A Baker's Dozen of Compelling Personal Narratives...
PLUS: A free grantwriting workshop from Grant Consultings, and a fundraiser for Raising Mothers in the announcements at the bottom.
Welcome to Memoir Land—a newsletter edited by Sari Botton, now featuring four verticals:
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.
First Person Singular, featuring original personal essays. Recently I published “Last Wishes” by Gabriella Savarese, guest-edited by Katie Kosma.
The Lit Lab, featuring interviews and essays on craft and publishing. There are also week writing prompts and other exercises from, ahem, a New York Times bestselling ghostwriter of memoirs (that’s me) for paid subscribers. Most recently I posted “The Prompt-O-Matic #27,” “The Memoir Land Author Questionnaire #29: Barrie Miskin,” and “The Memoir Land Author Questionnaire #30: John Devore.”
Goodbye to All That, where I’m continuing 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. Recently I reprinted “Minnesota Nice” by Cheryl Strayed, which appears in both editions of Goodbye to All That.
*Please note: I am no longer posting about these roundups on X/Twitter.*
Essays from partner publications…
Severalls
by Tom Lee
“On the morning of his admission to Severalls in June 1968 my father remembers sitting in a wheelchair at one end of the main corridor, once the longest in Europe, a corridor so long that he could not see where it ended. He was taken to a ward and later he sat in a consulting room, now in a dressing gown, in front of a horseshoe of eight or nine people discussing his condition. He was in tears but also relieved because finally there was an acknowledgement that something was wrong with him. After a while his psychiatrist, Dr Fox, said, ‘I think we’ll go for modified insulin therapy.”
Orbits, Collisions, and Ricochets
by Amethyst Loscocco
“The day my father left, I watched him load his dresser—each drawer pulled out and still full of his clothes—into the back of his white truck. I was ten years old and didn’t know why he was suddenly choosing to leave. I didn’t know he was unhappy with the life he’d built, or that he insisted he’d never wanted to adopt so many kids. I didn’t know he was testing other futures with other women, although I soon caught on.”
When Polio Walked the Earth
by Peter Kavanagh
“I was infected at the height of the polio season, in August 1953, just around the time Jonas Salk was performing his trials. His modern medical miracle, however, arrived too late for me. As was the norm at the time, after I fell ill, my family was quarantined. I was isolated in hospital for a year while my parents worried and prayed at home.”
For the Love of a Magazine
by Erika Simonian
“When she said to me, “I just re-upped your and Steve’s New Yorker subscription for four more years,” I assumed this to be another figment of her confusion, because four years would’ve been our longest renewal stint to date. Of course it was possible that she, clear about where she was heading, considered the extended renewal an epic send-off, but sure enough, it wasn’t long before the magazine stopped arriving altogether.”
Essays from around the web…
Windows
by Michael A. Gonzales
“Downstairs from them resided a single mom with two beautiful daughters. Their window was directly across from mine. Most nights their shade was down, but from the glow of their ceiling light, I could see whenever someone entered the room. Then, one night the oldest girl pulled up the shade. She didn’t seem surprised to have caught me peeping. ‘Hello,’ she said boldly. I almost fell off the bed I was so shocked.”
I Knew What My Enablers Were Doing. It’s Murkier With Matthew Perry.
by Patti Davis
“When I worked in a restaurant, I could tell intuitively when customers had coke on them. I was almost always right. I went out to the parking lot and sat in cars with total strangers just to do a line. As stupid as that was, I’m not a moron either. I was led by an addiction that blindfolds you and shoves you in the direction of only one thing — the drug you crave.”
Why Did She Stay? The Same Reasons I did.
by Britt Tisdale
“A master class in love bombing, my early relationship started with letters, trips and ‘You’re the most beautiful woman in the world.’ It ended with my phoning a friend for instructions on how to remove the bullets from my then partner’s handgun, my fingers shaking, terrified he would kill me or himself. My friend had known us from the beginning, the glimmer of limerence still in my eyes. Even back then, she knew never to call me on a Friday. That was his day off, when he required my full attention.”
Fill in the Blank: Addiction, Family Trauma, and How (Not) to Write About It
by Carley Moore
“A family at war cannot abide more rupture, nor can it abide problem solving. We can’t hold an intervention or agree on care. A house at war cannot hold itself together. Nails loosen. Beams fall. The outside pushes in, and the insides fall out. On HGTV they are fixing all of the abandoned, run-down cabins, making them habitable and beautiful again. Does my BLANK like this show because it’s about repair and possibility, things we have all long since given up?”
In the Garden of Gethsemane, a Lamp
by Jamie Etheridge
“My mother-in-law towers for an Indian woman, almost regal in her bearing and wears her long, dark hair braided and slung over her left shoulder. I watch as she rests my daughter’s head against her knobby knees. This is a woman I barely know, who let’s face it, I’ve resisted knowing. Yet at this moment, she seems like a goddess to me. Demeter anointing Persephone with life-giving ambrosia. She sits straight, her legs forming a platform, and lays my naked child facedown and lengthwise, along her thighs. Naked hands, naked skin. Skin-to-skin. Life-to-life. We are women, all in a line, from the first mitochondrial Eve until this baby girl splayed across her grandmother’s lap…I almost cry; it hurts so much to see someone else tending my child.”
Harping ON
by April Choi
“Harp practice has become an oasis of peace for my frenzied brain. But
sometimes I wonder how my harp is coping. Every time I sit down to
practice and release tension into the strings, I wonder if they will
break, or if my stress will damage the frame. It seems a lot to ask
one instrument to handle. As if to express displeasure, my harp’s
strings occasionally snap. The sharp cracks ring out like gunshots.”
The Grief and Relief of Having a Hysterectomy in My 30s After Our Surrogate Had a Stillbirth
by Kristina Kasparian
“My body feels raw and hollow and not quite mine. I register that my bladder is burning, my butt is sore, and I am still underwear-less. My hands and feet are unpleasantly numb, and I worry the anesthesiologist gave me lidocaine after all. It takes me a while to think about my uterus. I imagine it traveling like luggage through an airport terminal. It is somewhere outside and away from my body, on its way to pathology, transported the way they transported my son away from a body that wasn’t mine. I wrestle with the same discomfort I feel when I drop off a bag of clothes for goodwill. I’ve given away something that belonged to me and there’s an empty space where it used to hang. I doubt my uterus will serve anyone, though. Maybe they can study it as an example of a bad uterus. I’ll be sad if they say it was healthy. I picture my ovaries strung up like a garden hose in winter. This illness has been altering my anatomy for decades.”
Pick Your Genre: Processing Heartbreak in The Night House
by Abigail Oswald
“..grief is not glass or lace. Grief is a boulder through a window. A crowbar lodged forever in a door. The aftershock that hits just as you begin to resettle the shelves. And so, even in the midst of great loss, there’s something exhilarating about scorning expectation, isn’t there? Knowing the story everyone expects from you and doing something else instead.”
Reserve to Ready: My Marine Corps Journey
by Deb Sinness
“Today’s female Marine recruits train the same as male Marines. That wasn’t the case in the 1970s….We were taught to serve tea in the event we would be assigned as staff to a General officer. Most surprising, we received make-up classes. When we were in our dress uniforms, we were required to wear four articles of make up: eye shadow, mascara, blush, and lipstick to match the scarlet cap cord of our dress cover. Another bizarre uniform requirement was wearing a girdle. It did not matter how thin a recruit was, girdles were required during inspections. Everyone ditched them after boot camp.”
🚨Announcements:
📢 Free Grant Strategies Workshop for Artists Friday, August 23rd
Grant Consultings, is hosting a free virtual workshop, Grant Strategy for Artists, August 23rd, Friday at noon. With this free webinar, "Grant Strategies for Artists" grant consultants, educators, business owners, and artists Alison Erazmus and Sari Caine, will demystify the grant process (we'll also touch on applying to residencies too). Artists can come prepared to create or edit a Mission statement, define values and goals, learn how to search for grants, understand terms like "eligibility" and "criteria," and leave feeling more confident with tools under your belt.
📢 Raising Mothers celebrates their 9th year with an annual FUND-Raising Mothers fundraiser.
This year, the first goal is to reach 100 annual subscribers to help build and increase their monthly contributor budget. Help them get there!
📢 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:
The title of the essay and a link to it.
The name of the author, and the author’s Twitter handle.Nope…not doing Twitter anymore! Read and share the newsletter to find out/spread the word about whose pieces are featured.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.
Thank you for including my essay!
Thanks for including me! 😊