400 (Memoir Monday readers can use code MEMOIR20 for 20% off)

Learn More/Sign Up

📢 From Writing Co-Lab: Peitho's Gift Writing Retreat in Crete, Greece

Join us for a week-long writing retreat at a lovely hotel on a quiet beach on the southern coast of Crete. Away from the crowds, Peitho’s Gift offers writers a peaceful place close to nature and steeped in history to connect with their creative spirit and partake in the joys of an intentional creative community. Your facilitators, Trish Fancher and Brian Gresko, will provide a structure designed to help you maximize your day’s productivity. The mornings are free for writing and enjoying the sea, while afternoons provide opportunities for socializing, and the day ends with writing salons and local delicacies.

Learn More/Apply

📢 wants your workshop proposals!

Literary Liberation is looking for workshop proposals that crack open new worlds, sessions that make space for the voices this world tries to silence, and courses that remind us writing is both weapon and salve. Sounds like a place you want to share your expertise? Pitch your workshop to us!

Deadline: February 28, 2026

Propose a Workshop

📢 From : The Art & Practice of the Essay Workshop

Guided by Best American Essays series editor and award-winning author Kim Dana Kupperman, open the doors to the art and practice of the essay through an immersive, generative process of reading to write and reading to re-vision.

Dates: Mar 24, 2026 – Apr 14, 2026 View session dates & times Levels: Beginner, Intermediate Workshop Fee: $450 Workshop Duration: 12 hours over 4 sessions (Tuesdays, 1-4 pm ET) Workshop Location: Online Class Size: 8

Learn More/Register

📢 Attention Publications and writers interested in having published essays considered for inclusion in our weekly curation:

By Thursday of each week, please send to memoirmonday@gmail.com:

1. The title of the essay and a link to it.

2. Your name and Substack profile link, if you have one, so I can tag you in the post.

3. A paragraph or a few lines from the piece that will most entice readers.

   Please be advised that we cannot accept all submissions, nor respond to the overwhelming number of emails received. Also, please note that we don’t accept author submissions from our partner publications.

   Subscribe now

   ---

Notebooks! Shirts! Mugs! Get Your Memoir Land Merch!

Memoir Land Merch

1. Memoir Monday, a weekly curation of the best personal essays from around the web brought to you by Narratively, The Rumpus,  Granta, Guernica, Oldster Magazine, Literary Hub, Orion Magazine, The Walrus, and Electric Literature. Below is this week’s curation. ⬇️

2. First Person Singular, featuring original personal essays.

3. The Lit Lab, featuring interviews—The Memoir Land Author Questionnaire—and essays on craft and publishing. There are also weekly writing prompts and other exercises from, ahem, a New York Times bestselling ghostwriter of memoirs (that’s me) exclusively for paid subscribers.

4. Goodbye to All That, where I continue to explore my fascination with the most wonderful and terrible city in the world, something I began doing with two NYC-centric anthologies, Goodbye to All That, and Never Can Say Goodbye.

***Thanks to everyone who recently became paid subscribers. 🙏 I could still use more support. If I’ve featured your work or that of your publication’s contributors…if you’re a publicists whose clients I’ve regularly featured…if you just want to help me keep doing ALL THIS and paying contributors, please consider becoming a paid subscriber…*

Subscribe now

Click here to get more out of this post by reading it online rather than in your inbox.

Essays from Partner Publications…

Masking My Autism Made Me Sick

by

“For almost four years, I had also battled a chronic illness that evaded medical diagnosis. Persistent pains, continual fatigue, nausea, and a variety of mysterious, hard-to-explain symptoms vied for dominance of my body. After countless tests in which my body was probed like an alien’s resulted in nothing, my doctors had one-by-one given up, dubbing me “overly sensitive,” as if I was merely imagining my symptoms. Or worse: as if it was my fault.”

Electric Literature

What Being a Professional Athlete Taught Me About Writing—and What It Didn’t

by James Hamilton Hibbard

“Gradually, I realized not only that the playing field was far from level, but that I had interests which went beyond cycling. The version of who I wanted to become wasn’t someone who was obsessed with their own performance and recovery, but rather I aspired in some small way to create something of meaning and beauty. After I stopped racing, I began graduate school to study German philosophy, but it was always writing and literature which had been my real love, and I left my PhD program and began to work in marketing while pursuing writing.”

LitHub

This Is Your Brain on Oldsterhood

By

“I read a scientific study that says Boomer brains aren’t just draining. Au contraire. They are practically brimming over with emotional intelligence, crystallized intelligence, conscientiousness, emotional stability, and agreeableness. It changed how I look at myself.”

Oldster

Double Take: Are people crying Bigfoot when it’s really a bear?

by

“I’m zealous about the fact that we don’t need Bigfoot populating the wilderness to find the natural world mysterious and marvelous. The bears often mistaken for cryptids, for example, already exist and capture our imagination for very good reasons.”

Orion

Essays from around the web…

A Day at the Museum

By

“The security guards at the Museum of Natural History had pinned my student to the marble floor. Four overweight museum guards against one skinny guy from Uzbekistan—it didn’t seem fair. He was too drunk to start a fight, but then again, he shouldn’t have tried to dance with the dinosaur.”

The Missouri Review

Salad Days

by Amy Losak

“Ma was an avid observer of small moments. She had the poet’s eye for finding magic in mundanity, such as a generous helping of diner salad and a cleansing cup of tea. A booth worn and dimpled from constant use. Her five senses were always vibrating. But I was always in a rush – eager to be ‘somewhere else.’ Why, I have no idea. She savored, I stinted. She strolled, I sprinted. We had so much to say to each other. I don’t remember what we talked about. I wonder now if I truly heard her then. But Ma always listened. She always paid attention.”

Certain Age Magazine

Inside Was The Present Where Young Boys Die

by Kathy Smith

“Fifty of us walked, fingertip to gloved fingertip, through the sodden snow, looking for anything out of place: a mound of shapes, a candy wrapper, the body of a thirteen-year-old boy. Our footprints left wavering lines behind us. We didn’t speak. And if we glanced at each other, it was quick and desperate. This was the fourth day of searching. It was March 8th, my daughter’s twelfth birthday, and the missing boy was a student at her middle school.”

Hippocampus Magazine

The Way it Worked

by

“The way it worked was that seven months later, I came home, and although we had emailed daily in addition to the expensive weekly phone calls, we did not know each other in many fundamental ways and had to meet each other all over again. The way it worked was that he was still twenty-three years older and still not divorced and still had joint custody of his teenage daughters, one of whom hated me on sight. The way it worked was that despite all of the above, I would have moved in with him, but he wasn’t ready to move in with me, and given the speed of everything, I couldn’t really argue.”

Short Reads

Life isn’t about what we lose. It’s about what we keep

by

“The things I keep tell stories that I won’t be able to tell when I’m gone, too. They reveal what was important to the people who came before us — a concert they loved, a job offer they were proud of, a milestone they celebrated, like buying a home. Holding on to these objects is my way of keeping everyone here just a little bit longer. I hope they don’t mind.”

WBUR/Cognoscenti

Blankie: A Tragedy

By

“Blankie had been dozing there in the sun, but ‘wash’ was a word so alarming that they cracked open one pink rosebud satin eye to take a look around. They had seen what “washing” had done to other linens. They left Pia’s room full of themselves and came back empty, reset, and wiped clean of their smells and their memories.”

Words & Water

Doctors Expected My Son To Die. In My Rush To Prove Them Wrong, I Made A Serious Error.

by

“We had private health insurance at the time. I didn’t open a single medical bill until after we were home for a couple months. The outrageous numbers seemed fake — like I would pay them with Monopoly money. I chose to believe that they hadn’t been submitted to insurance yet. Medical debt is the number one reason why people become bankrupt and lose their homes in this country. It’s crushing to come home with a sick baby, and have to wait on hold with the hospital to get on a payment plan. This is one more reason I felt like a failure.”

HuffPost Personal

Colors of Masculinity

by Jain

“What I was not prepared for was being molested by male children, aged between 7-8 to about 14-15 years, who targeted my said body parts as I walked to the temple, in the temple and towards the ground where Lathmar Holi was to be played in the evening. As they targeted me, I could not help but wonder what kind of early sexualisation and ideas of masculinity we are exposing and pushing these children towards. When we bay for the blood of a young person for rape, saying if you are old enough to rape, you are old enough to be hanged, do we ever pause to check where and how we went wrong as a society in raising the young?”

Substack

Free Range Kids, Grown Up

by Asher J. Mongomery

“The children of Old Seminole Heights were frequently picked up from school together, often spending evenings and late nights together as a neighborhood family of sorts. . . . While the houses of each family served as bases for food and security, the streets and spaces between the homes were where we felt fully and freely responsible for ourselves and our own safety.”

The Harvard Crimson

The Aspens Quaked Their Whispers in the Wind,

by Will Cole

“Later, I sneak Amber into the hotel room that my office booked for one. My ears tingle as we change, our backs turned in modesty, my body sensing her body. Neither of us wears the unsexy Mormon undergarments anymore; her secular pajamas expose her shoulders, most of her thighs. My jammies are a baggy T-shirt and gym shorts. I climb into the soft king-size bed, thinking nothing of two straight women under one comforter. That’s not weird, right? Raymond and I use separate blankets, but he runs hot, I run cold.”

Portland Review

🚨Announcements:

📢 Don’t Miss the 2026 Live Personal Storytelling Summit—where I will be on ’s Identity Panel

Tickets are NOW ON SALE for personal storytelling summit Open Secrets Live 2026! The event will take place Saturday, May 2, from 10 a.m.-6 p.m., with a ticketed after party from 6-8 p.m., at Symphony Space’s Leonard Nimoy Thalia Theatre, 250 W. 95th Street, New York (95th and Broadway).

Learn More/Sign Up

📢 From The Oxford American—2026 Home Double Issue: Call for Submissions

The Oxford American is now accepting pitches for our special Summer/Fall 2026 double issue dedicated to Home. It’s an idea as gloriously complicated as the South itself, and we’re interested in works across genres that tackle it from all angles. We think of home as our region, but also as our physical houses and apartments. Home can be our sanctuary, but also our cage. It can represent our connection to a community, and can be troubled by violence, displacement, and loss within that community. It’s deeply personal, but always political…

Learn More/Submit

📢 From : A Book Proposal Generator with

“In order to demystify this seemingly overwhelming task, I’m thrilled to offer the Book Proposal Generator. Beginning with an overview of the anatomy of the book proposal by looking at several different examples, this generator will be broken up into eight weekly sessions. Each week, we will be discussing and going over one element of the book proposal in detail…By the final session, each student will have a complete book proposal, and will be ready to take the next step on the path to publication.”

8 Sessions: Saturdays, April 4-May 23 12:00-2:00pm ET $500

Learn More/Sign Up

📢 The Motherlode Retreat, April 26-30, Boyds Mill, Pennsylvania

Have you or someone you know found it challenging to write about your relationship with your mother? KindWrite Studio co-founder and award-winning writer and instructor Diana Friedman hosts The Motherlode Retreat, where we explore those messy and challenging relationships with our mothers and how to master writing about them.

At the Motherlode, we tackle this subject from various angles by exploring topics such as:

• The Mother Wound. What is it, how does it manifest for us each, and how do we write about it?

• How do unbalanced narratives from our mothers haunt us, and how do we move past them in our writing?

• How can we bring our mothers to life on the page when we remain emotionally connected and activated by them?

• How can we transform our mother-offspring experiences into powerful narratives?

Held at the Highlights Foundation, run by Boyd’s Mill, the retreat is located in a bucolic setting which offers fresh, healthy food, en suite private rooms, and plenty of trails and walks outdoors. You’ll receive professional writing instruction, build camaraderie with other writers, tuck into curated meals, and have sustained time to focus on your work.

The Motherlode Retreat is open to writers at all levels and working in all genres: memoir, fiction, poetry, plays, screenplays, as well as anyone seeking to use writing to explore their matrilineal relationship.

Learn More/Sign Up

📢 A Personal Essay Workshop with I’m Mostly Here to Enjoy Myself author

In this workshop you’ll learn how to take personal experiences and use them to reflect on and/or argue a larger point. We’ll discuss a selection of personal essays to see what works and why. We’ll talk about the advantages of a personal essay over a reported piece and what lengths work best for different purposes. We’ll also discuss how to pitch an idea.

SATURDAY MARCH 21 1PM-4pm ET via Zoom $275

Learn More/Sign Up

📢 Small Helpings: A Food and Memoir Workshop with &

What do we remember when we eat the food we love? What do we create for ourselves — and for others — one meal at a time?

​In this intimate, generative workshop, bestselling memoirist Abigail Thomas and award-winning author Darien Gee invite you to write short, vivid micro memoirs drawn from meals, kitchens, and the people who gathered around them. We’ll explore how food carries memory, how family and friendship live inside ordinary moments, and how nourishment extends far beyond the plate. ​For writers at any level who want to turn food and memory into lasting work.

Saturday, March 28, 2026 | 1-5 pm ET $150

Learn More/Sign Up

📢 From Writing Co-Lab: Peitho's Gift Writing Retreat in Crete, Greece

Join us for a week-long writing retreat at a lovely hotel on a quiet beach on the southern coast of Crete. Away from the crowds, Peitho’s Gift offers writers a peaceful place close to nature and steeped in history to connect with their creative spirit and partake in the joys of an intentional creative community. Your facilitators, Trish Fancher and Brian Gresko, will provide a structure designed to help you maximize your day’s productivity. The mornings are free for writing and enjoying the sea, while afternoons provide opportunities for socializing, and the day ends with writing salons and local delicacies.

Learn More/Apply

📢 wants your workshop proposals!

Literary Liberation is looking for workshop proposals that crack open new worlds, sessions that make space for the voices this world tries to silence, and courses that remind us writing is both weapon and salve. Sounds like a place you want to share your expertise? Pitch your workshop to us!

Deadline: February 28, 2026

Propose a Workshop

📢 From : The Art & Practice of the Essay Workshop

Guided by Best American Essays series editor and award-winning author Kim Dana Kupperman, open the doors to the art and practice of the essay through an immersive, generative process of reading to write and reading to re-vision.

Dates: Mar 24, 2026 – Apr 14, 2026 View session dates & times Levels: Beginner, Intermediate Workshop Fee: $450 Workshop Duration: 12 hours over 4 sessions (Tuesdays, 1-4 pm ET) Workshop Location: Online Class Size: 8

Learn More/Register

📢 Attention Publications and writers interested in having published essays considered for inclusion in our weekly curation:

By Thursday of each week, please send to memoirmonday@gmail.com:

1. The title of the essay and a link to it.

2. Your name and Substack profile link, if you have one, so I can tag you in the post.

3. A paragraph or a few lines from the piece that will most entice readers.

   Please be advised that we cannot accept all submissions, nor respond to the overwhelming number of emails received. Also, please note that we don’t accept author submissions from our partner publications.

   Subscribe now

   ---

Notebooks! Shirts! Mugs! Get Your Memoir Land Merch!

Memoir Land Merch

1. Memoir Monday, a weekly curation of the best personal essays from around the web brought to you by Narratively, The Rumpus,  Granta, Guernica, Oldster Magazine, Literary Hub, Orion Magazine, The Walrus, and Electric Literature. Below is this week’s curation. ⬇️

2. First Person Singular, featuring original personal essays.

3. The Lit Lab, featuring interviews—The Memoir Land Author Questionnaire—and essays on craft and publishing. There are also weekly writing prompts and other exercises from, ahem, a New York Times bestselling ghostwriter of memoirs (that’s me) exclusively for paid subscribers.

4. Goodbye to All That, where I continue to explore my fascination with the most wonderful and terrible city in the world, something I began doing with two NYC-centric anthologies, Goodbye to All That, and Never Can Say Goodbye.

***Thanks to everyone who recently became paid subscribers. 🙏 I could still use more support. If I’ve featured your work or that of your publication’s contributors…if you’re a publicists whose clients I’ve regularly featured…if you just want to help me keep doing ALL THIS and paying contributors, please consider becoming a paid subscriber…*

Subscribe now

Click here to get more out of this post by reading it online rather than in your inbox.

Essays from Partner Publications…

How a Black-Market IVF Drug Deal Helped Heal My Marriage

by

“It was that trying that got us through the trying. First, there was the news that because of our respective medical histories and ages, we’d need to go straight to IVF. As the bills, the drugs, the injections, the hormonal and physical side effects, the many doctor appointments, and more bills, racked up, we became consumed by stress and uncertainty — more separately than together.”

Narratively

Wyoming (an excerpt of Good Woman)

by

“What I wanted was for him to fight. Physically. For me. I wanted him to observe my peril and respond, like a soldier. I craved a physical demonstration of my worth, his body the vessel and medium for the proof.”

Electric Literature

2016 vs. 2026: What a Difference a Date Makes

By

“I began filling out The Oldster Magazine Questionnaire the other day. I didn’t get far. ‘How old are you?’ was easy enough. I’m 96. But the next question stopped me cold: ‘Is there another age you associate with yourself in your mind?’ There actually is another age that I return to from time to time—an age that changes from year to year. I look back a decade. When I’m feeling low, these visits with my former self can put my head in a different, better place.”

Oldster

Issey Miyake

by Akshi Singh

“I jettisoned the association between Lacan and Issey Miyake. But psychoanalysis loves a good comeback. I have seen the faces of psychoanalysts light up when they say the German word nachträglichkeit, or its French translation, après-coup. I understand the appeal – these are elegant ways of appreciating how the sweeping searchlight of hindsight can attribute meaning to encounters that in the moment of their unfolding felt insignificant, or a mere expression of chance. And so, when I fell in love with a very stylish man and one day he wore the most extraordinary shirt, I paid attention.”

Granta

Essays from around the web…

How ‘Heated Rivalry’ Thawed the Chill Between My Father and Me

By

“When one of the characters finally said what he had been holding back — said it plainly, without irony or retreat — my father made a small sound. A breath, maybe. His hand tightened on the armrest as if he needed something solid. After the episode ended, the room felt altered. ‘I didn’t know,’ he said at last. ‘Didn’t know what?’ I asked. ‘What it was like,’ he said. ‘For you.’”

New York Times/Modern Love

Love Can Look Like Anything, Even Marriage

by

“I am not defending the institution of marriage against people who have found it oppressive in the past, or consider the idea of it stifling to their future. Insomuch as I feel defensive at all it’s on account of how unpleasant the people who are ardent about defending the ‘traditional’ marriage make it sound. The enemy of stability isn’t progress; it’s regression. I love my wife. And I’m thrilled she can have her own bank account and kept her last name. And I’m also happy to open the jars.”

Playboy

I Got You

by Ellen Skirvin

“Our home became a revolving door. I tried to be polite but never engaged with the foster kids any more than I had to. Every time I came home, I was worried I’d find a new boy there. As time went on, my mom became addicted to caring for people. She managed a book club at a nearby prison, clipped the toenails of a widower up the street, stocked the hospice clinic with mini doughnuts and fresh-cut roses. Dad went along with whatever she wanted. I resented them both for choosing good deeds over me and moved away as soon as I was old enough.”

The Sun

How I found my way to my faith as a ‘bad’ Muslim woman

by

“That was the day I was certain I wasn’t the problem – the day I decided to stop wearing the hijab. My relationship with my faith dwindled. However, one thing never changed for me – my attraction to the month of Ramadan. People like me are judged in my community – we are mocked for suddenly becoming religious once a year. I find music spiritual, I stopped observing hijab years ago, I am inconsistent with my prayers, I wouldn’t mind showing my legs at work but avoided clicking pictures in them, I dressed up differently when I went out with my husband but wore traditional attire in our social gatherings – did I really have the right to truly relish Ramadan?”

Substack

An Ex-Immigrant Who Can’t Stop Dreaming About Flying Back

by

“Days may pass without me thinking about America or missing my American life.
But America is too good at making itself known without anyone else’s help. Movies, TV, books, newspapers. It is impossible, I realize, to escape the messaging. Even social media is awash with American content, no matter the number of times I clear my data and tell Big Tech Not-To-Track.”

Adelaide Literary

how to get a reputation

By

“Drew’s left a rolled tube sock in the exterior door as promised, and I find Jack waiting for me. I don’t have a plan for what I’ll do, beyond knowing I won’t go all the way, not before mutually declaratory love at least, but I am open to facing my fear of the penis.”

Sneaker Wave

How A Mentor Kept My Book Alive

by

“My ‘I’m giving up’ call to Alysia was meant to be as much an apology for wasting her time with War Boys as it was a beaten down writer’s final scream into the void. I barely got the words ‘I think I’m giving up on War Boys’ out of my mouth when Alysia started doing one of the things she does very well: instills her students with a belief in themselves, a sense of confidence that was nearly depleted in me then.”

Brevity

If Even Crocodiles Can Shed Tears, Why Can't I?

by

“Exiting the cinema in Rouen—the French town where I lived in Normandy back in 2001 with my mother and sister—I sat in the back of the car, quietly weeping away long after the credits had rolled. The movie had been released in spring, and I resisted the hype for a long time. I now see the serendipity that it found me on that gloomy November evening.”

The Queer Love Project

Miscalculating the Gravity of My Situation

by

“Water has a specific gravity of 1.0. You calculate specific gravity by dividing the density of the substance by the density of water. Objects with a specific gravity higher than 1.0, like bone and muscle, will sink in water. On the other hand, objects with a specific gravity less than 1.0, like fat, will float. Maybe forever.”

This essay won first place in Tell Your Story's Spring 2023 contest and was nominated for a Pushcart Prize.

Medium/Tell Your Story

My Friend Chose Medical Aid In Dying And It Was A Good Death.

by

“My friend chose medical aid in dying. Her friends, children, and grandchildren got to have her for a year after her cancer diagnosis. It was a year to remember. She left us all with a strength in our grief because of the courage she carried until the end. We all miss her, but we also have peace with her death.”

HuffPost Personal

First Bites

by

“Every single time, I had to relearn how to take, and truly taste, first bites—but without the benefit of a baby’s innocent mind. No longer could I be 6 months old and blissfully unaware of calories and grams of sugar. The voices in my head yowled, “This food is good; that food is bad,” etching even deeper grooves into my disordered brain that I had to erase. I ate many meals and snacks during my hospital stays, which lasted from 30 days to six months. The first bites were always the most difficult. And the most glorious.”

Open Secrets

How Alysia Liu Reminds Me Why I Skate

by McLeod

“I also remember developing a practice of chewing food and spitting it out in order to not gain weight. On Sunday nights, during off-ice practice, I made sure, like all the other girls, to strip down to only my beige-toned tights and sports bra before stepping on the dreaded scale. Some girls would remove jewelry. When I read that one of Liu’s rules for her comeback was “No one's going to starve me or tell me what I can and can't eat,” I internally cheered.”

Touch of Allright

Finding Queer Joy

by Rachel Brook

“Suddenly, Queer Brewing is all over the place. It makes me wonder, can you bottle queer joy? Can it be captured, canned, or kegged, then tapped and poured whenever you need a fresh draught? I know what I’d put in: The posts my friends send me from Sapphic Sandwich, Autostraddle, them. Sometimes I’ve already seen them, but that is not the point. Gender-neutral hairdressing. Turning up to dates in identical outfits.
Shirts, but no sleeves; this is the era of the gay little vest.”

Bi Women Quarterly

🚨Announcements:

📢 Don’t Miss the 2026 Live Personal Storytelling Summit—where I will be on ’s Identity Panel

Tickets are NOW ON SALE for personal storytelling summit Open Secrets Live 2026! The event will take place Saturday, May 2, from 10 a.m.-6 p.m., with a ticketed after party from 6-8 p.m., at Symphony Space’s Leonard Nimoy Thalia Theatre, 250 W. 95th Street, New York (95th and Broadway).

Learn More/Sign Up

📢 From , Verifying Family Lore

Brad Scriber spent two decades fact-checking articles for National Geographic magazine. In this two-hour seminar, he’ll provide an overview of how you can—and can’t—effectively fact-check family stories.

Thursday March 12, 7pm ET $75

Learn More/Sign Up

📢 The Motherlode Retreat, April 26-30, Boyds Mill, Pennsylvania

Have you or someone you know found it challenging to write about your relationship with your mother? KindWrite Studio co-founder and award-winning writer and instructor Diana Friedman hosts The Motherlode Retreat, where we explore those messy and challenging relationships with our mothers and how to master writing about them.

At the Motherlode, we tackle this subject from various angles by exploring topics such as:

• The Mother Wound. What is it, how does it manifest for us each, and how do we write about it?

• How do unbalanced narratives from our mothers haunt us, and how do we move past them in our writing?

• How can we bring our mothers to life on the page when we remain emotionally connected and activated by them?

• How can we transform our mother-offspring experiences into powerful narratives?

Held at the Highlights Foundation, run by Boyd’s Mill, the retreat is located in a bucolic setting which offers fresh, healthy food, en suite private rooms, and plenty of trails and walks outdoors. You’ll receive professional writing instruction, build camaraderie with other writers, tuck into curated meals, and have sustained time to focus on your work.

The Motherlode Retreat is open to writers at all levels and working in all genres: memoir, fiction, poetry, plays, screenplays, as well as anyone seeking to use writing to explore their matrilineal relationship.

Learn More/Sign Up

📢 A Personal Essay Workshop with I’m Mostly Here to Enjoy Myself author

In this workshop you’ll learn how to take personal experiences and use them to reflect on and/or argue a larger point. We’ll discuss a selection of personal essays to see what works and why. We’ll talk about the advantages of a personal essay over a reported piece and what lengths work best for different purposes. We’ll also discuss how to pitch an idea.

SATURDAY MARCH 21 1PM-4pm ET via Zoom $275

Learn More/Sign Up

📢 Small Helpings: A Food and Memoir Workshop with &

What do we remember when we eat the food we love? What do we create for ourselves — and for others — one meal at a time?

​In this intimate, generative workshop, bestselling memoirist Abigail Thomas and award-winning author Darien Gee invite you to write short, vivid micro memoirs drawn from meals, kitchens, and the people who gathered around them. We’ll explore how food carries memory, how family and friendship live inside ordinary moments, and how nourishment extends far beyond the plate. ​For writers at any level who want to turn food and memory into lasting work.

Saturday, March 28, 2026 | 1-5 pm ET $150

Learn More/Sign Up

📢 From Writing Co-Lab: Peitho's Gift Writing Retreat in Crete, Greece

Join us for a week-long writing retreat at a lovely hotel on a quiet beach on the southern coast of Crete. Away from the crowds, Peitho’s Gift offers writers a peaceful place close to nature and steeped in history to connect with their creative spirit and partake in the joys of an intentional creative community. Your facilitators, Trish Fancher and Brian Gresko, will provide a structure designed to help you maximize your day’s productivity. The mornings are free for writing and enjoying the sea, while afternoons provide opportunities for socializing, and the day ends with writing salons and local delicacies.

Learn More/Apply

📢 wants your workshop proposals!

Literary Liberation is looking for workshop proposals that crack open new worlds, sessions that make space for the voices this world tries to silence, and courses that remind us writing is both weapon and salve. Sounds like a place you want to share your expertise? Pitch your workshop to us!

Deadline: February 28, 2026

Propose a Workshop

📢 From : The Art & Practice of the Essay Workshop

Guided by Best American Essays series editor and award-winning author Kim Dana Kupperman, open the doors to the art and practice of the essay through an immersive, generative process of reading to write and reading to re-vision.

Dates: Mar 24, 2026 – Apr 14, 2026 View session dates & times Levels: Beginner, Intermediate Workshop Fee: $450 Workshop Duration: 12 hours over 4 sessions (Tuesdays, 1-4 pm ET) Workshop Location: Online Class Size: 8

Learn More/Register

📢 Attention Publications and writers interested in having published essays considered for inclusion in our weekly curation:

By Thursday of each week, please send to memoirmonday@gmail.com:

1. The title of the essay and a link to it.

2. Your name and Substack profile link, if you have one, so I can tag you in the post.

3. A paragraph or a few lines from the piece that will most entice readers.

   Please be advised that we cannot accept all submissions, nor respond to the overwhelming number of emails received. Also, please note that we don’t accept author submissions from our partner publications.

   Subscribe now

   ---

Notebooks! Shirts! Mugs! Get Your Memoir Land Merch!

Memoir Land Merch

1. Memoir Monday, a weekly curation of the best personal essays from around the web brought to you by Narratively, The Rumpus,  Granta, Guernica, Oldster Magazine, Literary Hub, Orion Magazine, The Walrus, and Electric Literature. Below is this week’s curation. ⬇️

2. First Person Singular, featuring original personal essays.

3. The Lit Lab, featuring interviews—The Memoir Land Author Questionnaire—and essays on craft and publishing. There are also weekly writing prompts and other exercises from, ahem, a New York Times bestselling ghostwriter of memoirs (that’s me) exclusively for paid subscribers.

4. Goodbye to All That, where I continue to explore my fascination with the most wonderful and terrible city in the world, something I began doing with two NYC-centric anthologies, Goodbye to All That, and Never Can Say Goodbye.

***Thanks to everyone who recently became paid subscribers. 🙏 I could still use more support. If I’ve featured your work or that of your publication’s contributors…if you’re a publicists whose clients I’ve regularly featured…if you just want to help me keep doing ALL THIS and paying contributors, please consider becoming a paid subscriber…*

Subscribe now

Click here to get more out of this post by reading it online rather than in your inbox.

Essays from Partner Publications…

Self-Portrait as a Tangle of Weeds

by

“What does it mean to love plants—gardening, greenery, farming, parks, nature hikes, bouquets, pickling, tabletop hydroponics—when so much of what we do with plants is a pastiche of wild and untended nature? Everywhere I have lived, I’ve been surrounded by disturbance, amalgamations of the natural world in the form of planted, cultivated abundance.”

Electric Literature

Neighborly

by Bessen

“Shortly after moving in, I was out front doing yard work, listening to an audiobook and digging a hole for an agave pup. I looked up to find Leeanner standing over me and speaking. As I took out my earbud, I understood her last few words to be ‘go to church?’ I quickly sputtered, ‘Jewish.’ Then I paused my audiobook, stood up, and repeated, ‘I’m Jewish.’ I didn’t clarify that I was hiding my atheism under the Star of David, but she seemed glad I hadn’t shouted, ‘pagan!’”

The Rumpus

Flight of the Mothman: Reflections on survival and queer iconography

By

“It’s obvious why queer people become attached to cryptids as community symbols. Less obvious is how things begin to curdle when that memetic ecosystem plays into an insidious type of “it me” branding. In reconsidering my college tryst with Mothman, I came to see how much of the creature’s ability to speak to queer expression revolves around the buying of cheap product as a way to signal one’s beliefs and sense of identity.”

Orion Magazine

Yes, And…

by

“Maybe, I thought, there are improv people and non-improv people, and I
just fall into the latter group. Yet once I walked through the door
and up the flight of stairs, I arrived back in Never-Never land. A
place where we’ve given each other permission—a gift—to participate in
the absurdity of life without risk.”

Oldster

Essays from around the web…

Falling From Ivy League Grad to Prisoner Expanded My Social Circle

By P.G. Sittenfeld

“In an environment in which a lot is already being asked of us as parents—on top of our jobs, family obligations, social lives, exercise regimens, doctor visits, tax consultations, vet appointments, license renewals, and future planning, let alone family vacations and personal pursuits—I would love to have one less to-do to add to my list. One less email to feel bad for missing, one less thing to feel guilty about when I inevitably don’t adhere to the rules and invite only some of the class to our celebrations.”

New York Times/Opinion

To Be or Not to Be a Badass

by

“Never before in my life had I been called a badass. I had been called everything that is the antithesis of a badass ever since childhood, including shy, too sensitive, nice (but not in the nice way), sweet, quiet, not assertive enough—you get the idea. And then, in the eighth grade, my science teacher decided that my timid personality equaled future failure, even though I was good at science. Actually, I was good at all subjects. I was a straight-A student.” (h/t )

Herstry

Claudia from 'The Babysitter's Club': My Asian-American Role Model, Then, Now & 4-Eva

by

“I now know that I craved representation, wanting to see myself reflected in the world at large; but as a pre-teen, I wasn't able to fully articulate this, and why this fictitious character resonated so strongly. All I knew was that seeing this cool, artsy, and confident Asian-American girl in one of my favorite book series meant the absolute world to me.”

Jenny Magazine

Of Way Trails and Wolves

by Caitlin Scarano

“Jon and I were on the precipice of wilderness, semi-homesteading where the road was swallowed by the northern end of the Cascades, near the Canadian border. The one-room cabin we lived in was cobbled from salvaged materials, with a big oil-drum wood stove and an outdoor shower. It was rustic, quaint, and precarious.”

Craft Literary

My Weed Addiction

by

“I have a very clear memory of sitting my uncle down at our dining room table when I was probably seven years old. I’d learned the dangers of smoking at school and, with my DARE coloring book in hand, I told him why he should quit smoking. I crossed my tiny arms, furrowed my tiny brow, and said matter-of-factly, ‘Smoking could give you cancer—you could die.’ He took a deep breath, his cheeks reddened slightly, and he said quietly, ‘I know, Courtney. I know.’ And shortly after, he quit for good. Three and a half blessedly healthy decades followed until this summer he was diagnosed with lung cancer. I inhaled sharply when I got the text from my dad.”

The Cut/NYMag

He Was Not His Final Days

By

“So what was one of the first things I did when I got unstuck? I wrote a poem from the deepest part of my heart. I wrote it to hold onto the parts of my dad that mattered most—not just in memory, but in spirit. It also helped me start moving through the grief, which I’ve learned isn’t something you can put on a leash and train to walk neatly out of your life.”

Writing {Unfiltered}

A Well-Meaning Rule Is Sweeping My Kid’s School. It’s Ruining Parents’ Lives.

by

“In an environment in which a lot is already being asked of us as parents—on top of our jobs, family obligations, social lives, exercise regimens, doctor visits, tax consultations, vet appointments, license renewals, and future planning, let alone family vacations and personal pursuits—I would love to have one less to-do to add to my list. One less email to feel bad for missing, one less thing to feel guilty about when I inevitably don’t adhere to the rules and invite only some of the class to our celebrations.”

Slate

Wolf

by

“Her body in the air, the ocean floor below a thick pavement ready to catch her. The braces he paid for, their work undone in three breaths. Her flesh and teeth and tongue sprinkling like flakes of fish food all across the freeway. He is not there to catch her. Doesn’t say, perfect, just right. Provides no green meshy net to hold her tight. Below, the cars heave and sigh and honk. Their bodies sitting. Her body splayed.”

The Masters Review

Rabbi for a Day

by

“A meditation buddy connects me with the retired rabbi of New York’s largest Jewish LGBTQ congregation. It seems fitting, as Caryl’s brother-in-law was gay—a secret he kept from all of us. This rabbi is out of town and texts to see who’s around. Like in August, when all shrinks are away, during Christmas break the rabbis are out of town too. Where do they go? I decide I’ll be the rabbi, pro bono. I’ve attended my share of funerals, hoping this gives me expertise to devise a memorial. Yet, assuming my new role feels daunting and otherworldly.”

Dorothy Parker's Ashes

🚨Announcements:

📢 Don’t Miss the 2026 Live Personal Storytelling Summit—where I will be on ’s Identity Panel

Tickets are NOW ON SALE for personal storytelling summit Open Secrets Live 2026! The event will take place Saturday, May 2, from 10 a.m.-6 p.m., with a ticketed after party from 6-8 p.m., at Symphony Space’s Leonard Nimoy Thalia Theatre, 250 W. 95th Street, New York (95th and Broadway).

Learn More/Sign Up

📢 From , How to Write a Memoir with Magical Realism, with .

Starting tomorrow at Narratively Academy, Jasper "Jaz" Joyner, author of the Richard Wright Literary Award-winning work, Pansy: A Black American Memoir, will lead How to Write a Memoir with Magical Realism. In this six-week workshop, students will learn how to shape an effective (and true!) memoir using fantastical elements borrowed from this beloved genre.

Learn More/Sign Up

📢 The Motherlode Retreat, April 26-30, Boyds Mill, Pennsylvania

Have you or someone you know found it challenging to write about your relationship with your mother? KindWrite Studio co-founder and award-winning writer and instructor Diana Friedman hosts The Motherlode Retreat, where we explore those messy and challenging relationships with our mothers and how to master writing about them.

At the Motherlode, we tackle this subject from various angles by exploring topics such as:

• The Mother Wound. What is it, how does it manifest for us each, and how do we write about it?

• How do unbalanced narratives from our mothers haunt us, and how do we move past them in our writing?

• How can we bring our mothers to life on the page when we remain emotionally connected and activated by them?

• How can we transform our mother-offspring experiences into powerful narratives?

Held at the Highlights Foundation, run by Boyd’s Mill, the retreat is located in a bucolic setting which offers fresh, healthy food, en suite private rooms, and plenty of trails and walks outdoors. You’ll receive professional writing instruction, build camaraderie with other writers, tuck into curated meals, and have sustained time to focus on your work.

The Motherlode Retreat is open to writers at all levels and working in all genres: memoir, fiction, poetry, plays, screenplays, as well as anyone seeking to use writing to explore their matrilineal relationship.

Learn More/Sign Up

📢 All February, at ’s : 28 x 20: Daily Prompts for Writing Super-Short Personal Essays in 20 Minutes

“28 X 20 is an invitation to dive into the daily rhythm of crafting short pieces. 28 days. 28 prompts. 28 micro-stories. 20 minutes each. No time to overthink it. No toe-dipping. Grab momentum, sharpen your skills, blow out your range, and end the month with a richer, more confident practice. Y'all. February is the shortest month. You can do this.”

For paid subscribers to . (Save 25% on subscriptions now…)

Learn More/Sign Up/Save 25%

📢 Marcia Yudkin's weekly Substack newsletter, Introvert UpThink, seeks personal essays

Attention Introverts! Marcia Yudkin's weekly Substack newsletter, Introvert UpThink, seeks personal essays, 700 to 1500 words, on some aspect of what it's like to be an introvert or to deal with an introverted friend, family member, co-worker, neighbor, etc.

“In this new series of posts, I would like to feature your insights and experiences related to being an introvert or dealing with an introverted spouse, child, employee, boss, neighbor, etc. The more specific you are about the setting and the relationship dynamics involved, the better.

Please send your essay/article/post to innies@yudkin.com.

Target length is 700 to 1500 words. If I use your post, I will of course credit you with a byline and a brief bio.” First example here.

📢 From Writing Co-Lab: Peitho's Gift Writing Retreat in Crete, Greece

Join us for a week-long writing retreat at a lovely hotel on a quiet beach on the southern coast of Crete. Away from the crowds, Peitho’s Gift offers writers a peaceful place close to nature and steeped in history to connect with their creative spirit and partake in the joys of an intentional creative community. Your facilitators, Trish Fancher and Brian Gresko, will provide a structure designed to help you maximize your day’s productivity. The mornings are free for writing and enjoying the sea, while afternoons provide opportunities for socializing, and the day ends with writing salons and local delicacies.

Learn More/Apply

📢 wants your workshop proposals!

Literary Liberation is looking for workshop proposals that crack open new worlds, sessions that make space for the voices this world tries to silence, and courses that remind us writing is both weapon and salve. Sounds like a place you want to share your expertise? Pitch your workshop to us!

Deadline: February 28, 2026

Propose a Workshop

Freedom Ways essay submissions close March 1

Memoir Land and Literary Liberation’s ongoing essay collaboration will stop accepting submissions this year on March 1, 2026. We will publish four essays in 2026. Take time to read our submission guidelines prior to submitting. We only consider and accept submissions by writers of the Global Majority. To get a clear idea of what we publish, read through the entire series so far. We pay for every published essay through paid subscriptions. Upgrade/manage your membership at any time to keep this series and others like it alive and healthy.

Check out the first three essays in the series…

Learn More/Submit

📢 From : The Art & Practice of the Essay Workshop

Guided by Best American Essays series editor and award-winning author Kim Dana Kupperman, open the doors to the art and practice of the essay through an immersive, generative process of reading to write and reading to re-vision.

Dates: Mar 24, 2026 – Apr 14, 2026 View session dates & times Levels: Beginner, Intermediate Workshop Fee: $450 Workshop Duration: 12 hours over 4 sessions (Tuesdays, 1-4 pm ET) Workshop Location: Online Class Size: 8

Learn More/Register

📢 Attention Publications and writers interested in having published essays considered for inclusion in our weekly curation:

By Thursday of each week, please send to memoirmonday@gmail.com:

1. The title of the essay and a link to it.

2. Your name and Substack profile link, if you have one, so I can tag you in the post.

3. A paragraph or a few lines from the piece that will most entice readers.

   Please be advised that we cannot accept all submissions, nor respond to the overwhelming number of emails received. Also, please note that we don’t accept author submissions from our partner publications.

   Subscribe now

   ---

Notebooks! Shirts! Mugs! Get Your Memoir Land Merch!

Memoir Land Merch

1. Memoir Monday, a weekly curation of the best personal essays from around the web brought to you by Narratively, The Rumpus,  Granta, Guernica, Oldster Magazine, Literary Hub, Orion Magazine, The Walrus, and Electric Literature. Below is this week’s curation. ⬇️

2. First Person Singular, featuring original personal essays.

3. The Lit Lab, featuring interviews—The Memoir Land Author Questionnaire—and essays on craft and publishing. There are also weekly writing prompts and other exercises from, ahem, a New York Times bestselling ghostwriter of memoirs (that’s me) exclusively for paid subscribers.

4. Goodbye to All That, where I continue to explore my fascination with the most wonderful and terrible city in the world, something I began doing with two NYC-centric anthologies, Goodbye to All That, and Never Can Say Goodbye.

***Thanks to everyone who recently became paid subscribers. 🙏 I could still use more support. If I’ve featured your work or that of your publication’s contributors…if you’re a publicists whose clients I’ve regularly featured…if you just want to help me keep doing ALL THIS and paying contributors, please consider becoming a paid subscriber…*

Subscribe now

Click here to get more out of this post by reading it online rather than in your inbox.

Essays from Partner Publications…

Caesura

By

“The year I started writing poetry was also the year I had the worst migraines of my life. I was nineteen, in my second year of college, and enrolled in a workshop for the first time. The genre seemed true to my experience of being alive: images flashing over broken lines, rhythm and meter giving the illusion of familiarity, of a connection or meaning just outside of sense.”

Electric Literature

Why Was I in Such a Rush to Have Sex for the First Time?

by

“If there are two camps when it comes to your v-card, those who want to hang onto it, and those who are eager to get rid of it, I fell into the latter category, big-time. At 16, I wanted my virginity gone fast, with the kind of urgency you feel after a car has splashed you with a giant puddle and you need to peel your dirty clothes off immediately.”

Narratively

50 Years On, My Brain Remains Shaped by The Ramones

by

“My friends and I were convinced. We must start a band at once. It was our senior year at Massapequa High School, and auditions were coming up for the acts that would play the Senior Variety Show, held in the school’s auditorium, which could pack in up to a thousand kids. This annual mélange of comedy sketches, musical performances, and dance routines had slots for three bands. Could we form one in time to get one of those spots?”

Oldster

Good Medicine

by

“Checking my phone, I noticed a message from the editor of this magazine, asking if I would write something for their ‘Therapy’ issue. I mentioned this to my boyfriend of fifteen years, a criminal defense lawyer, who requested, for this article, that I call him Handsome Jack. What could I write about? I asked him. After thinking about it for a moment, he said, ‘You’re so interesting when you write about your own mind. Why don’t you try a bunch of psychedelic therapies and report on what they feel like?’”

Granta

Heated Rivalry Holds Up a Mirror to My Deepest Self

by

“For me, a bisexual woman born in the former Yugoslavia and raised in Ukraine, Heated Rivalry triggered a reckoning. Watching a character like Ilya Rozanov—queer, Slavic, and shackled to his homeland despite living in “the West”—unleashed a memory spiral I thought I’d kept neatly well shut.”

The Walrus

Finding the Publishing World in the Epstein Files

by

“I don’t know what to do with these names. I hope they are all investigated thoroughly, even though I’m not counting on it. It is certainly not my place to. But I do hope that, at least in the world of book publishing, we can start to have a conversation about what it looks like to protect victims and make work environments safe.”

LitHub

Essays from Around the Web…

I Miss My Black Brooklyn

by Naomi Jackson

“I once lived in a Black mecca. But by the summer of 2022, my toddler son and I were often the only Black folks on the playground in Bedford-Stuyvesant, a fact that felt both alienating and surreal. We moved to Bed-Stuy that summer to be close to my sister and her family. Reeling from a recent separation and scrambling for child care in a different neighborhood, I often found myself on the playground, trying to make sense of both our new life and this new community. In the heat of summer afternoons, I sweated and watched with morbid curiosity as my child played with a gaggle of white and mixed-race children. When we met the rare Black family, I was too eager to speak to them, a moth to a proverbial flame of racial solidarity.”

Curbed/NYMag

Quitting

By John Phipps

“For the one obvious catch, cigarettes seemed to me like the perfect drug. They didn’t derange or disinhibit or cause you to act in ways you would later regret. They barely even interfered with fine-motor skills. While they provided pleasure, they answered a need in a way voluntary pleasure did not. If the difference between a need and a desire is that a need can be satisfied, then the need for nicotine was unique because it could go on being satisfied all of the time: twenty, forty, even a hundred times a day.”

The Point

Surrender

by

“The oncologist confirms that the risk is high. Cancer is probable. “Hormone therapy is one of the things we can do, but it can mess with your fertility and at twenty-four you’re too young.” Too young, the words linger. I divert my attention out of the window toward the mountain layers in the distance. Floating elsewhere, blankly gazing, I am no longer receiving the words he is speaking. Something about a complete removal of my breasts. A bilateral prophylactic mastectomy.”

Split Lip Magazine

What We Owe the People We Write About

by Kathryn Smith

“Katrina was a girl we’d gone to elementary school with. Her father had molested me, several of our classmates, and dozens of girls in our community in the 1970s and 80s. He’d been tried and sentenced in 2008. In the article, I didn’t mention Katrina’s name, but I did mention her father’s name, which could draw the story back to her. Maybe I should reach out to her. But what would I say? ‘I think it’s the right thing to do,’ my friend said.”

Brevity

KPop Demon Hunters: A Roadmap Through Korean Historical Grief and Healing

by

“The first time I watched K-Pop Demon Hunters, I was simply content to savor the ambrosia of cultural visibility, no small thing for a people who have endured generations of erasure. When I saw it again a week later, I marveled at the deft use of Korean cosmology to dissolve traditional Western binaries: hero and villain, capitalism and mysticism, mainstream appeal and thematic profundity. My third time was an experience I can only describe as an initiation. The beating heart of KPDH entered my own before leaping out of my chest as I sang-sobbed my way through the finale. I felt renewed. As if I had released something from within me that was not of me.”

Crush Life Manifesto

About Time

by James

“A thought that just came to me: a few days after I separated from my ex, I was at my sister’s flat with my dog, listening to a voice essay in a literary magazine I’d also been published in. The writer spoke of the ancient Chinese myth of the red thread of fate, an invisible red cord which was said to join the little fingers of two soulmates destined to be together. I remember wondering whether this meant my red thread was joined to another finger, not that of my spouse but somebody I hadn’t even met yet. Now, my take is different. Like the red string that helped Theseus leave the labyrinth, my red thread is helping me navigate this process, too. There may be steps backwards, it may be labyrinthine rather than linear, but I am moving forwards overall. I’m finding my way out.”

The London Clock

Loving my daughter through her battle with addiction

by Annemarie Whilton

“My girl is whip-smart, beloved and industrious. The only thing she has ever been a fool for is heroin. It began 14 years prior at parties thrown by South Shore teens — “Oxys, so fun!" But Oxycontin leads to heroin, heroin leads to fentanyl, and fentanyl leads to death. At least 28,000 dead in Massachusetts thus far. This particular tale of destruction is as old as Purdue Pharma’s mega fortune is new. Even I get tired of the never-ending narrative. There is enough heartache here to cripple the able-bodied. But, unbelievably, there is also unexpected love.”

WBUR/Cognoscenti

My High School Boyfriend Gave Me a Sex Ultimatum

by Ainsley Cunningham

“The ultimatum itself should have been enough for me to break up with him. But I didn’t. I’d been conditioned by media and culture and everything else to be a nice girl who considered other people’s needs before my own. I’d also been taught by TV and movies that boys needed sex, and that girls had the impossible but important task of figuring out how to not be a slut but also not be a prude.”

Open Secrets Magazine

I was ghosted by my friend of 50 years. I never expected an ASICS outlet to be my breaking point

by

“I rummaged through the sale rack at the ASICS factory outlet, searching for that hidden bargain gem. There's always something there, overlooked or ignored by those who shun last season's fashion because it's not the latest. Sam and I used to love that rack and couldn't care less if a particular shade of blue was out and a new shade was in. People can be pedantic and weird. We'd laugh about that…”

Mama Mia

🚨Announcements:

📢 Don’t Miss the 2026 Live Personal Storytelling Summit—where I will be on ’s Identity Panel

Tickets are NOW ON SALE for personal storytelling summit Open Secrets Live 2026! The event will take place Saturday, May 2, from 10 a.m.-6 p.m., with a ticketed after party from 6-8 p.m., at Symphony Space’s Leonard Nimoy Thalia Theatre, 250 W. 95th Street, New York (95th and Broadway).

Learn More/Sign Up

📢 The Motherlode Retreat, April 26-30, Boyds Mill, Pennsylvania

Have you or someone you know found it challenging to write about your relationship with your mother? KindWrite Studio co-founder and award-winning writer and instructor Diana Friedman hosts The Motherlode Retreat, where we explore those messy and challenging relationships with our mothers and how to master writing about them.

At the Motherlode, we tackle this subject from various angles by exploring topics such as:

• The Mother Wound. What is it, how does it manifest for us each, and how do we write about it?

• How do unbalanced narratives from our mothers haunt us, and how do we move past them in our writing?

• How can we bring our mothers to life on the page when we remain emotionally connected and activated by them?

• How can we transform our mother-offspring experiences into powerful narratives?

Held at the Highlights Foundation, run by Boyd’s Mill, the retreat is located in a bucolic setting which offers fresh, healthy food, en suite private rooms, and plenty of trails and walks outdoors. You’ll receive professional writing instruction, build camaraderie with other writers, tuck into curated meals, and have sustained time to focus on your work.

The Motherlode Retreat is open to writers at all levels and working in all genres: memoir, fiction, poetry, plays, screenplays, as well as anyone seeking to use writing to explore their matrilineal relationship.

$100 discount if you book by February 15.

Learn More/Sign Up

📢 All February, at ’s : 28 x 20: Daily Prompts for Writing Super-Short Personal Essays in 20 Minutes

“28 X 20 is an invitation to dive into the daily rhythm of crafting short pieces. 28 days. 28 prompts. 28 micro-stories. 20 minutes each. No time to overthink it. No toe-dipping. Grab momentum, sharpen your skills, blow out your range, and end the month with a richer, more confident practice. Y'all. February is the shortest month. You can do this.”

For paid subscribers to . (Save 25% on subscriptions now…)

Learn More/Sign Up/Save 25%

📢 Marcia Yudkin's weekly Substack newsletter, Introvert UpThink, seeks personal essays

Attention Introverts! Marcia Yudkin's weekly Substack newsletter, Introvert UpThink, seeks personal essays, 700 to 1500 words, on some aspect of what it's like to be an introvert or to deal with an introverted friend, family member, co-worker, neighbor, etc.

“In this new series of posts, I would like to feature your insights and experiences related to being an introvert or dealing with an introverted spouse, child, employee, boss, neighbor, etc. The more specific you are about the setting and the relationship dynamics involved, the better.

Please send your essay/article/post to innies@yudkin.com.

Target length is 700 to 1500 words. If I use your post, I will of course credit you with a byline and a brief bio.” First example here.

📢 From Writing Co-Lab: Peitho's Gift Writing Retreat in Crete, Greece

Join us for a week-long writing retreat at a lovely hotel on a quiet beach on the southern coast of Crete. Away from the crowds, Peitho’s Gift offers writers a peaceful place close to nature and steeped in history to connect with their creative spirit and partake in the joys of an intentional creative community. Your facilitators, Trish Fancher and Brian Gresko, will provide a structure designed to help you maximize your day’s productivity. The mornings are free for writing and enjoying the sea, while afternoons provide opportunities for socializing, and the day ends with writing salons and local delicacies.

Learn More/Apply

📢 wants your workshop proposals!

Literary Liberation is looking for workshop proposals that crack open new worlds, sessions that make space for the voices this world tries to silence, and courses that remind us writing is both weapon and salve. Sounds like a place you want to share your expertise? Pitch your workshop to us!

Deadline: February 28, 2026

Propose a Workshop

Freedom Ways essay submissions close March 1

Memoir Land and Literary Liberation’s ongoing essay collaboration will stop accepting submissions this year on March 1, 2026. We will publish four essays in 2026. Take time to read our submission guidelines prior to submitting. We only consider and accept submissions by writers of the Global Majority. To get a clear idea of what we publish, read through the entire series so far. We pay for every published essay through paid subscriptions. Upgrade/manage your membership at any time to keep this series and others like it alive and healthy.

Check out the first three essays in the series…

Learn More/Submit

📢 From : The Art & Practice of the Essay Workshop

Guided by Best American Essays series editor and award-winning author Kim Dana Kupperman, open the doors to the art and practice of the essay through an immersive, generative process of reading to write and reading to re-vision.

Dates: Mar 24, 2026 – Apr 14, 2026 View session dates & times Levels: Beginner, Intermediate Workshop Fee: $450 Workshop Duration: 12 hours over 4 sessions (Tuesdays, 1-4 pm ET) Workshop Location: Online Class Size: 8

Learn More/Register

📢 Attention Publications and writers interested in having published essays considered for inclusion in our weekly curation:

By Thursday of each week, please send to memoirmonday@gmail.com:

1. The title of the essay and a link to it.

2. Your name and Substack profile link, if you have one, so I can tag you in the post.

3. A paragraph or a few lines from the piece that will most entice readers.

   Please be advised that we cannot accept all submissions, nor respond to the overwhelming number of emails received. Also, please note that we don’t accept author submissions from our partner publications.

   Subscribe now

   ---

Notebooks! Shirts! Mugs! Get Your Memoir Land Merch!

Memoir Land Merch

1. Memoir Monday, a weekly curation of the best personal essays from around the web brought to you by Narratively, The Rumpus,  Granta, Guernica, Oldster Magazine, Literary Hub, Orion Magazine, The Walrus, and Electric Literature. Below is this week’s curation. ⬇️

2. First Person Singular, featuring original personal essays.

3. The Lit Lab, featuring interviews—The Memoir Land Author Questionnaire—and essays on craft and publishing. There are also weekly writing prompts and other exercises from, ahem, a New York Times bestselling ghostwriter of memoirs (that’s me) exclusively for paid subscribers.

4. Goodbye to All That, where I continue to explore my fascination with the most wonderful and terrible city in the world, something I began doing with two NYC-centric anthologies, Goodbye to All That, and Never Can Say Goodbye.

***Thanks to everyone who recently became paid subscribers. 🙏 I could still use more support. If I’ve featured your work or that of your publication’s contributors…if you’re a publicists whose clients I’ve regularly featured…if you just want to help me keep doing ALL THIS and paying contributors, please consider becoming a paid subscriber…*

Subscribe now

Click here to get more out of this post by reading it online rather than in your inbox.

Essays from Partner Publications…

Childfree by Choice: By refusing to give birth, I have birthed the version of myself that I always wanted to be.

By

“At sixteen, I vowed that I would never allow myself to be held in a situation that I could not walk away from. The year before, my family had moved to Saudi Arabia. As soon as we did, I felt like I had been sentenced to a lifetime in prison because being there was so suffocating and stifling. I could not go anywhere unless my brother accompanied me. I saw my mother—who, like my father, was a medical doctor—no longer able to drive because women then were not permitted to. Back then, in 1982, before we bought a car that only my dad could drive, when we would board a public bus, women would have to sit at the back.”

Guernica

My Personal Essay

by Katy Ryan

“My personal essay was due Wednesday in week five. On Tuesday I had no personal essay. I kept thinking one would materialize—some collection of thoughts or anecdotes I could hammer into shape. “It can be short,” my kind instructor encouraged. ‘It can be two separate short pieces. Just a draft. Don’t stress.’ I despaired. I considered ChatGPT. I complained to the cats, ‘It’s summer. I should get a break.” They lolled and rolled and otherwise disparaged me.’”

The Rumpus

Letter From Minnesota: There is No Time for Mom Guilt

by

“How could I not feel guilty for not doing more, when there are mothers in my city whose children have been taken from them? When there are children in my city whose mothers have been taken from them? I saw photos online of the marches in my city and I berated myself for not being there. We ordered a pizza for dinner one night, and I thought: we should have eaten whatever was in the fridge and donated what we spent. I scrolled through GoFundMe’s and names of food shelves and organizations working tirelessly to help the vulnerable in our community, each one as worthy as the last, and wondered where to even begin. Where, in this necessary resistance and revolution, did I belong?”

LitHub

Finding Complexity and Sweetness in Life’s Onion Layers

by

“At 65, people tell me it’s time to wind down, brace for retirement, accept the decline chronology mandates. But my life has never followed a straight line. And I see an ascent into catharsis, not a decline. Aging, I’ve come to believe—at least in my case—isn’t about slowing down. It’s about the courage to keep shifting gears, until you reach the right speed for you.”

Oldster

Essays from Around the Web…

Being Kevin, Watching “Being Charlie”

by

“It’s difficult to be anonymous as the son of someone. For many years, after college, I worked in bars and always enjoyed the first few months because nobody knew who I was. Somebody would usually figure it out—often the boss, and he’d tell—and people either liked me more or less because of my father, but it was never the same…The same thing happened in treatment centers, and it happened to Charlie, too.”

The Small Bow

What Hamnet Understands About the Long Search After Loss

By

“After the miscarriage, I became convinced my daughter was backstage. I would push back the costumes on the rack and almost expect to find her. Sometimes I wondered if she was Ophelia’s daughter or mine, an inheritor of all the drowned girls, all the stories that teach us women’s grief belongs to water and silence. I held out my arms onstage, again and again, hoping something would appear there.”

Substack

The River Tells You You’re Good: a perimenopause essay

by

“As I write this my heart rate is elevated. My jaw is clenched. My hands are shaky . Full body rage, like a hot flash, descends so easily now. I try to sit with it. I try to learn to hold it like a baby.”

The Scrap Heap

In ‘The Chronology of Water’, Kristen Stewart turns trauma into form

by

“When I first read The Chronology of Water, still drowning in my own past, I missed Yuknavitch’s academic rigor entirely. I saw only the life raft, not the architecture beneath it. She earned a Ph.D. at the University of Oregon and studied with Ken Kesey, author of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, in the late nineteen-eighties. Had her father not intervened, she might have attended any number of elite institutions such as Brown, Notre Dame, Cornell, Purdue or Columbia on scholarship. The achievement of The Chronology of Water lies in how fully it threads these identities together: the athlete, the scholar, the teacher, the survivor.”

A Rabbit's Foot

Ashes to Pistachios

by Golan Haji

“From time to time we would be joined in Nuh’s annex by another young man we called Sculptor. He was good with his hands, and had written, in Kurdish – a banned language that he’d had to teach himself – a lengthy elegy with a title to match: ‘My share of the misfortune: the imagined fates of the children who died.’ He lived right next to the cinema, which over the years had transformed from a site of holocaust to a little garden with a statue, the ‘memorial’ that was now the focus of Sculptor’s attention and his scathing commentary: “That’s not how you memorialise something! Where’s Bavé Behmed, who saved the kids? Why did that government artist Mahmoud Jelal only sculpt three children? Why have they got the Algerian flag up and not the Amazigh flag, when it’s the Amazigh who are persecuted like us Kurds? If it was up to me, I’d have a statue of Joan of Arc standing calmly amid the flames, or of the dragon being slain.’”

Equator

Unruly

by Erin Wood

“I’m rebellious, defiant, so I’m sent to the barn, driven there by my newly single mom, or my newly single dad, or my grandparents, or someone else. Another parent told my mom I should try horseback riding. Ice-skating and tae kwon do and ceramics didn’t stick, but I can already tell I’m a horse girl.”

The Sun

My Ex Wrote Friends. Watching From an Ashram Basement Turned My Life Upside Down

by

“As the theme song played on the tiny black-and-white screen, my eyes went wide with disbelief. It wasn’t just that my ex’s name — and that of his writing partner, also a friend of mine from college — flashed across the screen. There was Jennifer Aniston, a classmate from my performing arts high school. Because we’d both blow-dried our curly hair into straight bobs, I was twice tapped on the shoulder from behind by someone mistaking me for her. And there was fellow college alum David Schwimmer, the Chicago theater maven who I’d been introduced to at a couple of parties. He always looked past me: our meeting was of no significance.”

People

After My Daughter’s Suicide Attempt, Live Music Was Our Medicine

by

“Two days earlier, I’d picked [my daughter] up at a psychiatric hospital in Los Angeles. She landed there after swallowing a fistful of pills, something, she later told me, she’d contemplated doing almost every day for the past six months. My daughter’s no stranger to depression. Or thoughts of suicide. She was in kindergarten the first time she told me she wanted to die.”

Jenny Magazine

Flowers for the Dead

by

“The first sentence of my mother’s diary reads, ‘My most favorite thing in this world are flowers.’ My mother died at age forty eight, when I was twenty, and she has received more flowers from me while dead than alive.”

JMWW Blog

My Supporting Role as a Childless Mother of Two,

by

“A few months after I acknowledged my time to bear children was almost up, my sister and her husband announced their pregnancy. As we stood in her Los Feliz dining room, my parents and I hugged twenty-seven-year-old Tessa and wept. Our tight-knit family would soon add a fifth member, not including her husband. My sister hesitated to discuss her new precarious, yet planned, situation. My parents, on the other hand, were thrilled. They would finally have a grandchild. At the same time, ambiguous grief tempered my genuine enthusiasm.”

The Los Angeles Review

Minneapolis Calling

by

“We know ICE is in our groups and are wary that ICE may be in the meetings, where we have not known the people in our groups for very long. We end Signal chats and start new ones, whack-a-mole style. It strikes me that this has been the case with resistance movements forever, the assumption that certain communication channels are compromised but still necessary, good tools even if the wrong eyes are on them. It is a kind of dance.”

Sneaker Wave Magazine

I Was Turning 50 & Hadn't Had Sex In Six Years

by

“After all these years of no love, of first dates, and a few two monthers here and there, after six years of no sex, I decide to have sex now and think about love later. But could I have casual sex mindfully, with intention, without throwing myself away? Was that possible?”

Summer of Men

On Endurance: A Move to France, and What I Left Behind

by Jennifer Lunden

“On our most recent video call, Frank told me that the other day Emerson, aka Mr. Handsome, caught his first mouse. Emerson is an indoor cat, so yes, he caught it in the living room. It was just a baby, not even fully furred, and when Frank asked him, ‘What you got there, bud?’ Emerson dropped it… probably to tell Frank he had a mouse. And the little critter scampered away, presumably back to its family under the floor. In Maine, life goes on without me. In France, seven weeks in, everything is a long, arduous climb.”

Recovering American

the 10,000 steps

by

“At first, I went to fellowship meetings every other day. I never drank the coffee, I arrived with less than a minute to spare. But I sat down in the circle, and for that hour, I was really there. I met the best people the city could boast of in those rooms. I tried not to make anecdotes out of their lives. Even when they were comparing hits of heroin to cream puffs, even when they came out with lines like anxiety is just excitement without breath. After awhile, I would hang around long enough to have a cigarette on the front step with some of the old heads. Up close, they glowed even brighter. Gnarled and wonderful, dark and clear as the day beginning around us.”

Animal Vegetable Mineral

I Throw Pottery. Would I Throw My Career, Too?

by

“I may leave, I say, testing the idea, feeling it hard and heavy on my tongue. It tastes bitter. How could I, when so many were let go and I remain? There was a time it was inconceivable, when the mission was all that mattered. But torn between selfishness and sacrifice, stability and uncertainty, I falter. Am I resilient enough to stay?”

Open Secrets Magazine

🚨Announcements:

📢 Don’t Miss the 2026 Live Personal Storytelling Summit—where I will be on ’s Identity Panel

Tickets are NOW ON SALE for personal storytelling summit Open Secrets Live 2026! The event will take place Saturday, May 2, from 10 a.m.-6 p.m., with a ticketed after party from 6-8 p.m., at Symphony Space’s Leonard Nimoy Thalia Theatre, 250 W. 95th Street, New York (95th and Broadway).

Learn More/Sign Up

📢 The Motherlode Retreat, April 26-30, Boyds Mill, Pennsylvania

Have you or someone you know found it challenging to write about your relationship with your mother? KindWrite Studio co-founder and award-winning writer and instructor Diana Friedman hosts The Motherlode Retreat, where we explore those messy and challenging relationships with our mothers and how to master writing about them.

At the Motherlode, we tackle this subject from various angles by exploring topics such as:

• The Mother Wound. What is it, how does it manifest for us each, and how do we write about it?

• How do unbalanced narratives from our mothers haunt us, and how do we move past them in our writing?

• How can we bring our mothers to life on the page when we remain emotionally connected and activated by them?

• How can we transform our mother-offspring experiences into powerful narratives?

Held at the Highlights Foundation, run by Boyd’s Mill, the retreat is located in a bucolic setting which offers fresh, healthy food, en suite private rooms, and plenty of trails and walks outdoors. You’ll receive professional writing instruction, build camaraderie with other writers, tuck into curated meals, and have sustained time to focus on your work.

The Motherlode Retreat is open to writers at all levels and working in all genres: memoir, fiction, poetry, plays, screenplays, as well as anyone seeking to use writing to explore their matrilineal relationship.

$100 discount if you book by February 15.

Learn More/Sign Up

📢 All February, at ’s : 28 x 20: Daily Prompts for Writing Super-Short Personal Essays in 20 Minutes

“28 X 20 is an invitation to dive into the daily rhythm of crafting short pieces. 28 days. 28 prompts. 28 micro-stories. 20 minutes each. No time to overthink it. No toe-dipping. Grab momentum, sharpen your skills, blow out your range, and end the month with a richer, more confident practice. Y'all. February is the shortest month. You can do this.”

For paid subscribers to . (Save 25% on subscriptions now…)

Learn More/Sign Up/Save 25%

📢 Marcia Yudkin's weekly Substack newsletter, Introvert UpThink, seeks personal essays

Attention Introverts! Marcia Yudkin's weekly Substack newsletter, Introvert UpThink, seeks personal essays, 700 to 1500 words, on some aspect of what it's like to be an introvert or to deal with an introverted friend, family member, co-worker, neighbor, etc.

“In this new series of posts, I would like to feature your insights and experiences related to being an introvert or dealing with an introverted spouse, child, employee, boss, neighbor, etc. The more specific you are about the setting and the relationship dynamics involved, the better.

Please send your essay/article/post to innies@yudkin.com.

Target length is 700 to 1500 words. If I use your post, I will of course credit you with a byline and a brief bio.” First example here.

📢 is seeking personal essays and creative nonfiction

THE QUEER LOVE PROJECT is a digital platform dedicated to exploring love and commitment among queer relationships, whether that’s romantic, platonic, among friends and found family, or with oneself.

We accept personal essays on a rolling basis that reveal heartbreaks, happiness, secrets, reflections on coming out, sexual encounters, and the contemporary realities of dating. The intersection of families and other versions of “love” all make sense as we investigate the question: “What do we know about love?” Your nonfiction piece should have a clear take away from the experience, so it’s not just an anecdote but shows that there was some growth or lesson learned. Think “Modern Love”—but only queer stories.

Along with our general call for submissions, we are also seeking essays that are focused on the theme: SECOND CHANCES. How do you define a second chance? What did you learn from a second chance? How did someone give you a second chance? The topic is open to your interpretation, and we look forward to reading what it means to you! Deadline: February 14th

Learn More/Submit

📢 wants your workshop proposals!

Literary Liberation is looking for workshop proposals that crack open new worlds, sessions that make space for the voices this world tries to silence, and courses that remind us writing is both weapon and salve. Sounds like a place you want to share your expertise? Pitch your workshop to us!

Deadline: February 28, 2026

Propose a Workshop

Freedom Ways essay submissions close March 1

Memoir Land and Literary Liberation’s ongoing essay collaboration will stop accepting submissions this year on March 1, 2026. We will publish four essays in 2026. Take time to read our submission guidelines prior to submitting. We only consider and accept submissions by writers of the Global Majority. To get a clear idea of what we publish, read through the entire series so far. We pay for every published essay through paid subscriptions. Upgrade/manage your membership at any time to keep this series and others like it alive and healthy.

Check out the first three essays in the series…

Learn More/Submit

📢 From : The Art & Practice of the Essay Workshop

Guided by Best American Essays series editor and award-winning author Kim Dana Kupperman, open the doors to the art and practice of the essay through an immersive, generative process of reading to write and reading to re-vision.

Dates: Mar 24, 2026 – Apr 14, 2026 View session dates & times Levels: Beginner, Intermediate Workshop Fee: $450 Workshop Duration: 12 hours over 4 sessions (Tuesdays, 1-4 pm ET) Workshop Location: Online Class Size: 8

Learn More/Register

📢 Attention Publications and writers interested in having published essays considered for inclusion in our weekly curation:

By Thursday of each week, please send to memoirmonday@gmail.com:

1. The title of the essay and a link to it.

2. Your name and Substack profile link, if you have one, so I can tag you in the post.

3. A paragraph or a few lines from the piece that will most entice readers.

   Please be advised that we cannot accept all submissions, nor respond to the overwhelming number of emails received. Also, please note that we don’t accept author submissions from our partner publications.

   Subscribe now

   ---

Notebooks! Shirts! Mugs! Get Your Memoir Land Merch!

Memoir Land Merch

1. Memoir Monday, a weekly curation of the best personal essays from around the web brought to you by Narratively, The Rumpus,  Granta, Oldster Magazine, Literary Hub, Orion Magazine, The Walrus, and Electric Literature. Below is this week’s curation. ⬇️

2. First Person Singular, featuring original personal essays.

3. The Lit Lab, featuring interviews—The Memoir Land Author Questionnaire—and essays on craft and publishing. There are also weekly writing prompts and other exercises from, ahem, a New York Times bestselling ghostwriter of memoirs (that’s me) exclusively for paid subscribers.

4. Goodbye to All That, where I continue to explore my fascination with the most wonderful and terrible city in the world, something I began doing with two NYC-centric anthologies, Goodbye to All That, and Never Can Say Goodbye.

***Thanks to everyone who recently became paid subscribers. 🙏 I could still use more support. If I’ve featured your work or that of your publication’s contributors…if you’re a publicists whose clients I’ve regularly featured…if you just want to help me keep doing ALL THIS and paying contributors, please consider becoming a paid subscriber…*

Subscribe now

Click here to get more out of this post by reading it online rather than in your inbox.

Essays from Partner Publications…

Late, Blooming (An excerpt of The Big M: 13 Writers Take Back the Story of Menopause)

By

“When you are fat in a fatphobic world, you tend to live in a peculiar state of longing, a state of perpetual anticipation, making yourself promises about all the things you will do when. You plan your life around the bounty that awaits when you lose enough weight to find a loving partner, to get a good job, to travel abroad, to visit parents without intense anxiety, to make everyone happy, to make yourself happy. This fraught limbo is how I lived through my teens, my twenties, my thirties.”

Electric Literature

What I Want the Animals in My Home to Know

by

“Begin with the birds. How abundant they are these days, colours radiant and calls amplified. A half dozen varieties are present in our yard, all common. Bruising, helmet-headed blue jays rule the roost. They flutter onto the tops of fences and splash into puddles. They stomp about, truncheons slapped into palms for effect. Other birds keep their distance of them. Fixating on the metallic blue and sensing the innate aggression, I keep my distance too.”

The Walrus

I Am Happier than I’ve Ever Been and I Don’t Know Why

by

“Why am I happy is not one of the questions we are encouraged to ask in a capitalistic society. We are urged to worry: Why am I unhappy/How can I optimize my life, because those questions produce endless opportunities to sell us stuff. I’ve long been vulnerable to self-improvement, the idea that a “better” me will lead to a “better” life. But suddenly, I can’t stop seeing the glass half-full.”

Oldster

A Geometry of Silence

by Noreen Zobel

“People will tell you a story belongs to everyone who lived it, as if ownership were a generous circle. But the day he told his version first—polished, noble, ring still shining in the photograph on his hand—I learned that stories are also weapons. The same facts, arranged differently, can turn a person into a villain or a martyr. On social media, he wrote about trying. He wrote about grief. He wrote about waking every day with good intentions pressed like a medal against his chest. He didn’t write about the nights I slept alone in the guest room to keep the peace he kept breaking. He didn’t write about how volume can make truth sound smaller.”

The Rumpus

Essays from Around the Web…

I Grew Up with Alex Pretti

by

“We have become familiar with being barraged by videos of people we do not know getting detained and ripped from their families and beaten by agents whose salaries we pay. As social media does its work putting bits and pieces together about each day of unfolding tragedy, more and more of us will realize that those pieces belong to someone we know.”

The Verge

You Are Becoming Something New

by

“I am writing to you as a different woman, whose latest violent metamorphosis began in the unexpected and explosive split-second of unlocking my husband’s phone for the first time in our near-decade-long relationship and learning how much of our relationship was a well-spun lie.”

The Red Soil Diaries

The Secret to Marriage Equality Is Formula

by Nona Willis Aronowitz

“When Pearl came along, we vowed to do things differently. We’ve been much more liberal with our use of formula, and the result has been the parenting dynamic I always dreamed of. It’s not only taken the pressure off me, but also given Dom the ability to bond with and learn his baby right away. He did overnight feeds that provided me with long stretches of sleep. We traded tips on soothing methods. Formula gave Dom autonomy to feed as he saw fit, to experiment and fail and try again without worrying about wasting ‘liquid gold.’”

NY Times/Opinion

When the Flames Went Out

by

“There’s a kind of cruel symmetry to the popular mantra of keeping what “sparks joy”; it was sparks that erased most of mine. I still drift into shops with wares curated to feel discovered. I, too, point at the little things and say “cute.” But it’s those little things—tchotchkes, omiyage—and the way the larger things hold them that make up a house, slowly carved from the outside in by the objects placed inside it, each one finding its own nook. Things within things, like a babushka doll. When my house disappeared, that curvature vanished too.”

LA Review of Books

Zoomed My Sister's Funeral

by

“No one tells you when you are eight years old and your older sister lays with you to read about Jenny the Cat that 40 years later you won’t know one another. No one tells you when you are six years old that people grow and change and make choices not even blood can breach. No one tells you when you are four years old that there will come a day when it will hurt to see the covers of your favorite stories as you try to work out where everything went so terribly wrong. I wonder if someone will tell me when she dies, even as I know my parents will. I wonder if I’ll hear about it soon after or maybe later, as an aside, even as I know I will hear along with everyone else. There is no reason that I won’t be told, but I still wonder. I don’t know my place. The protocol. I start. I flail.”

Open Secrets Magazine

How I Left My Gallbladder in Cleveland—and Learned About Old Place Names

by

“At that moment, I realized the gallbladder is a vestigial-organ-in-progress, gradually traveling the road taken by the appendix and tonsils. Vestigial organs may no longer be useful to the body, but knowing their history is quite valuable for health. The same could be said for ‘vestigial’ remnants of a region’s history.”

The Cleveland Plain Dealer

Stress Response

by Scheiner

“It happened outside her parents’ house, next to their broken-down 1980s Ford Taurus, what was once red now rusted into dirt brown. The front door was open; the smell of cigarettes and dust and heroin (if it had a smell) wafted into the driveway. I knew heroin didn’t have a smell, but I still imagined it did.”

The Columbia Journal

The particular pain of January Birthdays

by Jennifer Serafyn

“Every January baby knows the particular sting of watching the world pack up its joy. The tree comes down, the lights go dark and everyone retreats into hibernation — just in time for your birthday. You unwrap presents that feel suspiciously like leftover Christmas gifts. There’s even research confirming what every January baby suspects: People spend less on our birthday presents.

WBUR/Cognoscenti

She Talked to Angels

by

“Alex understood the world in ways I couldn’t. Once, at a grocery store after the first of the month when her food stamps arrived, she went directly to the butcher and picked out expensive filets. I kept quiet but grew more tense in each new aisle as she loaded the cart with high-end frozen pizzas, gourmet ice cream and fancy bottled water. In the checkout line, she handed me the coupon booklet. Absorbing the disapproval from everyone around us, I paid for these luxuries with food stamps. Maybe Alex wanted me to know what it felt like to be judged, or maybe she just wanted a little relief from being judged.”

The Queer Love Project

My Paris Ghosts

by

“Paris has been an ally to my own slow unfolding. It’s the city where I let my daughter go, and where I have come home to myself: a woman alone in the world again. A woman—like Paris—with endless possibilities, passages and pathways.”

The New Quarterly

When Fear Surrounds You, Can You See Through the Fog?

by

“Who am I to say if that particular fear is rational or not? And does that really matter? When fear seizes your mind, you begin to process stimuli differently. You stay on guard, watching for triggers and ways to protect yourself. This survival instinct is natural and can keep us safe, yet fear manifests within us in tricky, seemingly contradictory ways: feeling a state of heightened alert while being cocooned in the fog of uncertainty.”

Substack

🚨Announcements:

📢 From : The Fine Art of Deep Revision with

Starting this Thursday at Narratively Academy, this 3-week class explores how revising your own writing can be efficient, productive and even fun — once you identify the concrete techniques that work best for you.

Learn More/Sign Up

📢 Only 4 spots left!: Want to work on a personal essay with me in Vermont in April? Registration is open for the Southern Vermont Writers’ Conference, at which I am leading a workshop…

For the second time, I’ll be leading a personal essay writing workshop at The Southern Vermont Writers’ Conference. It was a great group last time. Maybe this time you’ll join us?

Learn More/Sign Up

📢 All February, at ’s : 28 x 20: Daily Prompts for Writing Super-Short Personal Essays in 20 Minutes

“28 X 20 is an invitation to dive into the daily rhythm of crafting short pieces. 28 days. 28 prompts. 28 micro-stories. 20 minutes each. No time to overthink it. No toe-dipping. Grab momentum, sharpen your skills, blow out your range, and end the month with a richer, more confident practice. Y'all. February is the shortest month. You can do this.”

For paid subscribers to . (Save 25% on subscriptions now…)

Learn More/Sign Up/Save 25%

📢 is seeking personal essays and creative nonfiction

THE QUEER LOVE PROJECT is a digital platform dedicated to exploring love and commitment among queer relationships, whether that’s romantic, platonic, among friends and found family, or with oneself.

We accept personal essays on a rolling basis that reveal heartbreaks, happiness, secrets, reflections on coming out, sexual encounters, and the contemporary realities of dating. The intersection of families and other versions of “love” all make sense as we investigate the question: “What do we know about love?” Your nonfiction piece should have a clear take away from the experience, so it’s not just an anecdote but shows that there was some growth or lesson learned. Think “Modern Love”—but only queer stories.

Along with our general call for submissions, we are also seeking essays that are focused on the theme: SECOND CHANCES. How do you define a second chance? What did you learn from a second chance? How did someone give you a second chance? The topic is open to your interpretation, and we look forward to reading what it means to you! Deadline: February 14th

Learn More/Submit

📢 wants your workshop proposals!

Literary Liberation is looking for workshop proposals that crack open new worlds, sessions that make space for the voices this world tries to silence, and courses that remind us writing is both weapon and salve. Sounds like a place you want to share your expertise? Pitch your workshop to us!

Deadline: February 28, 2026

Propose a Workshop

Freedom Ways essay submissions close March 1

Memoir Land and Literary Liberation’s ongoing essay collaboration will stop accepting submissions this year on March 1, 2026. We will publish four essays in 2026. Take time to read our submission guidelines prior to submitting. We only consider and accept submissions by writers of the Global Majority. To get a clear idea of what we publish, read through the entire series so far. We pay for every published essay through paid subscriptions. Upgrade/manage your membership at any time to keep this series and others like it alive and healthy.

Check out the first three essays in the series…

Learn More/Submit

📢 From : The Art & Practice of the Essay Workshop

Guided by Best American Essays series editor and award-winning author Kim Dana Kupperman, open the doors to the art and practice of the essay through an immersive, generative process of reading to write and reading to re-vision.

Dates: Mar 24, 2026 – Apr 14, 2026 View session dates & times Levels: Beginner, Intermediate Workshop Fee: $450 Workshop Duration: 12 hours over 4 sessions (Tuesdays, 1-4 pm ET) Workshop Location: Online Class Size: 8

Learn More/Register

📢 Attention Publications and writers interested in having published essays considered for inclusion in our weekly curation:

By Thursday of each week, please send to memoirmonday@gmail.com:

1. The title of the essay and a link to it.

2. Your name and Substack profile link, if you have one, so I can tag you in the post.

3. A paragraph or a few lines from the piece that will most entice readers.

   Please be advised that we cannot accept all submissions, nor respond to the overwhelming number of emails received. Also, please note that we don’t accept author submissions from our partner publications.

   Subscribe now

   ---

Notebooks! Shirts! Mugs! Get Your Memoir Land Merch!

Memoir Land Merch

1. Memoir Monday, a weekly curation of the best personal essays from around the web brought to you by Narratively, The Rumpus,  Granta, Oldster Magazine, Literary Hub, Orion Magazine, The Walrus, and Electric Literature. Below is this week’s curation. ⬇️

2. First Person Singular, featuring original personal essays.

3. The Lit Lab, featuring interviews—The Memoir Land Author Questionnaire—and essays on craft and publishing. There are also weekly writing prompts and other exercises from, ahem, a New York Times bestselling ghostwriter of memoirs (that’s me) exclusively for paid subscribers.

4. Goodbye to All That, where I continue to explore my fascination with the most wonderful and terrible city in the world, something I began doing with two NYC-centric anthologies, Goodbye to All That, and Never Can Say Goodbye.

***Thanks to everyone who became paid subscribers after last Monday’s post. 🙏 I could still use more support. If I’ve featured your work or that of your publication’s contributors…if you’re a publicists whose clients I’ve regularly featured…if you just want to help me keep doing ALL THIS and paying contributors, please consider becoming a paid subscriber…*

Subscribe now

Click here to get more out of this post by reading it online rather than in your inbox.

Essays from Partner Publications…

The Cost of Writing

By Tariq Mir

“The cost of dissent had risen steeply. In August 2019 the Modi government placed some ten million people under lock-down, cut the internet and phone networks, and revoked Article 370 – the constitutional measure that allowed Kashmiri legislators to protect land, jobs, and culture. Its removal ended Kashmir’s semi-autonomous status and permitted outsiders to acquire property. That single act signaled clearly that altering Kashmir’s Muslim demography was now a matter of serious policy. Any opposition, the government implied, would be met with severity. Thousands were jailed, including journalists; scores lost their jobs.”

Granta

Formalizing Grief: On Victoria Chang’s Obit

by

“My father and I were in no shape to throw a funeral; we had no money, and nothing to say. Like its announcement, the obituary’s penultimate sentence wrote itself: ‘All services for Ellen will be private.’”

Electric Literature

A (Miserable) Day in the Life of an Unwilling Homeschooler

by

“It isn’t just Noah, or Tiffany, or even Clayton Howley I’m missing in particular. What I miss most is just the mysterious complexity that is Other Kids. I wasn’t always happy at Brinker—­often I was unhappy—­but I wonder now if the struggle of school was in fact something important for my health, like vegetables but for my brain.”

LitHub

How to Be Old: A Guide from a 79-year-old.

by

“This guide is expressly written for those who are bewildered by the face in the mirror and somehow think that 70 qualifies as middle-aged. These people need gentle guidance so that they, too, can enjoy the special perks of being old, beyond the senior discounts. This guide aims to help newcomers fit in with their cohort and enjoy their well-earned privileges.”

Oldster

Essays from Around the Web…

Hearing My Own Scream

by Rümeysa Öztürk

“During my 45 days in for-profit ICE prison, I collected stories from the other women detained with me: I think of the cry of a gentle mother of two whom I met in the for-profit prison where I was unlawfully kept in Louisiana. She told me how she was ambushed by immigration agents on a playground, her kids watching in terror and tears as she was taken. Another friend told me of an invasive search at the border, and the shame in her silent scream has fused to my own. My scream echoes the pain of immigrant children whose parents are brutally taken from them with anonymous hands.”

The Cut/NYMag

Bad Lunch

by

“I’d become a ship’s cook almost by accident. On a break from college in my early twenties, I was traveling in France and took a job as a deckhand on a 128-year-old Spanish brigantine that made trips back and forth across the English Channel. I endured a lot of teasing from the mostly British sailors—working-class Brits really know how to twist the knife—but my tears gave way to laughter as I developed a thick skin to go with my sea legs.”

The Sun

Autism in Translation: A Memoir of Labels, Loss, and Continuity

by Jeffrey-Michael Kane

“Science has always named us to manage its discomfort, giving difference a taxonomy. Beneath every reclassification runs the same wish: to solve the question of why we exist. I do not oppose understanding. But I want to share what it’s been like to live with the labels and what life was like before I was given a diagnosis of autism.”

Chicago Story Press

Things We Miss

by Paul Booth

“In some way, all travel is a masterclass in acting: acting like you belong, like you are different from every other traveler out there, like you can blend in, like you can play the part you’re supposed to play and live the life that’s been prescribed to you. Is marriage the same thing? I didn’t think so at the time, but Kate and I had long been stuck in a performance of marriage. Our everyday interaction had become a recital which recalled a past when we’d first gotten together rather than the future we were working towards. Being in Japan on our last trip as a couple allowed us to play, to act: to perform the roles we had cast ourselves in over a decade before.”

Sneaker Wave Magazine

Michelle, Ma Belle

by

“There they were, those first few notes, recognizable from within the wash of a six-string chord. It felt like magic as I heard and then played them, one at a time.”

The Coalitionist

Songs in Case of Sudden Death

by Casey Jo Graham Welmers

“On a Wednesday I wonder if Bob Dylan will accompany my mangled form into the afterlife; the following Friday I imagine John Lennon. A week later, surrounded by shattered glass, a rusted guardrail impaling the awful tableau, I’m sure I’ll hear Nina Simone as I draw my final, ragged breath. There are now over one hundred songs on my “untimely death/car crash” playlist, all carefully selected in case I should perish in a macabre tangle of metal and gasoline on southbound M-39.”

Hobart Pulp

It’s More Like a Five

by

“The doctor asked me a crucial question as I positioned myself on the table: ‘On a scale of 1-10, how much pain are you in?’ I told her nine. It was hard to walk, talk, sit, or sleep. Her response felled me: ‘Did you drive here?’ Confused, I said, ‘Yes.’ Then the appointment fell apart. ‘If you could drive, you’d be at a five.’”

Open Secrets Magazine

Lessons in Entomology

by

“The carpet is warm beneath us, and with the mold-scented air, none of us are sleeping. Earlier, when we’d entered the bedroom, my grandpa had opened the closet door and saw a cockroach, legs poised, that he swears was the size of his hand. Rubber-looking antennae hung from its face, and it scurried across the floor and out of sight, unnaturally, like it was on wheels. Before any of us could move we’d lost the thing, and none of us slept all night, afraid we might wake up with it crawling across our bodies. We lay still, blankets pulled high, as if staying still could make us safe.”

Craft Literary

On Superman

by

“My earliest memory was of the planet Krypton. It served as the door into my awakening consciousness. I remember holding my mother’s hand, walking into the darkness of a movie theater with the smell of popcorn permeating everything…symphonic music crashing all around me, and that large, beautiful orb, going from red to blue, and finally, to this crystalline landscape. I felt swallowed by the whole thing, as if I were walking on the surface of Krypton itself.”

Cleaver Magazine

🚨Announcements:

📢 From : 28 Days, 28 Essay Prompts: A Month of Generating Inspiration and Ideas for Memoir, starting February 1st

Developed by Narratively Chief Submissions Reader , this self-guided course is designed to help you break through writer’s block and figure out how to put your unique life experiences into words. Every day, you’ll receive a short personal essay or two to read, paired with a prompt to inspire your own writing. You’ll set aside a few minutes of your day to respond to that prompt and, if you choose to, share a short piece of writing with a supportive and encouraging community of writers.

Learn More/Sign Up

📢 Only 4 spots left!: Want to work on a personal essay with me in Vermont in April? Registration is open for the Southern Vermont Writers’ Conference, at which I am leading a workshop…

For the second time, I’ll be leading a personal essay writing workshop at The Southern Vermont Writers’ Conference. It was a great group last time. Maybe this time you’ll join us?

Learn More/Sign Up

📢 All February, at ’s : 28 x 20: Daily Prompts for Writing Super-Short Personal Essays in 20 Minutes

“28 X 20 is an invitation to dive into the daily rhythm of crafting short pieces. 28 days. 28 prompts. 28 micro-stories. 20 minutes each. No time to overthink it. No toe-dipping. Grab momentum, sharpen your skills, blow out your range, and end the month with a richer, more confident practice. Y'all. February is the shortest month. You can do this.”

For paid subscribers to . (Save 25% on subscriptions now…)

Learn More/Sign Up/Save 25%

📢 is seeking personal essays and creative nonfiction

THE QUEER LOVE PROJECT is a digital platform dedicated to exploring love and commitment among queer relationships, whether that’s romantic, platonic, among friends and found family, or with oneself.

We accept personal essays on a rolling basis that reveal heartbreaks, happiness, secrets, reflections on coming out, sexual encounters, and the contemporary realities of dating. The intersection of families and other versions of “love” all make sense as we investigate the question: “What do we know about love?” Your nonfiction piece should have a clear take away from the experience, so it’s not just an anecdote but shows that there was some growth or lesson learned. Think “Modern Love”—but only queer stories.

Along with our general call for submissions, we are also seeking essays that are focused on the theme: SECOND CHANCES. How do you define a second chance? What did you learn from a second chance? How did someone give you a second chance? The topic is open to your interpretation, and we look forward to reading what it means to you! Deadline: February 14th

Learn More/Submit

📢 Join ’s January Workshops

This Saturday, Jan 24 and next Saturday, Jan 30 we are hosting two workshops: Fictionalizing Family Archives with and StoryJustice: Social Justice Storytelling with . We have a few seats available in both. All of our workshops are sliding scale.

Paid subscribers take 20% off workshops!

Learn More/Sign Up

Literary Liberation wants your workshop proposals!

Literary Liberation is looking for workshop proposals that crack open new worlds, sessions that make space for the voices this world tries to silence, and courses that remind us writing is both weapon and salve. Sounds like a place you want to share your expertise? Pitch your workshop to us!

Deadline: February 28, 2026

Propose a Workshop

Freedom Ways essay submissions close March 1

Memoir Land and Literary Liberation’s ongoing essay collaboration will stop accepting submissions this year on March 1, 2026. We will publish four essays in 2026. Take time to read our submission guidelines prior to submitting. We only consider and accept submissions by writers of the Global Majority. To get a clear idea of what we publish, read through the entire series so far. We pay for every published essay through paid subscriptions. Upgrade/manage your membership at any time to keep this series and others like it alive and healthy.

Check out the first three essays in the series…

Learn More/Submit

📢 From : The Art & Practice of the Essay Workshop

Guided by Best American Essays series editor and award-winning author Kim Dana Kupperman, open the doors to the art and practice of the essay through an immersive, generative process of reading to write and reading to re-vision.

Dates: Mar 24, 2026 – Apr 14, 2026 View session dates & times Levels: Beginner, Intermediate Workshop Fee: $450 Workshop Duration: 12 hours over 4 sessions (Tuesdays, 1-4 pm ET) Workshop Location: Online Class Size: 8

Learn More/Register

📢 Attention Publications and writers interested in having published essays considered for inclusion in our weekly curation:

By Thursday of each week, please send to memoirmonday@gmail.com:

1. The title of the essay and a link to it.

2. Your name and Substack profile link, if you have one, so I can tag you in the post.

3. A paragraph or a few lines from the piece that will most entice readers.

   Please be advised that we cannot accept all submissions, nor respond to the overwhelming number of emails received. Also, please note that we don’t accept author submissions from our partner publications.

   Subscribe now

   ---

Notebooks! Shirts! Mugs! Get Your Memoir Land Merch!

Memoir Land Merch

1. Memoir Monday, a weekly curation of the best personal essays from around the web brought to you by Narratively, The Rumpus,  Granta, Oldster Magazine, Literary Hub, Orion Magazine, The Walrus, and Electric Literature. Below is this week’s curation. ⬇️

2. First Person Singular, featuring original personal essays.

3. The Lit Lab, featuring interviews—The Memoir Land Author Questionnaire—and essays on craft and publishing. There are also weekly writing prompts and other exercises from, ahem, a New York Times bestselling ghostwriter of memoirs (that’s me) exclusively for paid subscribers.

4. Goodbye to All That, where I continue to explore my fascination with the most wonderful and terrible city in the world, something I began doing with two NYC-centric anthologies, Goodbye to All That, and Never Can Say Goodbye.

***WHILE I HAVE YOU…I am considering abandoning the “Memoir Monday” series. These posts take a tremendous amount of work on my part—reading and considering so many essayists’ work, listing opportunities for free—and they rarely convert readers to paid subscribers. I’m not going to keep doing this if not enough readers want to support it.

Since the advent of the internet, we have been trained to never pay for content we consume, rather accepting that deep-pocketed advertisers would cover it—thus giving them a lot of power to decide what is shown to us.

If I’ve featured your work or that of your publication’s contributors…if you’re a publicists whose clients I’ve regularly featured…if you’re a regular reader of this series or Memoir Land and just want to help me keep doing ALL THIS and paying essayists, please consider becoming a paid subscriber…*

Subscribe now

Click here to get more out of this post by reading it online rather than in your inbox.

Essays from Partner Publications…

Hush

By

“I feel the heat of my mother and grandmother’s laughter and hear the clink of knives to plates as he plucks me from my body, leaving me to rot. After, as we sit around the table with our family, I feel the sour, acidic breath of death pushing against my face. I feel the lack of distance. The awareness that he will never stop. The old, animal parts of me that know how to spot a predator tell me that next time, he will eat me.”

Electric Literature

Go Get Yours, E. Jean

by

“As a survivor of sexual harm, I’d accepted a wan sex life for years, blaming my “issues” on the harm I’d experienced as a child. I’d still be captive to that belief if, too, had I not been forced to confront finding myself newly single at 64.”

Oldster

Turmeric Nine Ways

by Preeti Talwai

“Before the first yoga moms and golden chai lattes, the yellow spice was the love language of my foremothers. I am small when my Amma and my Amma’s Amma smear it over blacks and blues, dab it where paper has grazed skin, swirl it into too-warm milk and pots of dal. Always with sweet nicknames, lullabies, prayers. I grow tall enough to see over these words, into their trailing shadows: doctor’s visits, reluctantly booked after the aches root deep in our bellies; the suffering, threaded beneath the sequins of our ghagra-choli. I learn how even this spoonful of sun holds the shadow of Other People Knowing our brokenness.”

The Rumpus

The Mother of the Jersey Devil

by Adam Leeds Latham

“I had come to the Pine Barrens of New Jersey to research a novel about a pair of amateur cryptozoologists who travel the country and investigate monsters like Bigfoot while struggling through their marital issues and the husband’s bipolar disorder. Of all the landscapes I’d visited to get the settings right—the mountains of Humboldt County for Bigfoot, Big Bend National Park for La Lechuza, Scape Ore Swamp for the Lizard Man, Ocala National Forest for skunk apes, the Northwoods for wendigos, Canyon de Chelly for skinwalkers—this was the only place that creeped me out.”

Orion Magazine

Essays from Around the Web…

They Were Ordinary Germans. We Are Ordinary Americans.

by

“One summer day, years ago, I chanced upon the diary of a German soldier from the early 1940s in a flea market in New York City. It was buried among a bunch of other random items — hat blocks, Matchbox cars, an Underwood typewriter. There was so much I might have missed it, but I am Jewish; books adorned with eagles perched on swastikas tend to catch my eye.”

New York Times/Opinion

In Your Arms I Would Start A War: A Heated Rivalry Notebook

by

“The meteoric rise of the show, the return of the novels to the bestseller list, and the intensity of fans, all are reminders that the regime’s attempt to use political power to enact cultural power was not equal to the task of keeping this from us. And so it is sweeter, even tinged with revenge, to devour basically all the content around this show, including the brand posts.”

The Querent

I Knew He Was Gay When I Met Him—and I Married Him Anyway

by

“When people ask if I knew my first husband, Tony, was gay when we got married, the answer is yes, I did. The explanation I often give—Um, yeah, I met him in a gay bar at Mardi Gras!—is not quite true. What is true is that I knew he was gay before I ever met him. He had trained as a competitive ice skater in Lake Placid, New York, where my best friend Sandye had gone to art school. He was a much-loved character, always referred to as ‘Tony, the gay ice skater.’ Sometimes, ‘the gorgeous gay ice skater.’”

Oprah Daily

Creative Detours

by

“I still have such a strong, possibly irrational desire for women I love to self-actualize; it remains hard for me to witness my dear friends thwarted by men in their efforts to live their best lives. At this point, I’ve seen the pattern with several girlfriends – marriage, divorce (often devastating) and a winding detour that takes years and years for them to recover from, to reclaim their own path of fulfillment. Men can throw a woman off course big time. I’d like to think a good girlfriend can help her get back on track. Maybe, and maybe not. But I’ll probably never stop trying.”

Naked Acts of Love

Our Bodies, Our Bathing Suits

by

“Another body blessing is age. Now that I’m 61, I weirdly find myself more confident in a bathing suit, especially around swimmers, than in street clothes. Aging has brought me more freedom to give less of a fuck about what other people think, of my body, of my words, of me. Part of that is the joy and freedom I find in open water, where no matter how short or long I swim, I always feel like I have done something exceptional.”

Words & Water

My Year as a Fire Nomad

by

“While awaiting imminent smoke remediation, I spent time in just about every neighborhood in L.A. My odyssey would take me from FEMA-sponsored hotels in West Hollywood and Venice (nice ones!) to guest houses in Rancho Park and Eagle Rock, to spare bedrooms in Woodland Hills and Monrovia. En route I would find true love, caught up in the kind of fire that has no source other than the Great Mystery.”

LA Reported

The Wada Test (awarded the Annie Dillard Prize by Bellingham Review)

by

“I picture the surgical process as immaculate. I no longer consider the violence of the incision. The slow recovery. The trauma of removal. I imagine a surgical removal of my husband.”

Bellingham Review

What We Broke

by Lia Hagen

“The funny thing about being molested before you’re old enough to remember is that you feel the need to prove, even to yourself, that it happened. I used to write about being assaulted all the time. I’d tilt the limited memories in the sunlight like a mirror, then chase them across the ceiling like a cat. I remember little, and I was told even less.”

Split Lip Magazine

I Was a Married Mom in a Narcissist’s Harem

by

“I was aware of the harem-ness of it all—how these afternoons spent lazing at Leo’s resembled a scene from ancient times, a bunch of women called forth by a powerful sultan. But instead of feeding him grapes, we fed him attention. We also had roles. I was the only mom besides his wife, so I was his nanny. ‘Carpooling’ quickly turned into me driving his kids to activities allegedly so that he could make dinner, but when I dropped them off at home, he would be on the couch playing video games, his wife clicking away on her laptop beside him.”

Elle Magazine

Splash Damage

by

“Manipulative. The word reverberates, and my shoulders sag from the weight of it. My throat closes up, and I shudder against an unwelcome onslaught of grief. Thoughts of Kazuya intermingle with memories of my father, dead now twelve years, and I refuse to countenance that connection. Not yet. Not here. Masa squeezes my hand, and, as I always do, I will the sorrow away. I smile at him, saying, ‘I should go home.’ Masa’s voice hums low and soft. ‘Do you want company?’”

The Queer Love Project

Muscle Memory

by Mieke de Vries

“After nearly two years of testosterone, a year after top surgery and six months after a hysterectomy, the existence of my body gives me pleasure: a joy everyone deserves to feel. Joy joy joy when I look at my body: my round hairy belly, my small yet dense biceps budding under my freckled skin, my flat chest with a small patch of hair between my horizontal scars.”

Psyche

I Spent Decades Searching For My Mom’s Lost Baby

by

“When she was healthy, she rarely spoke of him. As an adult, I asked her about him—hoping to learn more—but regretted it when her eyes dropped and shoulders stiffened. ‘It’s in the past, Michele. Let it go.’ But in the bi-polar manic spirals that eventually returned, she’d cry out for him in the early morning hours when she should have been sleeping. She’d scribble his name on notepads and photos before tearing them apart and tossing them on the floor.”

Light Into Dark Places

The Church Lady I Became to Survive Being Queer

by

“y reasoning was straightforward: If I turned into the most noticeable, the most committed, the most ideal Catholic girl, nobody would ever guess. Homosexuals were those individuals—the ones who’d wandered from their beliefs, who’d been tainted by Western society, who didn’t love God enough. But me? I attended every single Mass. I had memorized all the prayers. I made treats for fundraisers and supervised retreats. Someone like me couldn’t be gay.”

Open Secrets Magazine

Did She Have Dreams?: Christopher Nolan's Insomnia in Five Women

by

“I’ve long given up trying to be objective, writing around my own opinion, CTRL+F at the end to erase myself from the essay—the writer Kate Zambreno calls this a form of repression. Instead, I make the choice to acknowledge myself: a woman and a writer, though I’m never sure which I am first. (One more woman in parts, in pieces.) So hello, here I am, another woman watching another movie about another dead girl, trying once more to make sense out of something that will never make sense; a life taken and a girl gone, try as I might to keep her alive through language.”

Bright Wall Dark Room

🚨Announcements:

📢 Only 4 spots left!: Want to work on a personal essay with me in Vermont in April? Registration is open for the Southern Vermont Writers’ Conference, at which I am leading a workshop…

For the second time, I’ll be leading a personal essay writing workshop at The Southern Vermont Writers’ Conference. It was a great group last time. Maybe this time you’ll join us?

Learn More/Sign Up

📢 All February, at ’s : 28 x 20: Daily Prompts for Writing Super-Short Personal Essays in 20 Minutes

“28 X 20 is an invitation to dive into the daily rhythm of crafting short pieces. 28 days. 28 prompts. 28 micro-stories. 20 minutes each. No time to overthink it. No toe-dipping. Grab momentum, sharpen your skills, blow out your range, and end the month with a richer, more confident practice. Y'all. February is the shortest month. You can do this.”

For paid subscribers to . (Save 25% on subscriptions now…)

Learn More/Sign Up/Save 25%

📢 is seeking personal essays and creative nonfiction

THE QUEER LOVE PROJECT is a digital platform dedicated to exploring love and commitment among queer relationships, whether that’s romantic, platonic, among friends and found family, or with oneself.

We accept personal essays on a rolling basis that reveal heartbreaks, happiness, secrets, reflections on coming out, sexual encounters, and the contemporary realities of dating. The intersection of families and other versions of “love” all make sense as we investigate the question: “What do we know about love?” Your nonfiction piece should have a clear take away from the experience, so it’s not just an anecdote but shows that there was some growth or lesson learned. Think “Modern Love”—but only queer stories.

Along with our general call for submissions, we are also seeking essays that are focused on the theme: SECOND CHANCES. How do you define a second chance? What did you learn from a second chance? How did someone give you a second chance? The topic is open to your interpretation, and we look forward to reading what it means to you! Deadline: February 14th

Learn More/Submit

📢 Join ’s January Workshops

This Saturday, Jan 24 and next Saturday, Jan 30 we are hosting two workshops: Fictionalizing Family Archives with and StoryJustice: Social Justice Storytelling with . We have a few seats available in both. All of our workshops are sliding scale.

Paid subscribers take 20% off workshops!

Learn More/Sign Up

Literary Liberation wants your workshop proposals!

Literary Liberation is looking for workshop proposals that crack open new worlds, sessions that make space for the voices this world tries to silence, and courses that remind us writing is both weapon and salve. Sounds like a place you want to share your expertise? Pitch your workshop to us!

Deadline: February 28, 2026

Propose a Workshop

Freedom Ways essay submissions close March 1

Memoir Land and Literary Liberation’s ongoing essay collaboration will stop accepting submissions this year on March 1, 2026. We will publish four essays in 2026. Take time to read our submission guidelines prior to submitting. We only consider and accept submissions by writers of the Global Majority. To get a clear idea of what we publish, read through the entire series so far. We pay for every published essay through paid subscriptions. Upgrade/manage your membership at any time to keep this series and others like it alive and healthy.

Check out the first three essays in the series…

Learn More/Submit

📢 From : The Art & Practice of the Essay Workshop

Guided by Best American Essays series editor and award-winning author Kim Dana Kupperman, open the doors to the art and practice of the essay through an immersive, generative process of reading to write and reading to re-vision.

Dates: Mar 24, 2026 – Apr 14, 2026 View session dates & times Levels: Beginner, Intermediate Workshop Fee: $450 Workshop Duration: 12 hours over 4 sessions (Tuesdays, 1-4 pm ET) Workshop Location: Online Class Size: 8

Learn More/Register

📢 Just One More Day to Apply for , , and ’ Ministry of Words Teaching Collective…

The Ministry of Words is a teaching collective offering courses in fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. Fatimah Asghar and Ingrid Rojas Contreras are brilliant, award-winning writers and teachers whose work and minds I wildly admire, and I’ve learned so much from them for my own writing and teaching. They’re also excellent, kind instructors. Our work has been recognized by institutions including the Pulitzer, Lambda Literary, the National Book Awards, the Carol Shields Award, the National Book Critics Circle, and more. We’ll bring to The Ministry of Words what we’ve learned from teaching at places including Stanford University, Tin House, Sewanee, Community of Writers, Scripps College, the Atlantic Center for the Arts, and elsewhere.

The classes will each be four months long, and will start 2/4—the first spring semester will focus on generating work, and the fall semester will be workshop-based (with help, for those who want it, on working toward publication). The application deadline is TOMORROW, 1/20. You can sign up for one or both, and there are limited partial scholarships for writers of color. We’ll offer cross-disciplinary lectures open to all participants, as well as space for shared online writing sessions that bring together all 3 classes on the weeks we’re not meeting. In addition, we’ll have opportunities to form long-lasting community—many of our former students have been meeting regularly for years.

By putting this together, we wanted to create a structured place outside of academia for people to work on their writing and craft, a place that’s nurturing and community-fostering and generally supportive and fun. If you have any questions, we’d love to hear from you.

Learn More/Apply

📢 Attention Publications and writers interested in having published essays considered for inclusion in our weekly curation:

By Thursday of each week, please send to memoirmonday@gmail.com:

1. The title of the essay and a link to it.

2. Your name and Substack profile link, if you have one, so I can tag you in the post.

3. A paragraph or a few lines from the piece that will most entice readers.

   Please be advised that we cannot accept all submissions, nor respond to the overwhelming number of emails received. Also, please note that we don’t accept author submissions from our partner publications.

   Subscribe now

   ---

Notebooks! Shirts! Mugs! Get Your Memoir Land Merch!

Memoir Land Merch

1. Memoir Monday, a weekly curation of the best personal essays from around the web brought to you by Narratively, The Rumpus,  Granta, Oldster Magazine, Literary Hub, Orion Magazine, The Walrus, and Electric Literature. Below is this week’s curation. ⬇️

2. First Person Singular, featuring original personal essays.

3. The Lit Lab, featuring interviews—The Memoir Land Author Questionnaire—and essays on craft and publishing. There are also weekly writing prompts and other exercises from, ahem, a New York Times bestselling ghostwriter of memoirs (that’s me) exclusively for paid subscribers.

4. Goodbye to All That, where I continue to explore my fascination with the most wonderful and terrible city in the world, something I began doing with two NYC-centric anthologies, Goodbye to All That, and Never Can Say Goodbye.

While I have you…I could use some more support in the form of paid subscriptions. If I’ve featured your work or that of your publication’s contributors…if you’re a publicists whose clients I’ve regularly featured…if you just want to help me keep doing ALL THIS and paying contributors, please consider becoming a paid subscriber…*

Subscribe now

Click here to get more out of this post by reading it online rather than in your inbox.

Essays from Partner Publications…

Better Than the Spa: Why I Dive Into Iqaluit’s Icy Waters

By

The purposeful walk into cold water is different from a sauna or spa experience, because it takes courage to enter the water without the cushioning of coming from or returning to a warm environment. I’m learning a new sense of control and release, a new understanding of sitting in discomfort, and a new way to flood my system with self-generated warmth.

The Walrus

No More Cows, an excerpt of Mega Milk

by

“Did the cows watch in judgment as we buried their bodies in ours? Did they strain in protest within the confines of their paralysis? Perhaps they preferred this new domestication to the lives they would have lived on a farm, popping out calves and pumping out milk. Perhaps they grasped it wasn’t their milk in our mouths. Perhaps they possessed no sentience.

Electric Literature

How Back to the Future Made Me a Misfit Skateboarder

by Sean Mortimer

“If you’d stopped thirteen-year-old me—anxious and lacking confidence—before I entered the theater for Back to the Future and said that if I chose skateboarding I would have to run from cops and even get tackled and put in headlocks by the boys in blue, become a walking target for empty bottles and worse thrown by strangers, and have school guidance counselors laugh in my face, I would have said no thanks.”

LitHub

Finding My Mom Again, On the Page

by

“My mother called herself a homemaker as so many women of her generation did. She raised four children—a boy and three girls. She starched my father’s shirts, even ironed his handkerchiefs. She cooked our meals. She sewed many of our clothes. She was patient, thorough, anxious, creative, studied, even though she never earned her college degree. But more than all of that, she was an artist.”

Oldster

Essays from Around the Web…

Balthazar, 1997

by

“I’d been working at Balthazar for a few months when Debra pulled me aside to tell me they knew I’d lied on my resume. Was I fired? I was not. Debra said, “You’re unusually nice to the customers, so we’re keeping you. The customers think your niceness is genuine. They love you.” Was I nicer than other people at the restaurant? I was. Was it genuine? That depends on what you mean by “genuine.” I’d kind of grown this personality, or I thought I had. Sometimes, you become the thing you’ve found you’re good at.”

The Paris Review

My Dad is Homeless and I Just Keep Going to Sunglass Hut Like a Damn Fool

by

“What’s currently troubling me is that, a couple months ago, I found out that my dad started squatting in an abandoned house in Puerto Rico. I hadn’t heard from him in a while. He’d been in jail over the summer and lost his cellphone and had to wait for a new one from the government, and I was honestly already an emotional mess after two family deaths this year and hadn’t done enough to check in on him. When I eventually learned about his situation, the news was almost more confusing than it was shocking. He was doing what? Why? What can we do? Was he ok?”

Aligator Tears

The Humble Potato

by

“To tell you my story I have to start with the history of the potato because the history of the potato is the history of imperialism and poverty and perseverance. Thanks to 16^th century Conquistadors, potatoes made their way across the Atlantic Ocean from their home in South America and soon were adopted across the European continent. And across Russia. That’s where I come in.”

All-American Story

Counting Down

by

“Now that two of my sons are engaged, planning weddings and families, I find myself counting down—wondering how many years I’ll have with future grandchildren before I die. If the first grandchild is born in two years and I live to the age of my mother, now ninety-five, I’ll have more years than my father had with my children. If I live to my father’s age, that will get me to my grandchild’s elementary and middle school years.”

Still Point Arts Quarterly

When my mom died, I didn't know if I could sing for her even though I do it for a living

by

“Somewhere along the path of letting go and becoming, I had decided to source my energy from somewhere else — from the mysterious, magical place where grief lives — the same place where awe lives, which is where my mom probably lives.”

CNN

Phantom Pains

by Rochelle L. Johnson

“The doctors spoke of these sensations as far-off possibilities. As if they might occur for a moment or cause a mild distraction one day. As if those doctors didn't quite believe in ghosts. Those doctors did not realize the power of apparitions. The phantoms came quickly and fiercely, and they stayed. They are with me still. They taught me something I dared only to hope in the weeks leading to my surgery: a body never forgets what it has been.”

The Georgia Review

How I Got My Groove Back at the Senior Center

by

“At first, I couldn’t imagine that it would be as much fun to bust a move with a bunch of my fellow oldsters as it was when I went to clubs and checked out the hot guys who burned up the dance floor.”

The Ethel/AARP

🚨Announcements:

📢 Only 4 spots left!: Want to work on a personal essay with me in Vermont in April? Registration is open for the Southern Vermont Writers’ Conference, at which I am leading a workshop…

For the second time, I’ll be leading a personal essay writing workshop at The Southern Vermont Writers’ Conference. It was a great group last time. Maybe this time you’ll join us?

Learn More/Sign Up

📢 All February, at ’s : 28 x 20: Daily Prompts for Writing Super-Short Personal Essays in 20 Minutes

“28 X 20 is an invitation to dive into the daily rhythm of crafting short pieces. 28 days. 28 prompts. 28 micro-stories. 20 minutes each. No time to overthink it. No toe-dipping. Grab momentum, sharpen your skills, blow out your range, and end the month with a richer, more confident practice. Y'all. February is the shortest month. You can do this.”

For paid subscribers to . (Save 25% on subscriptions now…)

Learn More/Sign Up/Save 25%

📢 is seeking personal essays and creative nonfiction

THE QUEER LOVE PROJECT is a digital platform dedicated to exploring love and commitment among queer relationships, whether that’s romantic, platonic, among friends and found family, or with oneself.

We accept personal essays on a rolling basis that reveal heartbreaks, happiness, secrets, reflections on coming out, sexual encounters, and the contemporary realities of dating. The intersection of families and other versions of “love” all make sense as we investigate the question: “What do we know about love?” Your nonfiction piece should have a clear take away from the experience, so it’s not just an anecdote but shows that there was some growth or lesson learned. Think “Modern Love”—but only queer stories.

Along with our general call for submissions, we are also seeking essays that are focused on the theme: SECOND CHANCES. How do you define a second chance? What did you learn from a second chance? How did someone give you a second chance? The topic is open to your interpretation, and we look forward to reading what it means to you! Deadline: February 14th

Learn More/Submit

📢 Register now for Winter 2026 workshops at

Our Winter 2026 workshops are open! Accessibility matters to us. Our workshops have supported-rate seats automatically built in at 30% off—reserved for community members facing financial barriers. Can you afford the standard rate? We’d love for you to grab a regular seat instead, helping us keep these supported spots open for those who need them. Want to do even more? Choose our pay-it-forward option to sponsor access for others.

Sliding scale • First come, first served • All workshops recorded!

Learn More/Sign Up

Also from : Support NOURISH, a mutual aid project.

NOURISH is an ongoing mutual aid project created by Literary Liberation. I’m partnering with Lit Lib to help increase awareness and encourage sponsors to pledge support to community members who need help feeding their loved ones. The goal is to raise at least $25,000, and any amount helps. We want to send a minimum of $150 to each household in the form of grocery store gift cards.

To learn more about how it works and to support this cause, read here:

Learn More

Donate

📢 From : The Art & Practice of the Essay Workshop

Guided by Best American Essays series editor and award-winning author Kim Dana Kupperman, open the doors to the art and practice of the essay through an immersive, generative process of reading to write and reading to re-vision.

Dates: Mar 24, 2026 – Apr 14, 2026 View session dates & times Levels: Beginner, Intermediate Workshop Fee: $450 Workshop Duration: 12 hours over 4 sessions (Tuesdays, 1-4 pm ET) Workshop Location: Online Class Size: 8

Learn More/Register

📢 Last Day to Sign Up for Off Assignment’s Generating the Personal Essay with

The hardest part of writing, often enough, is just getting started. And for those of us who write creative nonfiction, the problem is usually a glut, rather than a lack, of ideas. We essayists can choose to write about exactly everything we’ve ever done, thought, imagined, feared, regretted doing, celebrated not doing, etc. These limitless choices can be paralyzing. And whenever we’re feeling paralyzed, one of the best remedies is to simply reduce our choices. Constrain them. Channel them. Through a mix of close reading, craft talks, guided exercises, and weekly table reads of works-in-progress, we’ll generate reams of new writing, and we’ll work together to polish that writing via in-depth, strengths-based feedback. This six-week course, offered over Zoom and limited to 16 students, is all about overcoming decision fatigue, getting words on the page, and getting surprised by what we produce.

Dates: Mondays: January 12 - February 16 | 6 - 8:30 p.m. EST Price: $530 (Memoir Monday readers can use code MEMOIR20 for 20% off)

Learn More/Sign Up

📢 Apply for , , and ’ Ministry of Words Teaching Collective

The Ministry of Words is a teaching collective offering courses in fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. Fatimah Asghar and Ingrid Rojas Contreras are brilliant, award-winning writers and teachers whose work and minds I wildly admire, and I’ve learned so much from them for my own writing and teaching. They’re also excellent, kind instructors. Our work has been recognized by institutions including the Pulitzer, Lambda Literary, the National Book Awards, the Carol Shields Award, the National Book Critics Circle, and more. We’ll bring to The Ministry of Words what we’ve learned from teaching at places including Stanford University, Tin House, Sewanee, Community of Writers, Scripps College, the Atlantic Center for the Arts, and elsewhere.

The classes will each be four months long, and will start 2/4—the first spring semester will focus on generating work, and the fall semester will be workshop-based (with help, for those who want it, on working toward publication). The application deadline is 1/20. You can sign up for one or both, and there are limited partial scholarships for writers of color. We’ll offer cross-disciplinary lectures open to all participants, as well as space for shared online writing sessions that bring together all 3 classes on the weeks we’re not meeting. In addition, we’ll have opportunities to form long-lasting community—many of our former students have been meeting regularly for years.

By putting this together, we wanted to create a structured place outside of academia for people to work on their writing and craft, a place that’s nurturing and community-fostering and generally supportive and fun. If you have any questions, we’d love to hear from you.

Learn More/Apply

📢 Call for Submissions for “Freedom Ways,” a Collaboration Between Memoir Land and

Memoir Land and Literary Liberation co-publish an essay series that is now called “Freedom Ways.” Rate: $150. For submissions guidelines, deadlines and more, visit Literary Liberation. Here are the first two essays in the series:

Learn More/Submit

📢 Attention Publications and writers interested in having published essays considered for inclusion in our weekly curation:

By Thursday of each week, please send to memoirmonday@gmail.com:

1. The title of the essay and a link to it.

2. Your name and Substack profile link, if you have one, so I can tag you in the post.

3. A paragraph or a few lines from the piece that will most entice readers.

   Please be advised that we cannot accept all submissions, nor respond to the overwhelming number of emails received. Also, please note that we don’t accept author submissions from our partner publications.

   Subscribe now

   ---

Notebooks! Shirts! Mugs! Get Your Memoir Land Merch!

Memoir Land Merch

1. Memoir Monday, a weekly curation of the best personal essays from around the web brought to you by Narratively, The Rumpus,  Granta, Oldster Magazine, Literary Hub, Orion Magazine, The Walrus, and Electric Literature. Below is this week’s curation. ⬇️

2. First Person Singular, featuring original personal essays.

3. The Lit Lab, featuring interviews—The Memoir Land Author Questionnaire—and essays on craft and publishing. There are also weekly writing prompts and other exercises from, ahem, a New York Times bestselling ghostwriter of memoirs (that’s me) exclusively for paid subscribers.

4. Goodbye to All That, where I continue to explore my fascination with the most wonderful and terrible city in the world, something I began doing with two NYC-centric anthologies, Goodbye to All That, and Never Can Say Goodbye.

While I have you…I could use some more support in the form of paid subscriptions. If I’ve featured your work or that of your publication’s contributors…if you’re a publicists whose clients I’ve regularly featured…if you just want to help me keep doing ALL THIS and paying contributors, please consider becoming a paid subscriber…*

Subscribe now

*Thanks to everyone who contributed to last week’s crowd-sourced edition of Memoir Monday with their favorite essays published in 2025! It’s a great list. Check it out…*

Click here to get more out of this post by reading it online rather than in your inbox.

Essays from Partner Publications…

The Orcapause: How learning about “the Grandmother Hypothesis” helped Leslie Schwartz to find meaning in cronehood.

by

“Grandmothers, it turns out, explain why we don’t need to die after menopause. Our roles as menses-less dowagers improves the survival and fertility of our offspring and, most importantly, their children, perpetuating our species indefinitely. How formidable is that?”

Oldster

Center of Gravity

by

“I’ve always been good at picking Ethan out of a crowd. When you love someone, you know where they are. I can taste the roar and purr of the ice under his blades. I imagine his parents watching him as a boy—the way we would’ve watched ours, the way we never will— slitting the ice like scissors through silk. I resent his ability to keep upright on uneven terrain. He hasn’t changed, I think. He’s as solid as twenty-five years ago, when I first sat by him on the staff-room couch, distracted by his biceps. His body is still his and I hate him for it.”

The Rumpus

Ghosts on the Range: Searching for evil and finding ourselves amidst a haunting pattern of cattle mutilations in the West

by

“Each explanation was stranger than the last. They even included Sasquatch and a mythic creature at least known for draining the blood out of livestock: the chupacabra. People believed—still believe—the mutilations are the work of some dark force. The stories spread from one person to another through news, television, conversations between neighbors. It made me think of the time my mother had dinner with a man who’d spent his life looking for Sasquatch. She came away from the encounter convinced the cryptid was real.”

Orion Magazine

Feather By Feather: On Life, Death, and Birding

by Farah Naz Rishi

“A few days after my brother died, I sat in the living room of a dead house and made eye contact with a bird. It’d been raining that day: the world outside had been coated in a wet, pewter varnish, muted and hollow. My mother and I sat on the couch in a stunned stillness, each cradling a mug of chamomile tea we weren’t really drinking. Everyone who’d come to the funeral had left the night before. Now it was just us, trying to make sense of the quiet.”

LitHub

Essays from Around the Web…

Wake up, Maggie, I think I got somethin’ to say to you

by

“On April 30, 1971, the doctor took me from my mother and carried me down the hallway to a foster care ward. Under the law, my mom had 30 days to change her mind. She saw a psychiatrist in downtown Providence, where she began to hear herself think for the first time. Her mother had died. Her stepfather was a drunk. She was an unmarried mother to a child whom she’d just given up for adoption.”

Haganomics

How to Grow Out of Weed

by

“At some point, the combination of weed and the success of the show stopped getting me high on a deeper level. The thing that once opened me up began to quietly define the edges of who I was allowed to be. The attachment to weed, and the attachment to the version of myself that made High Maintenance, started to feel less like creative freedom and more like maintenance in the literal sense: upkeep, repetition, preservation. I was gripping the rope for dear life.”

Low Maintenance

My Mother’s Last, Best Gift Was an Astonishing Secret

by

“Back in their 20s, my mother gave my father the marry-me-or-lose-me ultimatum that was a standard of the day. But he told her he couldn’t because he was gay. She surprised him by saying that she wanted to marry him anyway. Her reason? Sketchy, because of the lack of nuance. But my guess is that she was already totally in love with him, because she was all her life.”

NYTimes Styles/Modern Love

I Never Expected My Mom to Move Into a Retirement Community. I Now Realize She May Have Been Hiding a Devastating Secret

by Kathryn Smith

“Lately, I find myself weeping in my bed when the night sky is at its blackest and my husband Geoff is dead asleep on his side, his silhouette a distant mountain range. I press my face into my damp pillow to mute the occasional, plaintive chirp. I’ve never been much of a crier, so these late-night keening sessions make no sense. I’m a fifty-nine-year-old happily-married woman, my children are healthy and grown, yet when the lights go out and the world lies down, a single phrase repeats itself in my mind: I want my mom.”

HuffPost Personal

I Became ‘That’ Girl at a Friend’s Party

by

“The front desk receptionist was the focal point of the head office. I had to look my best for the many important visitors who arrived each day. I was pretty and slim after discovering diet pills earlier that year. They changed my life. They were basically pure speed — sleep was a challenge. The weight fell off me. Who cared about sleep?”

Medium/Black Bear

How to Eat Grits

by

“Years later, I realized grits are a cousin to many foods. Maize or maiz is an Aztec food that originated in Mexico. Although I was born in Los Angeles, my family’s origins trace back centuries to Africa. Portuguese slave traders did business in the Black enslaved and in corn as well. Their slave ships, sickening and despicably tight, arrived in the Americas filled with human cargo, then returned to the African coast laden with corn, tomatoes, and chocolate.”

A Gathering Together

No Contact

by

“In the prison visiting room, Mom asked the guard to give me a maxi pad. It was thick and white, nondescript. No brand I’d ever heard of. We ain’t got Always with Wings in here, the guard said, laughing. I was twenty-five, but I felt like some dumb teenager, getting my period at the worst time. I wasn’t allowed to have my purse, couldn’t even wear a belt into the visiting room. It was the first time I’d seen my mother in seven years, and now I had red splotches crawling up my neck from the guard’s joke.”

Hypertext Magazine

The Inheritance I Bought: A dead woman’s milk glass collection became the family heirloom I never had

by

“I wish I could say I collect milk glass, but I don’t. I’m the keeper of someone else’s collection—a dead woman’s life work that I rescued from an estate sale almost twenty years ago. The Blue Woman, as I think of her, lived in a house completely immersed in blue: blue carpet, blue couch, blue curtains. But it was her milk glass that caught my attention—hundreds of white pieces scattered throughout her home, filling a large area with shelves upon shelves.”

Open Secrets Magazine

The Light Within

by

“Reyes, carrying the wrapped painting like an enormous relic, followed me as I picked around a path that led me past a carport and up a slope to the front porch of a trailer. This scene was sketch. I rang the doorbell. The door opened. There stood Eddie, very short and wide with greased back hair, wearing a white button-down shirt with suspenders, unbuttoned to show a ribbed tank undershirt, and black suit pants with shiny shoes. Beside him, a henchman-looking guy in similar garb. Eddie invited us in. I felt simultaneously like I was about to get killed and also couldn’t possibly refuse.”

The Ekphrastic Review

I’m Still Here

by

“Some women—like Molly—when faced with impending death, decide to have as much wild sex as possible. I decided to make bread. It was not something that I planned or even thought about. I had just successfully finished three rounds of chemo. My scans were clear, and I was getting my ostomy reversed very soon. I was slowly getting my life back. So I still cannot, for the life of me, explain how and why I had the overwhelming desire to create sourdough starter from scratch one random autumn day in 2023.”

Substack

🚨Announcements:

📢 Only 4 spots left!: Want to work on a personal essay with me in Vermont in April? Registration is open for the Southern Vermont Writers’ Conference, at which I am leading a workshop…

For the second time, I’ll be leading a personal essay writing workshop at The Southern Vermont Writers’ Conference. It was a great group last time. Maybe this time you’ll join us?

Learn More/Sign Up

📢 Tomorrow (Tuesday, 1/6) at : Telling Your Story: The 90-Minute Seminar for Kickstarting Your Memoir with

This seminar is right for you if:

• You’ve been thinking about writing a story about your own life but don’t know how to get started.

• You’ve begun writing a memoir but have hit some road blocks.

• You’re a recent high school grad or a 90-year-old retiree! Wherever you are in life, if you have a story you want to tell, this class will help kickstart the writing process.

This class takes place on Tuesday, January 6, 2026 from 7pm to 8:30pm ET. All Narratively Academy classes are conducted online and accessible to students anywhere in the world. This class will be recorded and shared with all enrolled students, but live attendance and participation is strongly encouraged. $60.

Learn More/Sign Up

📢 Register now for Winter 2026 workshops at

Our Winter 2026 workshops are open! Accessibility matters to us. Our workshops have supported-rate seats automatically built in at 30% off—reserved for community members facing financial barriers. Can you afford the standard rate? We’d love for you to grab a regular seat instead, helping us keep these supported spots open for those who need them. Want to do even more? Choose our pay-it-forward option to sponsor access for others.

Sliding scale • First come, first served • All workshops recorded!

Learn More/Sign Up

Also from : Support NOURISH, a mutual aid project.

NOURISH is an ongoing mutual aid project created by Literary Liberation. I’m partnering with Lit Lib to help increase awareness and encourage sponsors to pledge support to community members who need help feeding their loved ones. The goal is to raise at least $25,000, and any amount helps. We want to send a minimum of $150 to each household in the form of grocery store gift cards.

To learn more about how it works and to support this cause, read here:

Learn More

Donate

📢 Book Proposal Generator via The Shipman Agency

So, you have an idea for a book. Maybe you even already wrote it! Either way, you are ready for the next step. Does the thought of writing a book proposal for your nonfiction project make you want to light no fewer than 14 lavender-scented candles and lie in the dark for three days straight? You’re not alone! But after having written three book proposals, I promise you it’s not as daunting as it seems.

In order to demystify this seemingly overwhelming task, I’m thrilled to offer the Book Proposal Generator.

This generator is taught by Greg Mania, author of the memoir Born to Be Public, which has been named a best book of 2020 by NPR, O, The Oprah Magazine, Electric Literature, The Brooklyn Rail, Largehearted Boy, and was a 2020 Goodreads Choice Award Nominee for Best Humor.

8 Sessions: Saturdays, January 10 - February 28 9:00-11:00am ET. $500

Learn More/Sign Up

📢 Off Assignment’s Generating the Personal Essay with

The hardest part of writing, often enough, is just getting started. And for those of us who write creative nonfiction, the problem is usually a glut, rather than a lack, of ideas. We essayists can choose to write about exactly everything we’ve ever done, thought, imagined, feared, regretted doing, celebrated not doing, etc. These limitless choices can be paralyzing. And whenever we’re feeling paralyzed, one of the best remedies is to simply reduce our choices. Constrain them. Channel them. Through a mix of close reading, craft talks, guided exercises, and weekly table reads of works-in-progress, we’ll generate reams of new writing, and we’ll work together to polish that writing via in-depth, strengths-based feedback. This six-week course, offered over Zoom and limited to 16 students, is all about overcoming decision fatigue, getting words on the page, and getting surprised by what we produce.

Dates: Mondays: January 12 - February 16 | 6 - 8:30 p.m. EST Price: $530 (Memoir Monday readers can use code MEMOIR20 for 20% off)

Learn More/Sign Up

📢 Apply for , , and ’ Ministry of Words Teaching Collective

The Ministry of Words is a teaching collective offering courses in fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. Fatimah Asghar and Ingrid Rojas Contreras are brilliant, award-winning writers and teachers whose work and minds I wildly admire, and I’ve learned so much from them for my own writing and teaching. They’re also excellent, kind instructors. Our work has been recognized by institutions including the Pulitzer, Lambda Literary, the National Book Awards, the Carol Shields Award, the National Book Critics Circle, and more. We’ll bring to The Ministry of Words what we’ve learned from teaching at places including Stanford University, Tin House, Sewanee, Community of Writers, Scripps College, the Atlantic Center for the Arts, and elsewhere.

The classes will each be four months long, and will start 2/4—the first spring semester will focus on generating work, and the fall semester will be workshop-based (with help, for those who want it, on working toward publication). The application deadline is 1/20. You can sign up for one or both, and there are limited partial scholarships for writers of color. We’ll offer cross-disciplinary lectures open to all participants, as well as space for shared online writing sessions that bring together all 3 classes on the weeks we’re not meeting. In addition, we’ll have opportunities to form long-lasting community—many of our former students have been meeting regularly for years.

By putting this together, we wanted to create a structured place outside of academia for people to work on their writing and craft, a place that’s nurturing and community-fostering and generally supportive and fun. If you have any questions, we’d love to hear from you.

Learn More/Apply

📢 Call for Submissions for “Freedom Ways,” a Collaboration Between Memoir Land and

Memoir Land and Literary Liberation co-publish an essay series that is now called “Freedom Ways.” Rate: $150. For submissions guidelines, deadlines and more, visit Literary Liberation. Here are the first two essays in the series:

Learn More/Submit

📢 Attention Publications and writers interested in having published essays considered for inclusion in our weekly curation:

By Thursday of each week, please send to memoirmonday@gmail.com:

1. The title of the essay and a link to it.

2. Your name and Substack profile link, if you have one, so I can tag you in the post.

3. A paragraph or a few lines from the piece that will most entice readers.

   Please be advised that we cannot accept all submissions, nor respond to the overwhelming number of emails received. Also, please note that we don’t accept author submissions from our partner publications.

   Subscribe now

   ---

Notebooks! Shirts! Mugs! Get Your Memoir Land Merch!

Memoir Land Merch

Readers,

As I mentioned in last week’s “Memoir Monday” roundup, this week’s edition is crowd-sourced—something I do occasionally, whether I’m traveling, or caught up in the holiday shuffle.

I invite all of you to comment with the personal essays that have moved YOU the most in 2025.

So, in the comments tell me:

What have been your favorite personal essays published in 2025? Include the titles, author names, and publications associated with each of them, and if there’s a link you can share, please add that, too. You can share as many as you want. ***If you’d like to include ONE personal essay of your own, make sure you also include at least one by someone else.***

Leave a comment

Thanks for taking the ropes this week! I’ll be back on Monday, January 5th with another regular edition of the Memoir Monday weekly personal essay roundup.

- Sari Botton

Notebooks! Shirts! Mugs! Get Your Memoir Land Merch!

Memoir Land Merch

1. Memoir Monday, a weekly curation of the best personal essays from around the web brought to you by Narratively, The Rumpus,  Granta, Oldster Magazine, Literary Hub, Orion Magazine, The Walrus, and Electric Literature. Below is this week’s curation. ⬇️

2. First Person Singular, featuring original personal essays.

3. The Lit Lab, featuring interviews—The Memoir Land Author Questionnaire—and essays on craft and publishing. There are also weekly writing prompts and other exercises from, ahem, a New York Times bestselling ghostwriter of memoirs (that’s me) exclusively for paid subscribers.

4. Goodbye to All That, where I continue to explore my fascination with the most wonderful and terrible city in the world, something I began doing with two NYC-centric anthologies, Goodbye to All That, and Never Can Say Goodbye.

While I have you…I could use some more support in the form of paid subscriptions. If I’ve featured your work or that of your publication’s contributors…if you’re a publicists whose clients I’ve regularly featured…if you just want to help me keep doing ALL THIS and paying contributors, please consider becoming a paid subscriber…*

*Now through December 31st, save 20% forever on annual subscriptions to Memoir Land. Instead of $50/year, you pay $40. Memoir Land runs on paid subscriptions, and pays essayists and guest editors.*

Get 20% off forever

*Next week’s Memoir Monday newsletter will be crowd-sourced. Get ready to contribute your favorite personal essays of 2025 in the comments…*

Click here to get more out of this post by reading it online rather than in your inbox.

Essays from Partner Publications…

The End of the World Drives Us Into One Another’s Arms

by

“It is August 29, 2021, and she has spent all night sucking up warm, moist air. She has rapidly intensified into a Cat 4 monster. It is Sunday morning, it is the anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, it is six hours until landfall. Everyone evacuating has already evacuated. If you haven’t left by now, it is simply too late to leave.”

Electric Literature

Communal Living as a Writing Practice

by Sara Martin

“While living at the boarding house, I find myself describing it to people as literary. I think often of Anne Sexton writing, “I’m surprised the ocean is still going on,” except boarding house instead of ocean. At first, I thought it was a literary place because of its randomness or because of its likeness to the beginning of a Lemony Snicket book, but now it has more to do with the fact that being here feels like reading and writing. I am in the middle of Ana’s very particular aesthetic and other peoples’ lives, which is reading.”

LitHub

Winter Garden: Finding redemption in a place out of time

by

“Since I have begun working in the garden, I experience time differently. It passes much slower. It expands. The time until next spring feels like an eternity. The falling leaves of next autumn lie in an unimaginable distance. Summer too seems infinitely far away. Winter is already lasting forever. Working in the winter garden prolongs it. Never had winter seemed as long as in my first year as a gardener. I suffered a lot from the cold and lasting frost, not because of me, but mostly because of the plants which bloom in winter and kept their flowers despite all the snow and frost.”

Orion Magazine

Beaches

by

“Fran and I shared our Ocean Grove cottage for two decades. In good times it was pure joy. In bad times, our refuge. We had plenty of both. Instead of Delphi, Ocean Grove became our umbilicus. It always drew us back. It nourished us, centered us, for twenty years.”

Oldster

Essays from Around the Web…

My Own Heated Rivalry

by

“In the dusty, dark parking lot, we shared our first menthol kiss. He learned forward and grabbed me once again. But this time, I pushed him to the back of a wall and blew the smoke into his mouth, and our tongues met. “We need to swim in the river,“ he said to me before we walked back inside. I grabbed his crotch and said ‘yes.’”

NYMag/The Cut

No to the New! My Vintage-Only Holiday Gift Challenge

by

“Project Re-giving officially commenced at the end of Thanksgiving weekend, while enjoying a “mindfulness” overnight with my family at a spa in the Berkshires, a patch of Massachusetts that happens to be a hotbed of estate sales and antique shops. My determination clicked in as I lay on top of bolsters during a restorative Reiki session, my mind wafting over all of the people I am lucky enough to call family.”

Architectural Digest

There’s a Hole in My Heart Where My Friendship With My Ex-Girlfriend Used to Live

by

“The ache comes and goes, but I have a feeling I’ll spend the rest of my life wishing I could have her back, even if just for a few minutes, to tell her something nobody else would understand like she would. Sometimes I wish death were something people could jump in and out of, hopping back among the living when we truly need them, not as ghosts, but as their real, whole selves.”

The Queer Love Project

The world may be a runaway train right now, but here we’re all still on the uptown local.

by

“This past year, I’ve cycled through a few perspectives to process the horror show. One is the extreme long view, akin to my grandfather’s measured mantra, as I remember that humans have been bashing in one another’s skulls for a long time, that most societies throughout recorded history have featured some combo of slaves and slaughter for a variety of brutal and ludicrous rationales masking economic and cultural motives. And lest you think it was only a racial or colonial project, which much of it certainly was, look up the Sack of Magdeburg to groove on white-on-white European genocide. The long-view shtick works for a while, but the bleakness gets exhausting.”

NYMag/Curbed

My Coping Superpower: Finding Humor in the Darkness

by

“I’m in Philly FaceTiming with my sister Sue in Florida. She’s at Memory Care packing up our mother’s belongings and looking for an outfit to bury her in. This is no small task, given the devolution of her wardrobe from cute Chico’s ensembles to shapeless pullovers and elastic-waist pants (easier for diaper changes). ‘I swear, none of this is hers,’ Sue says, holding up a chartreuse sweatshirt with one sleeve missing. The absurdity of the moment sparks a memory and Sue and I simultaneously shout, ‘LET’S BURY HER IN THE LEOPARD SHIRT!’ before exploding into laughter.”

Provoked Magazine

Rescue

by Derek Maiolo

“The command came in that half-coach, half-boss tone from when I was a kid and served after school and weekends as his unpaid employee: Dig a hole; cut that board; grab the socket wrench—that’s an Allen wrench. I said a socket wrench. His face flushed when I got the wrenches wrong, which I did up to the day I left for college. He was trying to teach me how to be a man, he’d say, training my hands to know hard labor and calluses.”

Split Lip Magazine

On Surviving—and Befriending—Bullies

by

“Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about my own bullies, past and present. Of the scars they’ve left behind on my psyche even though they have long ago forgotten about inflicting them. Was there something in me? I wondered. And if there was a vulnerability, how was it so detectable to everyone else but me?”

Beyond

The Tomato Juice Betrayal

by

“My mother harbored a pathological hatred of tomato juice. It made no sense to me. She adored fresh tomatoes, and anything made with tomato sauce. Why the extreme animus to a cousin form? In today’s patois, I can’t even. Maybe a metallic aftertaste from the can it came in? The overbearing saltiness, when juice is supposed to be sweet? The clammy viscosity? She was a tender and caring health professional, although as a physical therapist, she never dealt with blood. Perhaps a buried allusion lurked in there, a whiff of recall from dissecting cadavers in grad school?”

Unearthed

Background Music

by

“Back then there seemed to be no laws at all, at least not on River Street, where dogs roamed free and ready to bite, kids threw bricks at you on the way to school (Cambridge in 1971 was a far cry from the leafy suburbs of Alexandria that you left behind, along with your cats and friends and little red satin beanie that you wore to chapel every morning at Grace Church Episcopal), but God there was music! Everywhere you went, guitars and bass and drums pouring out of transistor radios and laundromats and cars, bands with funny names like Cream and Strawberry Alarm Clock and Sly and the Family Stone, music that seemed to be written for these streets, and for you, lifting your feet up off the bumpy brick sidewalks covered with gray snow, giving you the sky again, and promising springtime even if there wasn’t a leaf in sight.”

Pangyrus

Twenty Briskets Later

by

“The pull back east was strong for me, but it had been a long time since I last lived there, and I found myself once again having to start over, just as I had done all those years ago when I moved to California. Could I have, in middle age, another chapter? Would I ever make brisket again? Would I ever gather friends and family around the table, in my new place here in New York? Would I be able to continue holiday traditions even though the nuclear family was not the same anymore? Would I still be able to sing the shehecheyanu blessing the first night of Chanukah and say quietly to myself, thank you for this life, for this light, for my kids, and our home, for all this food, and for being surrounded by so much love, I am so very grateful for all it, home was not always a safe place for me growing up but here, I am safe? Would I feel safe in this new life? I was doubtful. Those first few months, I was shaky, vulnerable, and lost.”

Sneaker Wave Magazine

Schrödinger’s Tape

by

“After her treatment at the hospital my 84 year old mother, with dementia, was left alone in the waiting room. All night. From France I telephoned the hospital in the middle of the night to follow up on her care. They told me she’d been discharged. Actually, she was sitting there, confused, massive gaze around her head, clotted blood in her hair, crumpled pajamas, waiting for someone to take her home. God, I hope she had slippers. I hope she wasn’t cold.”

Read. Write. Eat.

A season of ‘radical amazement’

by

“As I watched Anna work, I thought back to the baby I rocked to sleep, drowsy after nursing — with the same sense of awe and wonder, and yes, radical amazement, I’d had back then. She treated each of her patients with care, appreciating they are made in the image of God. As a physician-in-training, Anna has already seen things I never have. She will be privy to life histories I will never hear firsthand in my bubble of a world.”

WBUR/Cognoscenti

The Government Has a Death Wish for My Son

by

“They want my son to die. That thought has been hovering just below my consciousness for the past year. Wednesday night it surged above the surface. Since Thursday morning, it’s all I can hear. My son turned 12 last month. He’s in seventh grade. And he’s trans. Yesterday, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. stood at a microphone and essentially proposed a federal ban on … him. And that wasn’t the only attack on my child this week.”

Slate

🚨Announcements:

📢 Want to work on a personal essay with me in Vermont in April? Registration is open for the Southern Vermont Writers’ Conference, at which I am leading a personal essay workshop…

For the second time, I’ll be leading a personal essay writing workshop at The Southern Vermont Writers’ Conference. It was a great group last time. Maybe this time you’ll join us?

Learn More/Sign Up

📢 The 2026 Book Incubator

Narratively Academy just announced the The 2026 Narratively Book Incubator, an opportunity for writers to receive close, personal guidance and feedback from three award-winning book authors; attend a roster of expert panels and Q&As with agents, editors and other industry insiders; and work in community with each other to write your book in 2026.

Learn More/Sign Up

📢 Register now for Winter 2026 workshops at

Our Winter 2026 workshops are open! Accessibility matters to us. Our workshops have supported-rate seats automatically built in at 30% off—reserved for community members facing financial barriers. Can you afford the standard rate? We’d love for you to grab a regular seat instead, helping us keep these supported spots open for those who need them. Want to do even more? Choose our pay-it-forward option to sponsor access for others.

Sliding scale • First come, first served • All workshops recorded!

Learn More/Sign Up

Also from : Support NOURISH, a mutual aid project.

NOURISH is an ongoing mutual aid project created by Literary Liberation. I’m partnering with Lit Lib to help increase awareness and encourage sponsors to pledge support to community members who need help feeding their loved ones. The goal is to raise at least $25,000, and any amount helps. We want to send a minimum of $150 to each household in the form of grocery store gift cards.

To learn more about how it works and to support this cause, read here:

Learn More

Donate

📢 Book Proposal Generator via The Shipman Agency

So, you have an idea for a book. Maybe you even already wrote it! Either way, you are ready for the next step. Does the thought of writing a book proposal for your nonfiction project make you want to light no fewer than 14 lavender-scented candles and lie in the dark for three days straight? You’re not alone! But after having written three book proposals, I promise you it’s not as daunting as it seems.

In order to demystify this seemingly overwhelming task, I’m thrilled to offer the Book Proposal Generator.

This generator is taught by Greg Mania, author of the memoir Born to Be Public, which has been named a best book of 2020 by NPR, O, The Oprah Magazine, Electric Literature, The Brooklyn Rail, Largehearted Boy, and was a 2020 Goodreads Choice Award Nominee for Best Humor.

8 Sessions: Saturdays, January 10 - February 28 9:00-11:00am ET. $500

Learn More/Sign Up

📢 Off Assignment’s Generating the Personal Essay with

The hardest part of writing, often enough, is just getting started. And for those of us who write creative nonfiction, the problem is usually a glut, rather than a lack, of ideas. We essayists can choose to write about exactly everything we’ve ever done, thought, imagined, feared, regretted doing, celebrated not doing, etc. These limitless choices can be paralyzing. And whenever we’re feeling paralyzed, one of the best remedies is to simply reduce our choices. Constrain them. Channel them. Through a mix of close reading, craft talks, guided exercises, and weekly table reads of works-in-progress, we’ll generate reams of new writing, and we’ll work together to polish that writing via in-depth, strengths-based feedback. This six-week course, offered over Zoom and limited to 16 students, is all about overcoming decision fatigue, getting words on the page, and getting surprised by what we produce.

Dates: Mondays: January 12 - February 16 | 6 - 8:30 p.m. EST Price: $530 (Memoir Monday readers can use code MEMOIR20 for 20% off)

Learn More/Sign Up

📢 Apply for , , and ’ Ministry of Words Teaching Collective

The Ministry of Words is a teaching collective offering courses in fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. Fatimah Asghar and Ingrid Rojas Contreras are brilliant, award-winning writers and teachers whose work and minds I wildly admire, and I’ve learned so much from them for my own writing and teaching. They’re also excellent, kind instructors. Our work has been recognized by institutions including the Pulitzer, Lambda Literary, the National Book Awards, the Carol Shields Award, the National Book Critics Circle, and more. We’ll bring to The Ministry of Words what we’ve learned from teaching at places including Stanford University, Tin House, Sewanee, Community of Writers, Scripps College, the Atlantic Center for the Arts, and elsewhere.

The classes will each be four months long, and will start 2/4—the first spring semester will focus on generating work, and the fall semester will be workshop-based (with help, for those who want it, on working toward publication). The application deadline is 1/20. You can sign up for one or both, and there are limited partial scholarships for writers of color. We’ll offer cross-disciplinary lectures open to all participants, as well as space for shared online writing sessions that bring together all 3 classes on the weeks we’re not meeting. In addition, we’ll have opportunities to form long-lasting community—many of our former students have been meeting regularly for years.

By putting this together, we wanted to create a structured place outside of academia for people to work on their writing and craft, a place that’s nurturing and community-fostering and generally supportive and fun. If you have any questions, we’d love to hear from you.

Learn More/Apply

📢 Call for Submissions for “Freedom Ways,” a Collaboration Between Memoir Land and

Memoir Land and Literary Liberation co-publish an essay series that is now called “Freedom Ways.” Rate: $150. For submissions guidelines, deadlines and more, visit Literary Liberation. Here are the first two essays in the series:

Learn More/Submit

📢 Attention Publications and writers interested in having published essays considered for inclusion in our weekly curation:

By Thursday of each week, please send to memoirmonday@gmail.com:

1. The title of the essay and a link to it.

2. Your name and Substack profile link, if you have one, so I can tag you in the post.

3. A paragraph or a few lines from the piece that will most entice readers.

   Please be advised that we cannot accept all submissions, nor respond to the overwhelming number of emails received. Also, please note that we don’t accept author submissions from our partner publications.

   Subscribe now

   ---

Notebooks! Shirts! Mugs! Get Your Memoir Land Merch!

Memoir Land Merch

1. Memoir Monday, a weekly curation of the best personal essays from around the web brought to you by Narratively, The Rumpus,  Granta, Oldster Magazine, Literary Hub, Orion Magazine, The Walrus, and Electric Literature. Below is this week’s curation. ⬇️

2. First Person Singular, featuring original personal essays.

3. The Lit Lab, featuring interviews—The Memoir Land Author Questionnaire—and essays on craft and publishing. There are also weekly writing prompts and other exercises from, ahem, a New York Times bestselling ghostwriter of memoirs (that’s me) exclusively for paid subscribers.

4. Goodbye to All That, where I continue to explore my fascination with the most wonderful and terrible city in the world, something I began doing with two NYC-centric anthologies, Goodbye to All That, and Never Can Say Goodbye.

While I have you…I could use some more support in the form of paid subscriptions. If I’ve featured your work or that of your publication’s contributors…if you’re a publicists whose clients I’ve regularly featured…if you just want to help me keep doing ALL THIS and paying contributors, please consider becoming a paid subscriber…*

*Now through December 31st, save 20% forever on annual subscriptions to Memoir Land. Instead of $50/year, you pay $40. Memoir Land runs on paid subscriptions, and pays essayists and guest editors.*

Get 20% off forever

*Click here to get more out of this post by reading it online rather than in your inbox.*

Essays from Partner Publications…

Children’s Tales

by

“The Cellular Jail might have once symbolized a remote station of imprisonment and exile. Now it is a place for taking selfies. Standing atop the tower, where armed guards once performed sentry duty, I saw visitors taking photos on their phones. The sea breeze felt cool on my face while I took in the stunning view of the blue waters beyond. Tourist boats lined the beaches of adjoining islands. A lighthouse, the size of a striped white eraser in the distance, shimmered in the heat.”

Granta

Grim

by

“When my daughter was diagnosed with leukemia, it wasn’t discussed that kids in treatment often spend holidays in the hospital. No one explained to me that we were almost guaranteed to overlap an admission with at least one Christmas or birthday or Thanksgiving. Cancer doesn’t wait– treatment can’t either. I’d resolved to putting off any holiday decorating until my daughter could be home for it, even if it meant Christmas decorations went up on the 23rd or Easter baskets arrived a day or two late.”

The Rumpus

How Aging Unlocked My Creativity

by

“I began writing The Love Thief in my 60s. (Which, for the record, is a spectacularly underrated decade.) Our culture has long treated creativity as the domain of the young: the tortured 20-something genius, the fresh-out-of-school innovator, the buzz-worthy debut artist. But here’s the truth: creativity doesn’t care about your birthdate. In fact, I believe it deepens with age.”

Oldster

My Tattoo Helped Me Exert Bodily Autonomy, but Its History Is Misogynistic

by

“A hole is an emptiness. Something to be filled. Front hole. Back hole. Ear. Mouth. Anus. Trypophobia is a fear of holes. The word comes from the Greek “trypta,” meaning hole. Trypanophobia on the other hand is a fear of needles. It comes from the Greek “trypano,” meaning borer or piercer. Something that makes holes.”

Electric Literature

Essays from Around the Web…

I Love You Infinity

by A.J. Daulerio

“I’ve spent many hours in Al-Anon meetings and therapy sessions to help me process and clarify who my father was as a person. As close as we were at several points in my adult life, it also became impossible to overlook the other, more abusive side of him, especially when I was very young. But I have dedicated myself to the internal work of forgiveness, loosening the resentments I carried for far too long. I finally crossed over to the he-did-the-best-he-could side of the aisle, but it was too late for us to reconcile. How could we reconcile when he didn’t remember me?”

The Small Bow

Intractability

by

“When she asked me if I wanted to keep the ultrasound picture, did she want me to change my mind? Put a blob-like face on my stupidity, my untimely fertility? My eyes flitted across the monitor, trying not to register the tiny fluttering dark spot. I knew it was the heart and closed mine.”

Hypertext

Brokering The Link: In the Shadow of Many Mothers

by

“This year I turned the age my mother was when she died twenty-six years ago from a sudden, short illness. This month, had she been alive, she would have turned eighty-one. I do not have children, but I found myself reflecting on what it must have been like for her as a mother, knowing she was dying and leaving behind three young daughters. But growing up in Kenya and belonging to a community ensured that ‘other mothers’ stepped in to fill the void. These women helped me navigate my life experiences. Recently I saw a call for submissions from an Indian feminist journal on the theme of ‘motherhood,’ and so I queried the editor with an article about ‘other mothers.’ However, the editor rejected my piece on the basis that ‘motherhood was a sensitive topic’ and, assuming that I was not a biological mother, she considered my writing an ‘appropriation’ of motherhood. The editor also added that the journal’s definition of motherhood was restricted to ‘biological mothers’ and they believed any widening or deviation would be anti-feminist.”

The Dreaming Machine

I’m a Woman in My 50s. Why Am I Obsessed with My 20s?

by

“I began to wonder what really drives this midlife fixation on our 20-something selves. Nostalgia? Survival? A need to reconnect with the woman we left behind? Maybe it’s all of that—and something deeper. The more I talked with other women, the clearer it became: The decades are linked in ways that feel more deliberate than random.”

Provoked Magazine

Why It’s Best to Imagine the Worst

by

“We sat on our porch bench for hours, holding each other, crying and even occasionally laughing at the absurdity of the moment. Truthfully, despite our son’s delayed milestones and our nagging concerns, this diagnosis hadn’t been in our imagination either. But here we were, facing the reality that our lives would never be the same. I struggled through my grief and anger, all the while trying to usher in the joy of a soon-to-arrive third child. How could I be joyful again, knowing I would watch our second child suffer and our dreams for the family we had imagined disintegrate?”

NYTimes/Modern Love

There’s more than books in my Little Free Library

by Meaghan Shields

“In my childhood home, we struggled, surviving on what other people didn’t want or need. When my mom put money in the basket at church on Sunday, I prayed we wouldn’t need it ourselves hours later for gas money. Often we would. I snapped at her for giving what she could not afford. But, her generosity extended to me, too — and in just the way I needed. She knew every trip to the bookstore was a panacea.”

WBUR/Cognoscenti

🚨Announcements:

📢 Want to work on a personal essay with me in Vermont in April? Registration is open for the Southern Vermont Writers’ Conference, at which I am leading a personal essay workshop…

For the second time, I’ll be leading a personal essay writing workshop at The Southern Vermont Writers’ Conference. It was a great group last time. Maybe this time you’ll join us?

Learn More/Sign Up

📢 The 2026 Book Incubator

Narratively Academy just announced the The 2026 Narratively Book Incubator, an opportunity for writers to receive close, personal guidance and feedback from three award-winning book authors; attend a roster of expert panels and Q&As with agents, editors and other industry insiders; and work in community with each other to write your book in 2026.

Learn More/Sign Up

📢 Register now for Winter 2026 workshops at

Our Winter 2026 workshops are open! Accessibility matters to us. Our workshops have supported-rate seats automatically built in at 30% off—reserved for community members facing financial barriers. Can you afford the standard rate? We’d love for you to grab a regular seat instead, helping us keep these supported spots open for those who need them. Want to do even more? Choose our pay-it-forward option to sponsor access for others.

Sliding scale • First come, first served • All workshops recorded!

Learn More/Sign Up

Also from : Support NOURISH, a mutual aid project.

NOURISH is an ongoing mutual aid project created by Literary Liberation. I’m partnering with Lit Lib to help increase awareness and encourage sponsors to pledge support to community members who need help feeding their loved ones. The goal is to raise at least $25,000, and any amount helps. We want to send a minimum of $150 to each household in the form of grocery store gift cards.

To learn more about how it works and to support this cause, read here:

Learn More

Donate

📢 Book Proposal Generator via The Shipman Agency

So, you have an idea for a book. Maybe you even already wrote it! Either way, you are ready for the next step. Does the thought of writing a book proposal for your nonfiction project make you want to light no fewer than 14 lavender-scented candles and lie in the dark for three days straight? You’re not alone! But after having written three book proposals, I promise you it’s not as daunting as it seems.

In order to demystify this seemingly overwhelming task, I’m thrilled to offer the Book Proposal Generator.

This generator is taught by Greg Mania, author of the memoir Born to Be Public, which has been named a best book of 2020 by NPR, O, The Oprah Magazine, Electric Literature, The Brooklyn Rail, Largehearted Boy, and was a 2020 Goodreads Choice Award Nominee for Best Humor.

8 Sessions: Saturdays, January 10 - February 28 9:00-11:00am ET. $500

Learn More/Sign Up

📢 Off Assignment’s Generating the Personal Essay with

The hardest part of writing, often enough, is just getting started. And for those of us who write creative nonfiction, the problem is usually a glut, rather than a lack, of ideas. We essayists can choose to write about exactly everything we’ve ever done, thought, imagined, feared, regretted doing, celebrated not doing, etc. These limitless choices can be paralyzing. And whenever we’re feeling paralyzed, one of the best remedies is to simply reduce our choices. Constrain them. Channel them. Through a mix of close reading, craft talks, guided exercises, and weekly table reads of works-in-progress, we’ll generate reams of new writing, and we’ll work together to polish that writing via in-depth, strengths-based feedback. This six-week course, offered over Zoom and limited to 16 students, is all about overcoming decision fatigue, getting words on the page, and getting surprised by what we produce.

Dates: Mondays: January 12 - February 16 | 6 - 8:30 p.m. EST Price: $530 (Memoir Monday readers can use code MEMOIR20 for 20% off)

Learn More/Sign Up

📢 Apply for , , and ’ Ministry of Words Teaching Collective

The Ministry of Words is a teaching collective offering courses in fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. Fatimah Asghar and Ingrid Rojas Contreras are brilliant, award-winning writers and teachers whose work and minds I wildly admire, and I’ve learned so much from them for my own writing and teaching. They’re also excellent, kind instructors. Our work has been recognized by institutions including the Pulitzer, Lambda Literary, the National Book Awards, the Carol Shields Award, the National Book Critics Circle, and more. We’ll bring to The Ministry of Words what we’ve learned from teaching at places including Stanford University, Tin House, Sewanee, Community of Writers, Scripps College, the Atlantic Center for the Arts, and elsewhere.

The classes will each be four months long, and will start 2/4—the first spring semester will focus on generating work, and the fall semester will be workshop-based (with help, for those who want it, on working toward publication). The application deadline is 1/20. You can sign up for one or both, and there are limited partial scholarships for writers of color. We’ll offer cross-disciplinary lectures open to all participants, as well as space for shared online writing sessions that bring together all 3 classes on the weeks we’re not meeting. In addition, we’ll have opportunities to form long-lasting community—many of our former students have been meeting regularly for years.

By putting this together, we wanted to create a structured place outside of academia for people to work on their writing and craft, a place that’s nurturing and community-fostering and generally supportive and fun. If you have any questions, we’d love to hear from you.

Learn More/Apply

📢 Call for Submissions for “Freedom Ways,” a Collaboration Between Memoir Land and

Memoir Land and Literary Liberation co-publish an essay series that is now called “Freedom Ways.” Rate: $150. For submissions guidelines, deadlines and more, visit Literary Liberation. Here are the first two essays in the series:

Learn More/Submit

📢 Attention Publications and writers interested in having published essays considered for inclusion in our weekly curation:

By Thursday of each week, please send to memoirmonday@gmail.com:

1. The title of the essay and a link to it.

2. Your name and Substack profile link, if you have one, so I can tag you in the post.

3. A paragraph or a few lines from the piece that will most entice readers.

   Please be advised that we cannot accept all submissions, nor respond to the overwhelming number of emails received. Also, please note that we don’t accept author submissions from our partner publications.

   Subscribe now

   ---

Notebooks! Shirts! Mugs! Get Your Memoir Land Merch!

Memoir Land Merch