A Fresh Batch of Mini-Memoirs Just For You...
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, Catapult, Granta, Guernica, Oldster Magazine, Literary Hub, and Orion Magazine — plus many additional publications.
*Sadly, this is the last week we’ll have Catapult as a partner publication, as the parent organization has folded the magazine and closed the school. RIP Catapult! Thank you to the wonderful editors and contributors there for their great work over many years.
In addition to the weekly curation, there are now original personal essays under the heading of First Person Singular, for paying subscribers. The latest original essay, published in the First Person Singular series last week, is “The Bedroom” by Kate Vieira. The next original essay is coming next Wednesday.
***Submissions for First Person Singular are now PAUSED. An overwhelming number of new submissions have recently come in (I think because some websites have posted my submissions guidelines and email address?). There are way 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. (Welcome, Katie!)
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, 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. I’m bringing over from Catapult my “How’s the Writing Going?” interview series, beginning with a chat I had with 15-time author Bernice McFadden, who’s currently working on her memoir.
In The Lit Lab, Check out “How to Be Your Own Agent,” the latest video interview with Chloe Caldwell, author of four books including The Red Zone: A Love Story, published last April. Chloe and I talk about how she has acted as her own agent, for the most part, in publishing her books with indie presses.
Clockwise from top left: From Cataplut, Illustration by Rachelle Baker for Catapult; From Granta, Image © Clint Budd; From Oldster Magazine, Mohammed Nohassi/Unsplash; From LitHub, a vase with flowers; From Orion Magazine, Bernice Wright by Jackson Davis, in Jackson Davis, Papers, 1906–1947, Accession #3072, #3072-a, Special Collections, University of Virginia Library, Charlottesville, VA 22903; From The Rumpus, Art by Peter Witte.
Essays from partner publications…
Once This Romance Novel Is Published, Please Don't (Slow) Burn Me At the Stake
by Nichole Perkins
“Romance readers are loyal and vicious, and I mean that in the most complimentary way possible. Publish an essay about reading romance for the first time and mention Fabio. See what happens. I dare you. Romancelandia, the general social media community of romance readers and writers, will tear you a new one quicker than a bodice is ripped in a rose garden. We are fierce protectors of the genre because, despite the ways it helps keep the publishing industry afloat, it still gets ridiculed. How dare women want to read about being treated and loved well, often with great sex too.”
The Tiddler
by Charlie Gilmour
“One hot summer’s day, my uncle took my older brother and me fishing on a river in Sussex. The river was so polluted with hormones, my uncle said, that the fish were constantly changing sex, and if we ate them we’d grow breasts. We used balls of
cheese for bait, our plastic floats bobbing in the beef-stock brown water as we slapped at horseflies.”
Hair
by Meredith Maran
“It’s been thirty-three years, exactly half my lifetime, since I stumbled into a lesbian bar and mistook it for a Hells Angels clubhouse. Apparently, at least in the queer enclave of LaLaLand, today’s young lesbians don’t need to hide, or telegraph, their availability or their identities. They don’t need to costume themselves to hide from hostile straight people, or to be instantly recognizable to other queers. Could it be that with their long and short and wildly hued hair; their unshaven underarms and legs, their rainbow bikinis and designer dresses, they’re costuming themselves for the only reason that humans should: to please and express themselves?”
A Secular Sacrament: Domenica Ruta on Terminating a Pregnancy
by Domenica Ruta
“The socioeconomic impact of abortion cannot be overstated, but for me, it engendered a transformation that I think of as sacred. In another universe, another life, abortion would be a secular sacrament, bloody, holy, a threshold that people could walk through on the way to becoming the person they were born to be.”
An Archive of Black Memory
by Ama Codjoe, Ronald L. Greer II, Naima Penniman, Michael Kleber-Diggs, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, katie robinson
“Being raised in the woods wasn’t easy. An anomaly of Blackness, we were told at our school that we did not belong. Kids sneered at our handmade and hand-me-down clothes, scorned our untamable hair, cursed our skin made of clay not porcelain. But we saw our complexion reflected all around us in the tones of tree bark and fallen oak leaves. We didn’t have an abundance of toys, but we had jungle gyms of trees and front-row seats to ponds and tributaries.” — Carolyn Finney
The Muralist
by Ilana Bean
“The thing about living with my ex’s mural of his own ex about two hundred feet from my apartment was that I loved it. She looked out sideways, lips parted as if she were about to speak.”
A Three-Time Memoirist Switches to Narrative Nonfiction
by Helene Stapinski
“When I ran out of my own material, or rather when the events of my life became not quite fascinating enough to serve up to the rest of the world, I have to say I was kind of relieved. I went back to that old standby, journalism, writing about the lives of others…One of those lives was a man named Jules Schulback. Though Jules was dead, his granddaughter, Bonnie Siegler, had found footage he had shot of Marilyn Monroe back in 1954.”
Essays from around the web…
The Night Stevie Nicks Saved My Life
by Candi Milo
“Just then, a little sprite of a woman, and trust me, I’m a sprite, and she was littler than I, came swooping in and told the guy to move along, pal! Stevie Nicks. She talked to us softly but firmly.”
My Past Life at Sea Still Defines Who I Am
by Nell Smith
“I don’t yet know how to write this story of who I was from the perspective of who I am becoming; I’m still in the middle of it. I am creating a life that does not rely on my parents’ absolution. This, too, is the work of revision. Reading the memoir now, the anger I felt towards my father is palpable, but it feels like an artifact from a former self. I find myself thinking that I need a narrative with more room for empathy. When I built the first one, I just wanted to make sense of things; I didn’t realize I was going to have to keep living in it.”
My Valentine’s Day Experiment: I didn’t talk about myself for 24 hours.
by Andrea Askowitz
“I got an idea to give myself a secret challenge: 48 hours without talking about myself. I wouldn’t initiate conversation or use the word “I,” starting as soon as Vicky walked in the door. Before she got home, I reduced my sentence to 24 hours.”
Should Have Left Him Then: A Mad Lib
by Hayli May Cox
“He stands between you and the door, just as he has trapped you so many times, and screams. This will go for an hour or more, until you figure out what you must do or say to get him to stop. He is always writing your story. This, he explains, is why so much shit has happened to you. This is why you were _______ (verb, especially heinous). You _________ (verb ascribing blame) them. You _________ (verb, innocuous) too much.”
Breakdowns and Breakthroughs - Coming back to my body
by Aliya Mughal
“I used to think I could think my way out of self-consciousness, that by sitting with my mind and ignoring the needs of the body, I could move beyond the confines of physical form, a dark place into which God placed the soul with the promise of releasing it one day, as my Mum says.I was seduced by the idea of transcendence, of release, of elevation, of escape, from an early age. I wanted to get out of my skin and place a distance between my mind and body, imagining somehow that I could literally and figuratively rise above it. The ultimate delusion. Of course, I was bypassing the very vehicle through which I might have any chance of finding a way out of the suffering I was manifesting. I was seeking the impossible.”
🚨Announcements:
Get ready for the AWP offsite edition of the quarterly Memoir Monday reading series, Saturday, March 11th, hosted by Lilly Dancyger! This edition, in Seattle, features Raquel Gutiérrez, Erin Keane, Sabrina Imbler, and Comonghne Felix.
📢 The Woodstock Bookfest is back, March 30th to April 2nd in Woodstock, NY! If you attend, don’t miss the personal essay panel on April 1st, featuring Alexander Cheek, Gary Shteyngart, and Carolita Johnson, moderated by me, Sari Botton.
📢 Memoir experts Brooke Warner and Linda Joy Myers are offering a new, six-week memoir intensive. “Anyone who has a memoir-in-progress knows how valuable a dose of inspiration can be to keep you writing, focused on why you're writing your story in the first place, and away from the inner critic messages that stand in the way of you doing the work you've set out to do. This 6-week course, taught by memoir experts Brooke Warner and Linda Joy Myers, touches upon the following important concepts—Freedom, Memory, Truth, Self-revelation, Meaning, and Inspiration. You’ll write in community. You'll get feedback on a submission of your choice. And you'll be inspired each week alongside others who care about memoir as much as you do.”
📢 The Essay as '“Attempt”: Making Sense of the World with Personal Essays— Former Catapult editor Matt Ortile will be leading this three hour workshop via Kundiman on Sunday, March 5th from 2-5pm Eastern. *Open to all writers of color. Scholarships available.
📢 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!
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