A Fresh Batch of Personal Essays...
Plus a call for submissions in the announcements at the bottom.
Welcome to Memoir Land—a newsletter edited by Sari Botton, 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 “The Kramah! The Kramah!” by Jerry Stahl, an excerpt of his latest memoir, Nein, Nein, Nien: One Man's Tale of Depression, Psychic Torment, and a Bus Tour of the Holocaust. A new essay is coming soon.
The Lit Lab, featuring interviews and essays on craft and publishing. There are also occasional writing prompts and exercises for paid subscribers. Recently I posted “The Memoir Land Author Questionnaire #5: Molly Roden Winter” the fifth installment in that interview series.
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 “What the Prior Tenant Gave Me,” an essay of my own that’s an ode to artist Joe Coleman.
*Please note: I am no longer posting about these roundups on X/Twitter.*
Essays from partner publications…
Why I Made Up the Role of My Dreams
by Heidi Sopinka
“In the summer of 2009, in what could be described as a moment of wild daring or a postpartum psychotic break, I left my small baby and toddler with their father and flew to Mexico City to hunt down the last living Surrealist. I had happened on a copy of Leonora Carrington’s The Hearing Trumpet, which has a ninety-two-year-old heroine, while I was also writing a novel with a ninety-two-year-old heroine. When I found out the author was still alive, I felt I had to meet her.”
The Life, Old Age and Death of a Woman of the People
by Didier Eribon, translated by Michael Lucey
“My link with my mother placed me within a collective history and a mental geography that a single word can describe: family. In her book Old Age, Simone de Beauvoir calls attention to societies studied by ethnologists where older people are the keepers of the knowledge of family genealogies. Is it not the same in our own society? It is certainly so when it comes to genealogies, and, more widely, to that social memory that is most at risk of disappearing alongside genealogies. The task of remembering in this way usually falls to women, partly because they live longer, on average, than men, but also because, in a general way, women are the ones assigned the task of maintaining family relationships and friendships throughout their lives, and so they keep the register up to date, and understand the complexity of these relationships and the changes that take place within them.”
Public Parts
by Dayna Mahannah
“The instructor said a simple pose would work best for the first ten minutes, until the class got comfortable with construction. Tilting my chin toward the ventilation system, I tried to stand—to pose—like someone who’d done this before. Simple but not boring, like a Matisse cutout, maybe. Or a Schierbeek sculpture. I felt a little…grand. I was thirty-two and nude on a stage and yes, I felt a little grand. Graphite and charcoal whipped over newsprint on the crescent of easels around me.”
The Incredible Strangeness of a Total Solar Eclipse
by Christopher Cokinos
“I know this interlude of light as one of awe, not fear, because I once stood in shock, gaping at the sky beside the scrawny waters of the Little Lost River in Idaho. There, with friends and a couple of strangers, we watched everything change.”
Crows in this Part of New Delhi
by Shreyasi Sharma
“Here in this part of Delhi, I look at crows long enough. I am beginning to recognize each one of them—some have an oval head, some have a little-flattened-oval head, some have a cloudy-gray throat, some have a rich iron-black crown. Some, when stretched out in a white bland May sky, emerge with a slit-like V in their wings. Some swoosh on my walks but then swiftly turn in another direction (perhaps some can even smell coconut oil in my hair).”
A Long Way Down
by Ray Suarez
“When I used to read personal finance columns warning older workers could face sudden and catastrophic losses of income in their final working years I was empathetic, but concluded “That could never happen to me.” After all, I had worked hard to build in bumpers around my life, and my career, to keep that from happening.”
Essays from around the web…
When Your Friend Breaks Up With You
by Sophie Lucido Johnson
“Romantic comedies imply that, ‘It’s not you, it’s me’ is a cop-out line; unfair because it’s untrue. But maybe it feels unfair because it is true, and we all want to be main characters of our own stories. How crushing, to spend energy on a relationship only to find that there was really nothing you could have done to save it. The other person needed to write you out, for their own reasons.”
It’s Not Me. It’s the Algorithm
by Ofelia Brooks
“Buried in her feed was a PSA that she would block any new Twitter accounts that had only a few followers because trolls were harassing her. I fit that description—I only had a handful of followers. But I wasn’t a troll. I was a Black woman, visibly so, trying to connect to other Black women and non-binary people. And I was blocked.”
11 Facts About Narwhals
by Sasha Howell
“A group of narwhals is called a blessing. I learned this in the dark hours of the morning when I should have been sleeping but wasn’t. My eyes and mind poked open by a question asked of me earlier in the day. Do you have other kids? I stop my slumbersome scroll at a picture: three silvery white creatures each with a seemingly magical horn rise up out of the water between chunks of ice to form what looks like a group high five. You know this, I want to say to her, but don’t.”
American Jewish Comedy Sings a Swan Song
by P.E. Moskowitz
“But the depths of Jewish angst, otherness, and grievance have been mined for comedy for so long, it was inevitable that this specific brand of humor would run out of steam eventually. It’s not just that one can only make the same kind of jokes so many times, it’s that the culture those jokes were based in now seems irrelevant. Which could be why this last season of Curb, as much as I hate to admit it, has felt tired.”
Was a Happily Married Mother of 4. Then I Met a Woman at Pilates.
by Katrina Anne Willis
“I was raised in a world where gay was not really an option. Or at least not a desirable one. My Granny used to call our local TV star, Cowboy Bob, “Gay Bob” because she mistakenly thought that was his name. We all thought it was hilarious. Gay was funny. Gay was foreign. Gay was whispers and giggles behind backs. Gay was a slur… ‘Gay’ was a hard word for me to say at all, let alone in reference to myself. ‘Lesbian’ was even harder. ‘Queer’ was so offensive that my big sister, Cora, and I weren’t allowed to say it when we were young, so we called each other “quee” instead.”
Psychological Thriller
by Charles Jensen
“The moment I walk in, I know something is wrong. Off. Hollow. The way the sound of the door opening echoes when it should absorb. The click of my steps on bare tile…The realization swoops into me with a breath I feel all the way in my gut…I look in the bedroom. The closet gapes, the bare hangers there dangling like teeth in a broken grin. I rip open a dresser drawer: disemboweled. The master bath, his bath, empty; even the shower curtain gone.”
Dowsing
by Amelia K
“What I remember of our well is either the orange memory or the silver one. The orange memory is of pressing my weeping face to a hot window and begging god for rain. The silver memory is of a midnight rain, the kind you can smell, waking me up, and seeing the moon reflected in the well's glutted black pupil from the same window.”
🚨Announcements:
📢 Electric Literature is open for submissions in ALL CATEGORIES through April 14th
Get your submissions ready! Electric Literature wants your best short stories, essays, flash, poetry, and graphic narratives. Recommended Reading, The Commuter, and Personal Narrative opened submissions on April 1. You may submit once per category, but it is fine to submit across multiple categories. The portal will close at midnight Pacific Time on April 14, or when we receive 750 submissions (per category). All submissions will be accepted through our Submittable page. For candid advice from our editors on how to make your work stand out, watch How to Get Published in Recommended Reading, How to Get Published in The Commuter, and Calling All Essayists: Electric Lit’s Creative Nonfiction Program.
📢 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!
Thank you so very much for including my Huffington Post essay. I am incredibly honored.
I have often read some of the pieces submitted and felt affirmed for liking them so much because they appeared here. Great curation of interesting essays, always.