A Baker's Dozen of Great Personal Essays to Take You Through this Week...
Welcome to Memoir Land—a newsletter edited by
, now featuring three 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.
First Person Singular, featuring original personal essays. Recently I published “Abortion Abortion Abortion” by Natalie Beach, and “My Hysterectomy: A Love Story” by…me. A new essay is coming soon.
(***Submissions for First Person Singular are now PAUSED. An overwhelming number of new submissions have recently come in. There are more essays in my inbox than I could publish in two years. And I’m too overwhelmed to keep bringing in more to read before I go through all those already in there, even with help from recently appointed contributing editor Katie Kosma.
*Going forward, there will be specific limited submission periods, which I will announce here. You can find submissions guidelines and more on the “About” page, but, again, submissions are currently PAUSED.)
The Lit Lab, featuring interviews and essays on craft and publishing. It is primarily for paid subscribers. Recently I published, “From Memoir to Movie Script,” an interview with The Same River Twice author @Pam Mandel. A new interview is coming Friday.
Essays from partner publications…
Voices on Addiction: Anchor Point
by Kelly Coughlin
“Abstinence isn’t sexy, no matter which social media influencer decides to take a public journey on the wagon. Although moderating is no big deal for a person whose alcohol problem is minor or temporary, for a real alcoholic, ‘dry January’ is edge play.”
Learning When to Give Up
by Victoria Waddle
“I pushed myself once again to dress in athletic wear and drive to the city rec center. I sat in my car facing the gloaming. I was 54 years old. I didn’t want to have my ass kicked by a teenager again. Watching the gold, orange, and red of the setting sun filtered through a single long, flat cloud, something occurred to me: I didn't have to.”
100 Years after the Exclusion Act, Chinese Canadians Like Me Still Question Their Belonging
by Adrian Ma
“We could have gone anywhere for our first family holiday after the worst of COVID-19 had passed. But three generations of my family have travelled to British Columbia for a reason. We’re here because I’m searching for something I felt I had lost a bit of during the pandemic: my sense of belonging, my connection to this country, my very identity as a Canadian. We’re in Victoria, where my father first arrived in the country, to show my children exactly where our family’s Canadian story began.”
Searching for the Cyclops’ Cheese
by Alexis Marie Adams
“One afternoon my children and I stop for a bite at a roadside taverna, sitting in the cool shade of a blooming arbor. I go inside to order lunch and see a dozen or so black-and-white photographs on a wall. In one shot, locals harvest grapes in a vineyard; in another, a black-robed priest draws water from a well. And then, there it is. An image of a man standing proudly, holding what appears to be a long, very full, fleshy bag. I know exactly what the bag is, know what’s inside it.”
Getting to Know My Husband’s Late Wife Through the Words She Left Behind
by Amy Paturel
“I was intrigued about the woman who came before me and captivated by her love of the craft. We shared a way of inhabiting and understanding the world through storytelling. Me, as a journalist and essayist. Sherise, as a fiction writer and poet who died before she had a chance to publish.”
Stevenage
by Gary Younge
“In 1988 my mother took the bus to Stevenage town centre to do the weekly shop, came home and died in her sleep. She was forty-four; I was nineteen. Her passing was a matter of some civic note.”
In My Worst Nightmares My Father Transitions
by Kaia Ball
“In these dreams, her beauty is effortless. She moves with supreme Black elegance, each gesture power incarnate. The perfect shade of foundation blends the sun-scarred skin of her forehead into her cheeks. A hairline I once watched recede is handily buried beneath luscious curls, voluminous as mine were before I hacked them off. Even her five o’clock shadow has been put to rest. She kneels before me, her shimmering skirt unwrinkled by the movement. She holds my hands with nails lacquered violet. My father always loved violet.”
My Hysterectomy, a Love Story
by
“In the thirteen years between ending my first marriage at 26 and embarking on my current marriage at 39-and-change, as I flitted around the East Village with a string of Peter Pans, I firmly resisted considering whether I was interested in motherhood—in truly knowing my own heart. “Ambivalent” seemed like a sufficient descriptor, a safe place to land that didn’t require me to really think, because I was too afraid to really think—to confront the gap between what I might really want, and what I thought I was supposed to want.”
Essays from around the web…
Meals for One
by Sharanya Deepak
“When I cooked the ragù at home in Delhi, I had been away from Brussels for almost five years, and it had become stripped of any original instructions, weakened by the pandemic’s disruption of lived lives and linear time. My life in Brussels, once a map drawn inside my head that I would trace before I went to bed, had been stamped out by the pandemic’s large, monstrous presence.”
I Call it Running
by Marcia Yudkin
“I'm not competitive when it comes to money, houses, clothes, publications or cars, so what is this tickle of self-consciousness, this wave of disgrace I feel at my sluggish pace?”
The Way Home
by Jane Ratcliffe
“Our first walk is around the block. Ortiz nearly chokes himself as he tugs me forward, reminding me of the sled-pulling dog in How the Grinch Stole Christmas! He doesn’t listen to a word I say, doesn’t seem that fond of me, yet when I appear at his door the next morning, he practically somersaults in greeting. This time we venture around the neighborhood, Ortiz pulling me into the sunshine. It’s a delight being outside with him — birds singing above my head, the smell of the nearby river.”
Driving Malaysia’s E2, Or: How Can We Not Rage?
by Enbah Nilah
“Hundreds of thousands of us, ceaselessly driving along the rainbow bridge of the Malaysian Dream, ignoring the billboard signs that never look like us unless it’s to sell curry powder and hair oil. We look away from the roadkills and turn down the PSAs about crime rates and violence and politics and police when all we want is to listen to music… how can we not rage? How can we not go 40km/h over the speed limit, keeping one eye out for the police cars that stop migrant workers by the side of the road, our noses sharp to the odor of ancestral aspirations vaporizing like gasoline fumes, all in the hopes of reaching somewhere that will let us out of this machine?”
Alternate Histories
by P. L. Watts
“All the bad shit happens—the abuse, the neglect, the rape, the violence—but I am legally emancipated at sixteen. I go live with my choir teacher and her partner. I help them with their musical theater company. We ride all over town setting up equipment, rehearsing, singing songs from Victor, Victoria. I learn about the Indigo Girls way earlier, and I’m obsessed. I am half in love with them both. They put me in therapy and help me sue Florida Child Protective Services for negligence. I am wealthy by eighteen.”
🚨Announcements:
📢 Off Assignment Magazine is holding it’s second annotated book auction, and I’m a participant. Bid on a copy of my book filled with juicy secrets in the margins! It’s for a great magazine and mission. “In each lot, you'll find unique books with handwritten comments and confessions from a brilliant cast of novelists and writers. Each one was donated by its author to support the mission of Off Assignment, a non-profit literary magazine bringing forth a new kind of travel writing that features diverse voices and transporting stories.”
📢
has some new workshops on offer! On Thursdays from 7/20 through 8/31 there’s The Braided Essay, a generative workshop. On 7/22, there’s Telling Shared Stories: Writing About Other People in Memoir, a one-day workshop. There are other options, too!📢 Aaisha Bhuiyan, a Bangladeshi-American writer and former AAWW Open City fellow (2021), is launching an intimate writing workshop series. “I’ve been facilitating workshops since 2017 for different spaces including UNESCO, USOW, AAWW and the Met.” Bonus: the Memoir Monday community saves 10% with the Promo Code: MM10.
Re-imagining family stories
Virtual, July 16th 12-2pm ET
This virtual creative writing workshop will take a closer look at individual family systems, allow room for deep reflection and have an option to imagine alternative stories with inspired characters.
Write Outside
Central Park, NY, July 30th 3-6pm ET
This in-person writing workshop focuses on using environment and mapping tools to reflect on the self. I will draw from my learnings in grad school, where we leaned heavily on intrapersonal dynamics, and my experience with meditations to guide writing prompts.
📢 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.
A paragraph or a few lines from the piece that will most entice readers.
Because of data limits for many email platforms, going forward we will only include artwork from our partner publications. No need to send art.
*Please be advised, however, 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!