A Dozen Stellar Personal Narratives...
PLUS: A Narratively Academy workshop with Kerra Bolton, private coaching with Starina Catchatoorian, and "Summer Salons" From FAWC 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 published “Smoke,” by
.The Lit Lab, featuring interviews and essays on craft and publishing. There are also occasional writing prompts and exercises for paid subscribers. Most ecently I posted “The Prompt-O-Matic #18,” and “The Memoir Land Author Questionnaire #17: Glynnis MacNicol.
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 “The Free Pied-à-Terre that Spoiled Me,” something I wrote.
*Please note: I am no longer posting about these roundups on X/Twitter.*
Essays from partner publications…
Bleak Midwinter
by Catherine Taylor
“Friday 2 January 1981, the last day of the Christmas holidays, was cold and drizzly in South Yorkshire. There was, however reluctantly, a possibility of taking a walk that day. My head hurt from being cooped up indoors, reading Jane Eyre and Julius Caesar on a manic loop: gothic imagination fused with ancient Roman law. Late in the morning, sundry family members, along with visitors from overseas who’d been staying for new year, descended on Haworth, just over an hour’s drive away. At the Brontë Parsonage Museum I would see for the first time the dresses, gloves and shoes belonging to Charlotte, Emily and Anne displayed in their glass cases, marvelling at how grown women could be so tiny; and the preserved miniature books containing the tales of Gondal and Angria that the sisters had dreamt up with their brother Branwell to while away the intense, interminable hours of childhood – stories they would become obsessed with, inspired, and, in some indefinable way, ruined by.”
Echo of a Cataclysm
by Jolene Brink
“I’d looked at dozens of studies and maps re-creating the flood’s path, competing for comparisons about how to describe the sound, the speed, the impact. What are we trying to do? I wondered, reliving something so deep in the past. Why do we reach for it? When I asked Berger a version of this question, he paused and then said, ‘I think it’s the same way humans are obsessed with car crashes. We’re curious as long as we can watch from a safe distance.’”
My Father, the Secret Pornographer
by Rebecca Duclose
“I wasn’t sure what amazed me more: his plots full of missed sexual encounters, oceanic masturbation scenes, and society seductions or the fact that the figures of his imagination appeared to inhabit the same beloved tidal pools of my youth. Albert’s naughty novellas, Ramshead Passage and Battery Foote, were set on the island where my sister and I spent over a decade of summers as kids.”
Driving Around San Francisco with a Famous Antiwar Hero — an excerpt of 1974: A Personal History
by Francine Prose
“Of course life is never as simple as Algren’s wise-guy rules of avoidance. Tony was charismatic. He was brave. He’d been to Vietnam. He’d interviewed prisoners, peasants, scooter drivers. He’d seen the horrors of war. He’d help steal the Pentagon Papers. He’d gone to jail. And now he wanted me to listen, to hear what he had been through. He seemed to think I could help. He’d come to San Francisco to write a book, and I was a writer.”
Winning the Culture War Against Queer Kids’ Books
by Michael Leali
“I was celebrating the release of my third middle grade novel, The Truth About Triangles, at a recent bookstore event when someone asked me, ‘How does it feels to write LGBTQ+ stories for young people?’ I paused, overwhelmed by the tangle of words this question brought up. But one word stood out. ‘Impossible,’ I said. ‘It feels impossible.’”
The Forgotten Lovers of Single Life
by
“Woe is not me. I’m 70 and I live alone. I have always been single and I always will be. That’s because I love being single. I dated a few men when I was a lot younger, and I still smile when I think of them. But each time, when we went our separate ways, I was just so happy to leap back into the arms of my one true love – my single life.”
Essays from around the web…
53) Special Father's Day Edition
by
“The more I loved him, the more I realized what I’d missed. It was a new pleasure having a dad to consult, one that could give me advice about the pressures and stresses in my life. He had great perspective and input on anything I asked about. Watching how hard he tried to live overwhelmed me with sadness. Then I’d get frustrated—why didn’t he try more, try harder, to eat, to stand, to move? I desperately didn’t want to lose him. Not after losing him as a child.”
Meet Me in the Middle: Reflections on 33,000 Words
by Allison Kirkland
“About a year into this process I saw a tweet that haunted me: Your writing might not change the world but it will change you and that’s enough…No! — was my first thought. I have to change the world. That belief had sustained me through pages and pages I’d crafted alone every single week for the past year…If I wasn’t going to change the world, what were those hours worth? I’d been sitting alone in my office, tangling with old memories, blowing off friends and being the opposite of who I’d been for many years: someone who didn’t take her own work that seriously. If I didn’t change the discourse, and change the minds of millions, why was I even writing?”
For 33 Years, I Thought Something Was Wrong With Me. Then I Faced The 1 Possibility I Hadn't Considered.
by Clare Egan
“Of all the people I thought I might grow up to be, a lesbian wasn’t one of them. I never fantasized about women or imagined loving them. I didn’t have crushes on women or crave their attention. I was born in ferociously Catholic Ireland. My mother was very religious. Before getting married, she almost became a nun. I have only one photograph from that time in her life, a novice habit framing her kind, questioning eyes. I imagine her living in the echoey rooms of an old convent, among a colony of young women, their days punctuated by prayer, their heads bowed in reverence toward the god that guided their lives. Her days were embroidered by women, their rhythms and interests, the way women think and talk and feel. That sounds heavenly to me, though not in the way the church intended.”
Picture Me Then
by Christie Tate
“I was raised in a strict Catholic home, but never experienced anything truly spiritual until I almost died of bulimia. The experience changed not only my body but also my soul. I was no longer someone who relied solely on reason and logic, instead becoming attuned to the mysterious and unknowable promptings of a Higher Power. One of these promptings came on an April morning during my sophomore year of college, when I cut through the student center on my way to PE class and a sign for ‘CAMP DAY’ caught my eye. I was neither sporty nor outdoorsy, two attributes I imagined as prerequisites for camp counselor success, and I had no experience working as a camp counselor, but I followed the arrows to the main conference room, propelled by a curiosity that felt like an invitation from the spiritual realm.”
Such a Good Brain
by Karen Paul
“Several weeks earlier, it had become clear that there was to be no heroic last-minute rally, no unanticipated happy ending to the story of the tumor that had entered my husband’s brain nearly 12 months earlier, scattering its tentacles across the lobes and the grey matter, searching for a place, anyplace, to lay in its scaffolding. One morning, when it was clear that we would be spending the next and last phase of our life together preparing for his death, our youngest son, 13 and an empath, was sitting on our bed and, without asking, picked up his phone to call his grandmother. “Grandma,” he said, “Daddy’s here, and he’s sad, and I think that talking with you would make him feel better.” He handed the phone to his dad. Talking on the phone hurt my husband’s head, but he grasped for our son’s phone as if it were a life raft. And for the first time throughout his brain cancer year, he talked with his mother like he was a little boy. ‘Mommy, I wish you were here to cut my hair.’”
Of Coors Light and Clones: A Story About Dave
by K.M. McCorkendale
“Dad Dave was also a vagabond of sorts, a sailor who loved Coors Light way back in the 1960s when it sold only in the American West. It was the first craft brew, a beer with mystique Dad Dave once said he would drive for—traveling from Texas or Tennessee to Colorado to buy a case. You used to fetch him a can when he worked in the yard, returning with it opened, having taken the first sip. Don’t spill, you’d say before he could explode with rage, because the horror a soldier experiences in war never ceases. His anger erupted in wrong moments all your life, but never when you opened and drank his beer. You let him drink in the quiet you knew he liked from you.”
🚨Announcements:
📢 Academy’s Summer Writing Workshop: Mastering Personal Essays About Family
Academy is offering a Summer Writing Workshop: Mastering Personal Essays About Family with Kerra Bolton. If you want to craft compelling personal essays about your family without getting caught in the messy middle, this intimate five-week workshop (capped at no more than 10 students) is designed to help writers polish their storytelling and get their pieces published. Starts July 8.📢 Writer/Editor Starina Catchatoorian is Offering Private Coaching…
“I'm excited to announce I am now consulting privately with writers. This summer, set your writing intentions and goals! From June 6 through August 6 I'm offering a $30 discount (normally $125/session) at $95/session for Memoir Monday readers. See website for more details.
📢 Attend “Summer Salons” at Provincetown’s Fine Arts Work Center:
A lineup of influential figures in the arts and culture scene will host Summer Salons at Provincetown’s Fine Arts Work Center from May 31st to September 7th. Poets Tracy K. Smith and Major Jackson, curator Helen Molesworth, photographer Catherine Opie, author Sarah Schulman, and journalist Peter Slevin will lead intimate weekend conversations and workshops.
Whether attending in person or via live stream, participants will engage directly with the artists in unmoderated discussions, followed by Q&A sessions and hands-on workshops. Prices are determined based on affordability, and all ticket sales will support the Fine Arts Work Center’s commitment to providing free arts and culture events, including this summer’s nightly readings and artist talks hosted each week Monday through Wednesday nights, open art studios, and open-mic readings on Thursday nights, among other free events. The lineup:
📢 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.
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!
I'm such a fan of Memoir Land. Thanks so much for featuring my essay "Meet Me in the Middle." Sari, I learn a lot from your writing as well as your literary citizenship.
Thank you for mentioning my Narratively Academy workshop. More importantly, thank you for believing in and supporting me as a writer by publishing "The Water Spirits Will Carry Us." I appreciate the work you do to support and uplift writers.