A Baker's Dozen of Excellent Personal Essays...
PLUS!: A call for submissions from Electric Literature in the announcements at the bottom.
Welcome to Memoir Land—a newsletter edited by
, 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 “You Have Been Given,” an excerpt of
’s new essay collection. A new essay is coming soon.The Lit Lab, featuring interviews and essays on craft and publishing. There are also occasional writing prompts and exercises for paid subscribers. Recently I posted “The Memoir Land Author Questionnaire #4: Margaret Juhae Lee,” the fourth interview in that series, inspired by the popularity of The Oldster Magazine Questionnaire.
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 published “What the Prior Tenant Gave Me,” an essay of my own that’s an ode to artist Joe Coleman.
*Please note: I am no longer posting about these roundups on X/Twitter.*
Essays from partner publications…
On Killing A Pigeon in New York City
by Vincent Tolentino
“It seemed to be working. The pigeon hardly appeared to notice. Nadia was able to pull one of the wings out from the body—a sickening sheet of gel stretched between wing and side. It had been literally stuck shut. I propped my phone against the step, dipped my fingers in oil, and did as Nadia was doing. We worked quietly, pulling feathers free, dragging the gel down to the tips, then out completely. It must have flapped its wings after it landed in the glue. It must have tumbled into the glue, then righted itself. It must have fallen three stories from the ledge. The Adhan began at the mosque on the corner. Evening prayers curled like smoke; we listened while we worked.”
How Euchre Healed My Family
by Jessica Myshrall
“When my mother was battling breast cancer, my grandmother worried that the chemo would make her too sick for euchre. ‘Mom, I could be dying, and I’d still be playing,’ my mother told her. ‘Oh, me too,’ my grandmother replied. In the weeks before my grandmother died, some of us gauged whether she was having a ‘good day’ based on how many games she could get in.”
A Birthday Spent Mostly Alone—but not Lonely
by
“In the bathroom mirror I see a man, one who is old with gray hair and tired eyes, yet this is a man who does not feel old. Yes, morning has yet to be shaken from these bones, but old is someone else. Not me.”
Corey Sobel, Strictly Speaking, Doesn’t Exist
by Corey Sobel
“Do you believe you have a fixed, unitary self, like you’re a sculpture made from a single kind of stone? Or are you one of those palimpsests I see in subway stations here in Brooklyn, the posters that have been partially torn away to reveal the older posters they were pasted over—the older posters themselves torn to show the still-older posters underneath? Or is it that you feel like a proscenium stage where one self steps forward, speaks their lines, and then shuffles off to wait in the wings while another self takes over?…I wonder which one I am all the time.”
Essays from around the web…
The Casino Tapes
by
“The spheres of ballet rarely intersect with this netherworld of erotic dance but, in a rare convergence, a pretty blonde who says she was a circus contortionist until she injured her back, comes up for an afternoon ballet class I teach, and since I don’t charge her for the lesson, invites me for a drink on the terrace, where I tell her I’ve been inside the nightclub only once, to cap off a dancer’s birthday, when a doorman with a crush on the birthday boy invited our party in for free, and she recounts stories of low pay, bad accommodations, obligatory post-show mingling, and the constant expectations of sexual favors.”
My Progeny
by Heidi Biggs
“Sometimes I think I’ll never be a mother, but I forget I’m already a mother, probably even a grandma. When I was 18, I worked at a fish and game in Alaska. Old Greg and Young Greg would stand in the water all day with waders on, grappling up king salmon that would wander into the concrete pathway alongside the hatchery, and I sat in a folding chair and would bend down toward the salmon’s back and pick a scale off of with tweezers and put it on a little card with a grid that held them in place with water-activated adhesive, and then the Gregs would let the fish go...”
Summer People
by Beth Boyle Machlan
“For me, the real appeal of summer people wasn’t their wealth; it was their certainty. I envied their conviction that the world would hold its shape, that they could return to a place year after year and find it welcoming, unchanged. That we call this confidence “privilege” reveals so much about the system we have created, one in which real homes have become so rare that we visit them like museums or rent them just for weekends, sample-sizes of security ordered from algorithms online.”
Wreckless Abandon
by Kevin Wood
“I wandered the streets—a gray sky fittingly somber—feeling almost breathless with sadness. At first I thought it was all about Daniel’s life, the inner battle I’d recognized, how his body would claw its way to connection, then seize with shame and flee. And the chaos he himself had called out. That familiar, relentless, brutal chaos that can engulf a life with such conflict within. Representations of how we resist living as we’re meant to, at odds with how we believe we should. But the sadness lingered for weeks. ‘Why are you so sad about his life?’ a couple of friends asked.”
Alternating Currents
by Diahann Reyes-Lane
“I screamed out for help, the sound of my voice coming from some carnal place inside of me that I didn’t know existed. I begged someone, anyone, to call 911. A neighbor did but the paramedics refused to come. Not for a dog, the dispatcher said.”
My Mother is a Pirate
by Heidi North
“This brutal round of cancer has taken half my mother’s tongue, and with it her ability to eat. Now she gives me her clothes and I fit them. Suit them. My whole life she’s been two sizes bigger than me, but now I am her old size. Wearing her clothes, I look in my mirror and see I have grown into her proportions.”
Divorce is Having a Moment. And I Wish it Had Happened 10 Years Ago
by Heather Sweeney
“The word divorce seems to be everywhere lately. And while people have different reasons for ending their marriages, one motivation that’s dominating the cultural discussion right now is the exact reason I ended my own marriage over a decade ago: Women want to find happiness.”
The Great Joy of Returning to Your Childhood Hobbies
by Marian Schembari
“Every week, I carry my sheet music into Matt’s studio. The student in the session before mine is a hedge-fund guy in his 50s, and we giggle at each other in the doorway between our two lessons, as if we’re seeing through the graying hair and trench coats and wedding rings to greet our promising, 16-year-old selves…As Matt teaches me about breath control and diaphragmatic support and the functionality of my soft palate, I feel like he’s teaching me how to re-enter my own life.”
On Discovering Family Secrets
By B.K. Jackson
“Had she noticed when I was a baby that I had her lover’s eyes? When I was six months old, had she seen his smile creep up one side of my face? Was that why she didn’t stay to see how much of him might leak out of me by the time I was one year old, like a stain?”
🚨Announcements:
📢 Starting this week at Academy: Untangling the Traumatic Narrative: Using Words to Access Our Wounds…
… a three-part memoir workshop with Rebecca Evans.
📢 Electric Literature will open for submissions in ALL CATEGORIES on April 1!
Get your submissions ready! Electric Literature wants your best short stories, essays, flash, poetry, and graphic narratives. Recommended Reading, The Commuter, and Personal Narrative will all open for submissions on April 1. You may submit once per category, but it is fine to submit across multiple categories. The portal will close at midnight Pacific Time on April 14, or when we receive 750 submissions (per category). All submissions will be accepted through our Submittable page. For candid advice from our editors on how to make your work stand out, watch How to Get Published in Recommended Reading, How to Get Published in The Commuter, and Calling All Essayists: Electric Lit’s Creative Nonfiction Program.
📢 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.
You can also support Memoir Monday—and indie bookstores!—by browsing this Bookshop.org list of every book that’s been featured at the Memoir Monday reading series. It’s a great place to find some new titles to add to your TBR list!
Thank you for including my essay Alternating Currents among so many wonderful reads! Thrilled to discover other writers here whose other work I will be keeping my eye out for from now on.