A Dozen Stellar Personal Essays, and More
Be sure to check out all the announcements at the bottom...
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. Below is this week’s curation.
First Person Singular, featuring original personal essays. Recently I published “Shelter Among Sisters” by
. A new essay is coming Wednesday.
*Submissions are currently paused for First Person Singular. I’ll do a limited submission period later this fall. Stay tuned…*
The Lit Lab, featuring interviews and essays on craft and publishing. It is primarily for paid subscribers. Recently I posted “Publishing Books as a Collective, via Crowd-Funding,” an interview with the three co-founders of new, alternative publishing project, Quilted Press.
Essays from partner publications…
Passion of the Fruit
by Lisa Munniksma
“As I break one open on my way back inside, I remember that unripe passion fruit are toxic. All parts of the vine produce cyanide as protection against the insects and animals who would eat them. We larger animals would have to consume a significant amount to feel the effects, but one taste of an unripe passion fruit might convince you they can’t be worth ingesting. But my garden teaches me patience.”
Cause and Effect
by Lynn Cunningham
“It was one of those life-changing phone calls, only not the kind announcing you’ve won a lottery or been nominated for some big-deal award. The woman on the other end of the phone was a Children’s Aid worker in a community just north of Toronto. ‘Ms. Cunningham? I’m calling about your grandson, Andrew. Come and get him, or we’re taking him into care. Meet me at the hospital.’”
The When Horror is the Truth-teller
by
“No one is likely to shame you for not having read Dracula, the way they do The Mill on the Floss or Middlemarch, though perhaps they should and perhaps that is, ever so subtly, what I am up to now. I was once the sort of person who thought they knew Dracula, and might have spent my adult life without reading the novel until a close friend dropped some very suspect-sounding and yet enthralling literary gossip: Dracula was rumored, he said, to have been inspired by Bram Stoker’s visit to see Walt Whitman with Oscar Wilde. Stoker had seen them kiss.”
When Innocent Black People Die, I Mourn The Life, The Potential, And The Art
by Zeynab Warsame
“Many questions cannot be answered. A case of mistaken identity. Maybe the feeling that there was violence on the horizon, though Dumas was unarmed at the time of his death, the threat of him necessitated his shooting. This story is an old one, and it was passed down by another, and it runs underneath our days today, with each loss misremembered, forgotten. These instances hold hands across time. In Henry Dumas, we have the ability to look inside him, to examine his heart long after he died. It’s not nearly enough, but it is a gift. Others were not and will not have this afforded to them.”
The Catharsis of Writing About Sex in Memoir
by Minda Honey
“I’ve mostly written sex scenes as reportage. His body was there. My body was here. Breast clad in. Hand on. Not that dissimilar from the setting and documenting of any other scene. Yet, when I read back over the sex scenes throughout my debut memoir, The Heartbreak Years, what I see is that in recreating these intimate moments for a reader I regained the autonomy I was often missing in the moment.”
Notes On Another New Life #8: Happy Birthday to Me
by
“You’re advised to play pickle ball, avoid footstools, dote on your grandchildren, and watch movies where Judi Dench and Maggie Smith flutter warily around foreign hotels.
Me: What about eating men like air?
The world: That's not your job, any longer, dear. You've earned your rest. Anyway, at your age, eating men like air will probably give you indigestion.
Me: I ate some yesterday, and I'm fine.”
Essays from around the web…
Who’s Afraid of a Spatchcocked Chicken?
by C Pam Zhang
“A spatchcocked chicken roasts in 45 minutes and costs less than the equivalent number of pre-cleaned breasts, wings, thighs, drumsticks. I found beauty in the economy of the technique: the way spine became stock and giblets gravy, the definitive crunch of the breastbone that yielded, only with effort, to the weight of my whole body. It feels more honest: I feel it. Nowadays, at a certain type of Chinese restaurant in the Inner Sunset of San Francisco or in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, I still thrill at an old, laminated menu that offers ‘cow stomach’ or ‘pig bung;’ I trust more a place that doesn’t attempt to dissimulate with ‘offal’ or ‘tripe.’”
Crybaby for Life
by
“I remember being told to fight back against my tears as if they were an enemy to be vanquished. The tools I was offered were deep breaths, warm water rinses, and reminders to ‘relax’ and ‘calm down.’ In other words, I didn’t stand a chance.”
Men Explain Periods to Me
by Farah Ahamed
“Obviously, no two men have the same understanding of menstruation, and some have no knowledge at all. It is no wonder, then, that when they first hear about periods and the myths surrounding them, men became alarmed. While for some men it is a frightening topic, for others it is some kind of perverse fantasy. Because ‘X’ is not something they can imagine or relate to, it isn’t normal, and therefore a woman becomes alien, or even subhuman.”
The Sobriety Experiment
by Adrian Fernandez
“I saw them as an incestuous, overindulgent, throbbing mass of self-interest and contrived personality. The tribe I’d once had was dead, and in its place, vampires had come, sucking the life from my home. This one cheated. That one stole. The other lied. He was mean to her, and she was conning the next guy. They broke each other down and bullshitted as they built each other back up, congregating in a mass of Me-Monsters, holding hands in a ritual of taking and enabling. A world that had felt more real than anything I’d ever known seemed hollow now.”
Elevate and Find Joy
by Cris Cadiz
“We enter the pale, dusty singletrack one by one, giving the rider in front of us breathing (and braking) room. I wait my turn, gloved hands steady on my handlebars, one foot on the ground, the other on my pedal, rocking my bike a little in anticipation. My mind replays the coach’s mantra for cornering: low, lean, look. Ahead, hidden by dense forest greenery and twists in the trail, we hear hoots of success. It’s my turn. I stand up and pedal hard. Here we go! I eyeball the trail sign as I flash by it: Roly Grail. I’m 53 years old, riding a mountain bike along with 100 other badass women gathered to enjoy a sport we love and want to learn more about.”
If You Want to Know What You're Made Of
by Jennifer Battisti
“It’s a girl who sees you, sees through your shrunken, muted body from the back of the bus. The way she drills her eyes, heady heady, into the empire waist of your babydoll dress, into your Manic Panic hair. Her persistence in your bedroom. Lesbian is a word you have to suck on, she tells you. It needs to dissolve on your tongue awhile before you can sound it out. Once you sound it out, you like the way it is asking something of you, how the word itself needs your answer to exist.”
🚨Announcements:
📢 Calling all book lovers: Electric Literature is hosting a masquerade!
This year we’re celebrating haunted houses in literature, and paying homage to Edgar Allan Poe’s story, “The Fall of the House of Usher.” Join us, and hosts Hilary Leichter and Morgan Jerkins, for a spooky night of partying, drinking, and dancing with the literary community!
The ticket price is $75 and includes an open bar, free haunted house books, and free masks. At Littlefield, Brooklyn, NY, Friday, October 27, 2023
Cocktail hour from 8 – 9pm. Dancing from 9 – 11pm. The dress code is red or black festive attire.
📢 Submissions for ’s second annual Memoir Prize are open now.
“Through Thursday, November 30, 2023, Narratively is accepting entries for our 2023 Memoir Prize. We’re on the hunt for revealing and emotional first-person nonfiction narratives from unique and overlooked points of view. The winning submission will receive a $3,000 prize and publication on Narratively.”
📢 Writing Co-Lab has some new classes on offer…
Writing Co-Lab provides dynamic online classes and workshops in every genre to deepen your craft, sharpen your publishing acumen, and ignite your imagination. Writing Co-Lab is cooperatively owned and run by teaching artists, so up to 90% of your tuition goes directly to the instructor. With free open mic nights, early morning writing clubs, and faculty “ask me anything” sessions, Writing Co-Lab is committed to fostering community inside and outside the classroom. We have upcoming classes taught by acclaimed writers like Edgar Gomez, Bushra Rehman, Omer Friedlander, Natasha Oladokun, Kyle Dillon Hertz, Mila Jaroneic, Amy Shearn, and Alexandra Watson. Check out our full class listings and come write with us!
📢 The Resort writing community is hosting its first IN-PERSON retreat for writers!
Come to Your Senses, facilitated by Resort founder Catherine LaSota, is designed to be an inspiring weekend in NYC on Nov 18-19, 2023 (no overnight accommodations included). For two days, get nourished and reconnect to your creativity with chef-prepared food, soothing acupuncture, art viewing, craft making, lots of generative writing prompts, and more, all in the beautiful plant-filled Resort headquarters. This retreat is open to all genres and experience levels and is limited to eight participants. Registration closes on November 3, 2023. Find out more and sign up here.
📢 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!
Lynn Cunningham's "Cause and Effect" (essay #2) is gut-punch riveting -- a compelling tale of compassion, resilience and growth. This one tugs emotions and will linger.
Hooray for Alyson and her beautiful essay Crybaby for Life!