A Dozen Essays To Make Time For This Week...
Welcome to Memoir Monday—a weekly newsletter and a quarterly reading series, brought to you by Narratively, The Rumpus, Catapult, Granta, Guernica, Oldster Magazine, Literary Hub — and now many additional publications.
In addition to the weekly curation, there are now occasional original personal essays under the heading of First Person Singular, for paying subscribers. If you haven’t become a paid subscriber, please consider becoming one.
The third original essay, published in First Person Singular in May, is What Water Taught Me About My Irrational Fears, by Flávia Monteiro. The fourth original essay is coming in mid-June.
Submissions are open. You can find submissions guidelines and more on the “About” page. Subscribe and follow us on Twitter at @memoirmonday for updates!
Essays from partner publications…
The Funk of Poverty
by Starr Davis
“I got up early the next morning and fed my baby the only two scoops of formula left, then said a prayer and called the welfare office. They placed me on hold for two hours. While I was on hold, I got an email from the editor who told me my essay was full of the funk of poverty and not its flowers. They sent me excerpts from Toni Morrison and advised me that the secret to writing trauma is to byplay painful vignettes with lighthearted prose of hope. I reviewed the essay to see if I could smell anything, any funk.”
What I Learned on the Aging Beat
by Marcia DeSanctis
“My bike is proof of life. To ride it, especially in a city like New York, is to constantly fight for mine.”
On Metaphors and Snow Boots
by Annie Sand
"Like the weather, my inner squalls are meaningful for their mere existence — true beyond all explanations, beyond calculated gains and losses, beyond cures. It can be powerful to center experience over explanation, to reject ill-fitting assumptions, to stylize perspective. To write one’s way toward something different.”
The Dark Mothers’ Club
by Val Kieseg
"I think I’m one sleepless night away from the mental hospital, I write, then delete, then write: I don’t feel half as bad as I think I should."
Finding Love (and Marriage) by Accident in Upstate New York
by Aileen Weintraub
“My very first date with Produce Man landed on the second anniversary of my father’s death. I took this as a sign that my father had sent him from the heavens and it was bashert, the Jewish term for ‘destiny.’”
What Water Taught Me About My Irrational Fears
by Flávia Monteiro
“I think of the pool as being my first recreational drug…I go in the water, my full body and head submerged, and suddenly the laws of physics are no longer so rigidly enforced: water softens gravity and bends light and distorts sound. Water also changes its shape to fit me. Everything becomes lighter, I become lighter.”
Essays from around the web…
Thieves
by Beth Kephart
“Did it really begin then, my sense of failure as a daughter? Did the way she looked at me contain the way she saw me? Or was she seeing something else as she lay on that couch and I sat on that ottoman, the rust in the patterns chasing something? Someone else? The face of the first thief, the heat of his breath, the animal in him that shoved her to the ground, as if he had not already stolen more than any thief has an actual right to? Was I to blame for how she blamed the life she now had for not being the life she had wanted?”
A Mother’s Unshakeable Love
by Joy Netanya Thompson
“Sometimes I wonder what Zadie will remember about those three weeks of pain and hospitalization. I can’t change the fact that I wasn’t there the night her appendix ruptured. But will she remember that I waited with her in hard plastic chairs in the ER for four hours? Will she remember how I held her hand in pre-op; that I was the first face she saw after surgery? Then there are the things she’ll never know unless I tell her, like walking down the hill toward the hospital trying to convince myself that I was capable of being her mother.”
Head Wounds
by Joy Victory
"The photo I found in my grandfather's files is shocking: A massive sea turtle lies dead in the back of a pickup truck, its speckled front flippers so big they stretched far beyond the width of the vehicle. A chain is wrapped around its neck, and its bear-sized head, which looks injured, hangs limply over the open tailgate. On the back of the picture someone has scrawled 'giant turtle in back of truck, 1954.'"
How My Father Groomed Me for Rape Culture
by Sheryl Burpee Dluginski
“My newly developed curves seemed to give me a dangerous power over my father and other men, which troubled me because I couldn’t seem to discern its appropriate use.”
Czarna, Reimagined
by Julie Zuckerman
“The most amazing thing has happened, Aunt Czarna. Because I wrote about your son, I’ve found your daughter. The daughter whom, at nine days old, you brought to the municipal hospice in the 19th arrondissement in Paris and never spoke of again...Despite the research that went into our family history book and cookbook, she was unknown to us, your siblings’ descendants and your own, until now. I imagine that you did not hand your baby over with “absolute indifference” as recorded by the authorities, but with considerable grief and sorrow.”
Help, I Can’t Stop Staring At My Face
by Aubree Nichols
“I would identify a choice defect of the day and walk back and forth to the bathroom mirror every 5 or 10 minutes checking, checking, checking on it. I was relentless, but I couldn’t make myself stop. I knew I needed help…I did something perfectly suited to my new city, Los Angeles. I hired a gorgeous and deeply spiritual model–turned–female embodiment life coach from Topanga, California, named Rachel Pringle to help me establish some healthy self-love practices. I wanted to learn how to spend less time looking in the mirror thinking about what I saw there, but that’s exactly where our work began. ”
🚨Announcements:
Through June 27th, you can apply for Narratively’s Spring 2022 Memoir Prize.
“Narratively is accepting entries for our Spring 2022 Memoir Prize. We’re on the hunt for revealing and emotional first-person nonfiction narratives from unique and overlooked points of view — the best of which we’ll reward with four-figure cash prizes, publication and heavy promotion, and a lot more.”
Judges include:
Ashley C. Ford, New York Times–bestselling memoirist of Somebody’s Daughter
Nicole Rocklin, Oscar-winning film and TV producer behind the movie Spotlight
Glynn Washington, host, creator and executive producer of the podcast/radio show Snap Judgment
📢 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!
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