A Dozen New Personal Essays to Read this Week...
PLUS: Two new workshops from Lilly Dancyger 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 reprinted “How—After 15 Years—I Stopped Panicking, Started Declawing, and Finally Published My Memoir,” an essay of my own that was originally published by Catapult, RIP.
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 #20,” “The Memoir Land Author Questionnaire #19:
,” and “The Memoir Land Author Questionnaire #20: Rachel Zimmerman”.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 “Washington Square” by
.
*Please note: I am no longer posting about these roundups on X/Twitter.*
Essays from partner publications…
VOICES ON ADDICTION: Furry Dice, Milkshakes, and Meth
by Hannah Sward
“Furry dice hang from the rearview mirror. He’s wearing a wife beater, it’s white. Not one stain on it. How does he keep it so white? And how does he manage to be on time? An on-time drug dealer. Kasper is okay. I even slept with him once. Well, not really. He couldn’t get it up. Too many drugs.”
Colonization Has Made a Taboo Out of Menstruation
by Laakkuluk Williamson Bathory
“I have tattooed lines across the tops of my hand to thank sila, the universe, for giving me the moment when all time stopped as a polar bear’s eyes directly engaged with mine. She had stood up to look through the upper-floor window of our cabin, and I had unwittingly stuck my head out. Her glistening black nose was just a few centimetres from mine.”
Whale Fall
by Rebecca Giggs
“A few years ago I helped push a beached humpback whale back out into the sea, only to witness it return and expire under its own weight on the sand. For the three days that it died the whale was a public attraction. People brought their children down to see it. They would stand in the surf and wave babies in pastel rompers over the whale, as if to catch the drift of an evaporating myth. The whale was black like piano wood and because it was still young, it was pink in the joints under its fins. Every few minutes it exhaled loudly and slammed its fluke against the sand – a tantrum or leverage. Its soft chest turned slack, concertinaed, when it rolled.”
Possess Me, Demon, Please
by Alexandra Dos Santos
“For a long time, I’d known I was spiraling but couldn’t say it out loud. I couldn’t even think it. A demon’s name holds all of its power. It will lie to you, tell you something else to misdirect you. Because once you have its name, you can command it out. That day, I named my demon for what it was, so I could send it back to hell. I decided to get sober.”
Gravity and Grace: What Becoming a Nurse Teaches You About Being a Poet
by Dorinda Wegener
“Many years ago, after the Master of Fine Arts did not generate the academic career and writing lifestyle I bought blindly into, I needed a job. I laid aside creative writing for a time, leaned into my gifts of empathy and scientific curiosity, and became a nurse.”
Letter to My Younger Self #7: Life Won’t Wait, but Writing Will
by
“Your mom, who is the glue that ties you to your heritage and culture, is disappearing bit by bit, and you are powerless to stop her decline. You feel guilty for living so far away and not doing more to help your parents, but one day you’ll understand that writing about pain and illness is how you witness, and witnessing is a form of love.”
Essays from around the web…
How to Make Thross Dye
by Colt Walker
“I wore a different pair of gloves as I stitched shut the holes in the woman’s side. I didn’t want to contaminate the thross blossoms with any blood, sweat, or dirt, and she had plenty. Her breathing was ragged, like she was having a bad dream, but I didn’t know what to do about that. Outside the wind rose and fell erratically, perfectly matched to the sporadic movement of her chest. I didn’t know what to do about that either.”
1974, a Memoir by Francine Prose
by
“1974 is about being twenty-six and wanting to attach your gorgeous, creative animal self to the grand, romantic project of social transformation. We all wanted to do that. When I say “all,” I mean everyone I knew, and if you were a girl, you didn’t know how to sort the romance of I need to fuck people (so I can discover how life works) from the romance of I am part of a generation that is going to get this done, this end to official lies. You didn't need to sort out the two impulses. It was all sex and all please make life better for more people.”
Elita Gay Warriors in Desert Hot Springs
by
“What I do know is that, in the changing room, when he spoke to us “respectfully,” no matter his motive, he represented the world. He reminded us that it can be a very threatening place for people like us. He reminded us, “respectfully,” that when he saw our bodies, or our outfits, or our proximity to each other, or whatever got to him, he saw a threat dangerous enough to cause him to confront us, to try to intimidate us.”
Summer with Ricardo in Echo Park
by Hannah Sward
“Ricardo. Likes Bob Dylan, old movies, Somerset Maugham and Bukowski. But Ricardo writes poetry. One thing I said is I’m not having any poet. My father is a poet. No money. Constant revisions…I was sitting on a red velvet couch at a party in Echo Park…Ricardo came over, ‘I write poetry.’…’That’s too bad.’ I got up. Walked away. The next morning he tipped his 1950s hat, bowed goodbye. Eight years later we are still together.”
There’s No Wrong Way to Grieve and No Wrong Time to Come Out
by Mindy Raf
“I wasn’t conscious I was gay until I was 32, and I was a little pissed off when it all sank in. I couldn’t believe I’d been gay my whole life and nobody, including myself, had bothered to tell me…’Mindy, you’re so gay, how did you not know you were gay?’ – All of my current friends and lovers…”
Love Affair with an Old Russian
by Donna Cameron
“Russian literature may not have offered a clear professional path, but it equipped me to think, reason, and write, which opened doors to challenging jobs and eventually a fulfilling career in the nonprofit world. A dozen years after college, I had an opportunity to co-lead a business delegation to the Soviet Union. We would travel to Leningrad—once St. Petersburg—where Dostoevsky spent much of his life.”
🚨Announcements:
📢 New Workshops from !
Telling Shared Stories: Writing About Other People in Memoir, a one-day session that will guide writers in creating their own ethical rubrics and craft approaches to writing about the people in their lives—from legal reads and whether/when to share pages with loved ones, to navigating power dynamics and figuring out which stories might not be yours to tell at all. (Sunday, July 21)
Essay Collection Incubator, a nine-month workshop including author visits from Melissa Febos, Esmé Weijun Wang, Kiese Laymon, and Jill Christman; generative and revision exercises to develop individual essays and your collection as a whole; agent and editor panels and guidance on the book proposal, querying, and publishing process; and more. (Deadline to apply is July 15!)
📢 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.