A Dozen Personal Essays to Celebrate Our Publication's New Name: "Memoir Land..."
Welcome to Memoir Land—a newsletter 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. (Plus an associated quarterly reading series hosted by Lilly Dancyger.)
First Person Singular, featuring original personal essays. Recently I published “Reclaiming My Late Father,” by Wendy L. Dodek. Another new essay is coming Friday.
(***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 an interview with author and Cheryl Strayed's Dear Sugaradvice columnist
.
Essays from partner publications…
Retriever of Souls
by Amy Irvine and Ruby McHarg
“Female adolescence and its wild estrogen rise worsen Ruby’s seizures. We drive six hours, to Colorado Children’s Hospital in Denver, where I sob hysterically to Ruby’s neurologist. Every time we see her, I tell her I’m not usually like this, and every time, I am exactly like this. As I name the alliterative failures—mothering, medication, and medical devices—Dr. W cuts me off.”
Want to Believe
by Shelley Mann Hite
“Fully immersed in water. Submerged. Purified. A baptism. It felt as if someone was trying to shake me to wake up. Pay attention….I had not noticed my body in this way for years. I had not felt it. I’d been ignoring it, doing whatever I could to avoid listening to what it had to say. To avoid feeling anything at all.”
I Am a Man, but I Am Not
by M Jesuthasan
“During durian season, you can buy the fruit in white polystyrene boxes with the hard shell removed. You must eat it with your hands, tearing into the doughy yellow mounds that cover a hard seed. The flesh is a dense, heavenly concentration of pungent, fibrous honey. This is a very heaty fruit (energizing or stimulating, in traditional Chinese medicine), so you must never have it with alcohol. The flavor is sweet, solid, and electric, and lingers long after eating, like something warm on your breath—according to old lore, no soap brand can wash the smell off your hands, only water poured from the husk of the fruit itself.”
In Winter, Thoughts of Hiking in August
by Sydney Lea
“I’m by anyone’s reckoning an old, old person now. Yet, although I have no notion what becomes of us after the Reaper arrives, but every so often I get an odd little inkling of continuity, of everything’s starting over, just as what we have contrived to call a year or four seasons has always done.”
Not White But Not (Entirely) Black: On the Complex History of “Passing” in America
by Herb Harris
“Race had been a source of confusion throughout my childhood, and I wondered if the original purpose of Topsy-Turvy dolls might have been to help mixed-race children understand their identities. As an object of play, the dolls might have enabled these children to grasp the paradox of who they were and understand their relationships with half-siblings who might eventually become their owners. I could imagine my fair-skinned grandmother as a little girl playing with one of these dolls, which might have been handed down from her grandmother.”
Giving Up the Ghost
by Lynn Cunningham
“My room features a Murphy bed, a small desk, a wall-mounted TV, and an inoffensive print; brown and beige are the dominant colours. The space is reminiscent of an upscale dorm or a highway motel, except for the syringe disposal receptacle in the bathroom. But matters of decor are not top of mind on this Friday in January, as I stand outside the entrance of the building. Instead, I’m focused on cigarettes—or, more precisely, smoking as many of them as possible in the time left before 4:30 p.m., when nine other people and I will hand over our packs and lighters, and put our faith in the Mayo Clinic’s Nicotine Dependence Center.
Essays from around the web…
I Was So Excited to Watch 'Beef' — But David Choe Ruined it For Me
by Iris (Yi Youn) Kim
“As a Korean American sexual assault survivor, I found it almost impossible to separate the art from the artist. This question looming over ‘Beef’ — whether Choe was or was not in fact a rapist — distorted my entire experience of watching the show. Instead of being able to enjoy its cathartic portrayals of Asian American rage, I found myself disturbed every time Isaac appeared onscreen, wondering how much of the character’s aggression was a performance and how much of it was channeled from Choe’s documented misogynoir. The toxicity of Cousin Isaac hit uncomfortably close to home.”
You Start Down the Wrong Path
by Sarah Fay
“It’s reasonable to want our disordered, confused, and troubling thoughts, feelings, and emotions to have a definite cause: chemical imbalances, misfiring neurons, depleted grey matter. Biogenic explanations of mental and emotional suffering—particularly the idea that this disorder is caused by that neuron or this gene—are tidy. We like the colorful photos of our amygdalae and the scientific jargon that goes along with them because they’re easy. We like and want to believe that our human experience can be understood through a neuroscientific lens. It’s comforting to think that our mental and emotional lives—ethereal and often indescribable—can be explained. But they can’t.”
Death by Thesaurus
by Ellen Notbohm
“I don’t know what kind of bug he was, and it happened so fast that I don’t remember much of what he looked like… He landed near the cleft where two pages meet. He never knew what hit him. I snapped the book shut, sniper-decisive. He took the full weight of 700 pages of the Oxford Writer’s Thesaurus, with the force of an overreactive full-grown human author behind it.”
This is the story of New York City’s Ageloff Towers at 141 East 3rd Street, its people, and the immediate neighborhood…
by Jacob Margolies
“This is the story of New York City’s Ageloff Towers at 141 East 3rd Street, its people, and the immediate neighborhood. Every old apartment building in New York has a story that contains the history of the people who lived there. It is the story of a block and a neighborhood. It is a story of the city.”
Tachycardia
by Suzanne Richardson
“We collaborated on sourness. The mystery of the lemon. The passion of the lemon. The brutality of the lemon. The sideways glance of a lemon. The pretending of a lemon. The army of a lemon….We collaborated on moons. Young moon. Bird moon. Done moon. Vicious moon. Hungry moon. Summon moon. Cruel moon. Leather moon. Bring us together moon. Bite moon. Pleasure moon. Treasure moon. Sigh moon. Tide moon. Patient moon.”
Radiated Areas are Bound to be Illuminated
by Jamie Holland
“All the doctor needs to say is Your Petscan looked great! or Nothing lit up! Either translates to No need to worry!, but he hesitates—or did we get cut off?…Forget my perfect garlic chicken. Forget the frozen spinach stacked up like sandbags, my daily regimen of 10,000 steps and deep cleansing breaths. None of it matters now, not the six liters of water a day, not the morning dropperfuls of astragalus tincture and mushroom extract and certainly not all those bottles of curcumin or the ancient herbs extracted from Boswellian trees and tangerine peel. All that time I should’ve been inhaling chocolate shakes because that’s my plan from here on out: Double fudge and cotton candy and deeply fried everything. Tequila shots and sunburns and why not start smoking because actually? Screw it all.”
🚨Announcements:
📢 Attention essayists: Electric Literature is launching a creative nonfiction program! Learn more about it in a free salon Tuesday, May 16th at 3pm EST, hosted by Mount St. Mary’s University. Tune in to hear EL’s essay editors, editor-in-chief Denne Michele Norris, associate editor Wynter Miller, and contributing editor Michelle Chikaonda in conversation to learn more about their new submission guidelines and more.
📢 Lilly Dancyger also has a few new workshops on offer, plus manuscript and essay consultations. Lilly is a talented writer, editor, and teacher who will help you improve your work. Check out her offerings…
📢 Granta Writers’ Workshops has two new courses on offer: Nature Writing: Rewilding Language, and Writing Memoir: Unlocking Memory and Shaping Experience.
📢 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!