A Dozen Personal Essays to Start Your Week Off Right...
Welcome to Memoir Monday—a weekly newsletter featuring the best personal essays from around the web, and a quarterly reading series, brought to you by Narratively, The Rumpus, Granta, Guernica, Oldster Magazine, Literary Hub, Orion Magazine, The Walrus—and this week, we are thrilled to welcome Electric Literature aboard!
In addition to the weekly curation, there are now original personal essays under the heading of First Person Singular. Last week I reprinted my own essay, “The Diagnosis and Surgery I Had to Fight For,” in time for Adenomyosis Awareness Month.
***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 a Submittable account and specific submission periods, which I will announce here. You can find submissions guidelines and more on the “About” page, but, again, submissions are currently PAUSED.
In other news, recently I launched “The Lit Lab,” a new section of this newsletter dedicated to interviews and essays on craft and publishing. It is primarily for paid subscribers. Recently I published an interview with The Secret Lives of Church Ladies author Deesha Philyaw.
Essays from partner publications…
Body and Soul
by Drew Nelles
“I have learned things from Dan: how to sit quietly beside a person who needs my presence, how to operate a lift and strap a wheelchair into a van. But I am resistant to the idea, occasionally suggested, that disabled people are here to teach us something about the value of human existence, that the rest of us should treasure what we have, for it might be taken from us tomorrow. The lives of disabled people have intrinsic importance, independent of whatever they might offer the able bodied. When accidents like Dan’s occur, our first instinct is to scour them for meaning, but there is no cosmic truth here. There is only the random lightning strike, the explosion of a dying planet—only suffering and our capacity to overcome it.”
Geography as Generosity: An Afternoon with Barry Lopez
by Robert MacFarlane
“I creaked down the stairs to the hotel lobby where Barry was waiting for me, heart-thuddingly anxious about disappointing him in some way I could neither foretell nor forestall. He rose with some difficulty—for his illness was at this point considerably advanced—greeted me with warmth and courtesy, bid me sit next to him, and then pointed to a big book already placed on the coffee table in front of us. It was a world atlas.”
My Jewish Father’s Chinese Food Was Legendary
by Abigail Weil
“Kosher Chinese home cooking became my dad’s greatest legacy, and Millie Chan turned out to be the on-ramp he needed toward this. It encouraged one of his favorite hobbies: sourcing ingredients from the many terrific greengrocers and neighborhood markets around Cleveland. Sriracha was a household staple for us 15 years before it became ubiquitous: my dad called it “Vietnamese,” no noun, and bought it in quantities that could supply a small restaurant.”
Ausländer
by Michael Moritz
“The principal character of W.G. Sebald’s novel Austerlitz, for whom the book is named, recalls how he was brought as a four-year-old from Prague on a Kindertransport train to Liverpool Street station where he was met by an austere couple, a vicar and his wife from North Wales. The boy was renamed Dafydd Elias, and subsequently raised in a small village. As an adult, having reverted to his original name, Austerlitz made his way back to the Czech Republic and, unable to detect the borders between the distortions of memory and fact, relived his life as a child.”
Feral
by Staci Greason
“After a wild thing is wounded, what does it do? It flees. Hides. Buries its tracks so that no one can sense vulnerability. Survival is key. Make a home for solitude and heartache until it feels normal. For three decades, I held fast to my Helen Reddy anthem, my Marlo Thomas dreams, reinforcing my belief that women should stay single, and eventually embraced a sort of Cat Lady action figure identity.”
Colorado, You Need to Look at Transgender People
by Rafael Frumkin
“One of the many beautiful things about the trans body is that it’s built, not inherited. You author your form, edit it, decide what it is you want to keep and what you want to change. I have heard other trans people refer to their bodies as “vessels,” which I think is apt: it’s the thing with a head and a heart that carries your soul, and you can (and should) modify and bedazzle it all you want.”
Essays from around the web…
Poverty Sucks
by Scott Hurd
“Mom wasn’t the only person born at 107 Rice Lane, as a little online sleuthing quickly uncovered. Paul McCartney was born there too, as evidenced by souvenir copies of his birth certificate from the height of Beatlemania. For a few glorious moments, the starry-eyed fan in me imagined Mom and one of the Fab Four having been born in the very same house. Did our families know each other? Were they friends?”
What Justine Bateman Gets exactly Right About Beauty
by Andrea Askowitz
“At a party recently, I ran into a friend I knew in college. Thirty-five years ago, she was adorable — full cheeks and a giant smile. I had full cheeks back then, too…’You look great,’ my friend said to me. ‘You haven’t aged.’…I took it in. I said thank you and felt good for a second…But here’s the thing: I have aged. Thirty-five years.”
When Climate Change Melts Your Relationship
by Alison Kaplan
“I worried that the big issues of the world didn’t seem to affect Doug the same way that they affected me. Our political leanings were more or less aligned, and we shared similar dreams for the future, so I didn’t understand how he managed to go about his life without succumbing to the same existential dread and anger that plagued me. It was a strange space for me to navigate, envying his capacity to be content in such a flawed world while also resenting the privilege that allowed him to feel that way. And instead of explaining all of this to him, I had picked a fight about a lamp”
I Work At The Hospital That Saved My Trans Son’s Life. Now, We Are Facing Death Threats.
by Toni Fastner
“That fall M begged for chest binders. He wrapped his chest so tightly he could hardly breathe. The cutting continued. Why would he harm what I considered his beautiful, God-given body? Because his body betrayed the core of who he was…It took me so long to understand that…”
This Little-Known Passover Candy Is Our Family’s Most Special Tradition
by Ilene V. Smith
“Golden honey cascades from the bear-shaped jar into the pot, my grandmother Sarah standing beside me, watchful. She has been gone for 15 years but I feel her there, making sure that I get this just right. I pull the walnuts out of the refrigerator — so hard to find this time of year — and place a handful into the food processor bowl, made cloudy from overuse.”
Appetite
by Wil Reidie
“Food is only a small diversion. Very little, in fact, almost nothing. But what is any life well-led than a thing of many joyous little diversions?”
🚨Announcements:
📢 Narratively is currently accepting submissions for their 2023 Profile Prize contest. They are looking for profile pieces that tell the story of ordinary people or communities doing extraordinary things. The grand prize winner will receive $3,000, and the two finalists will receive $1,000 each. Guest judges are renowned journalists Gay Talese, Lisa Lucas and Rebecca Traister. For more information and to submit a story, use their pitch form. There is a $20 entry fee and the deadline to submit is April 14.
📢 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!