A Fresh Batch of Personal Essays to Read this Week...
PLUS: "Reckon True Stories" podcast featuring Deesha Philyaw and Kiese Laymon; Two new workshops from Lilly Dancyger; A workshop from Literary Liberation, all in the announcements.
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 reprinted “A Numbers Game” by
.The Lit Lab, featuring interviews and essays on craft and publishing. There are also week writing prompts and other exercises from, ahem, a New York Times bestselling ghostwriter of memoirs (that’s me) for paid subscribers. Most recently I posted “The Prompt-O-Matic #22,” “The Memoir Land Author Questionnaire #23: Farah Naz Rishi”.
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 “Washington Square” by
.
*Please note: I am no longer posting about these roundups on X/Twitter.*
Essays from partner publications…
Sweeping It Under the Carpet
by Richard Kelly Kemick
“Over the years, Buddy’s hair wove its way into the carpet with such ubiquity that the green phlegmatically faded to a shade the paint store would name Mild Infection. “Why is the carpet so much lighter by the couch?” my father asked me, pointing to where the dog and I spent most of our weekends, cuddling and kissing and watching marathons of Law and Order: SVU. ‘It must be how the light slants in from the window,’ I said.”
Crooked Parallels: On Alice Munro, Andrea Skinner, and My Mother’s Failure to Protect Me
by Jonny Diamond
“This past Sunday, Munro’s daughter Andrea Robin Skinner wrote about her mother’s failure to protect her from serial sexual abuse by her stepfather, Munro’s second husband Gerald Fremlin. Skinner’s essay is brave and important. It is hard enough to tell your own story of abuse, to talk publicly about how the one person in your life who should have protected you failed to do so. It is harder still when that person is a literary icon, as close to a secular saint in Canada as it gets…Because of Skinner’s bravery—and because of what I wrote two months ago, about the improbable contiguities between Munro and my own mother—I feel compelled here to tell my own story of sexual abuse.”
Boomerang
by Asha Dore
“I told them my breasts felt full after she nursed. They told me she may be a slow grower. Is that even a thing? They told me I must have been wrong about her due date. I must have misread the scale over and over. They told me to go home, so I did. The next available appointment for a pediatrician was two weeks away. I called a private lactation consultant. I couldn’t afford to pay her to come help us, but she agreed to talk to me for fifteen minutes on the phone for free. “Feed her every ten minutes,” she said. 'Use a spoon or a medicine dropper.'”
Success in My Third Act
by
“My goal as a storyteller was to appear on The Moth Mainstage. Every time I performed, I sent them a video, saying, ‘Hi, Here’s a new piece. Hope we’ll work together soon.’ I did that several times a year for NINE years and — except for an occasional ‘Thank you for submitting’ — the only response I ever got was silence. Zilch. Zero…One day I asked someone at The Moth why it took so long for them to book me. ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘you got better.’ And that’s when I realized that failure is a great learning opportunity.”
Essays from around the web…
My Stepfather Sexually Abused Me when I Was a Child. My Mother, Alice Munro, Chose to Stay with Him
by Andrea Robin Skinner
“In 1976, I went to visit my mother, Alice Munro, for the summer at her home in Clinton, Ont. One night, while she was away, her husband, my stepfather, Gerald Fremlin, climbed into the bed where I was sleeping and sexually assaulted me. I was nine years old. I was a happy child — active and curious — who had only just realized I couldn’t grow up to be a sheep-herding dog, a great disappointment, as I loved both dogs and sheep.” (Ed. note: I wish this piece weren’t paywalled. It feels too important. But, alas, that’s the call The Toronto Star made.)
The Kidnapping I Can’t Escape
by
“What I’ve learned over the years is that trauma is trauma. Something terrible happens, beyond what is in our own personal capacity to cope with, and the details don’t matter as much as the state we’re thrown into. Our bodies and brains have not evolved to reliably differentiate a rape at knife point from a job loss that threatens us with financial ruin or from the dismantling of our world by our parents’ divorce. It’s wrong, but explain that to your poor, battered autonomic nervous system.”
Is This Burning an Eternal Flame?
by
“This weirdness arrived without warning and it may see itself out the door. Until it does you'll find me trying various fire extinguishers that come with credible recommendation. You'll find me reframing for myself what health is, what strength is, what peace is. You'll find me decoupling safety and answers. And you'll find me muttering Oh well to myself, again and again.”
How in the World Did I end up the Only Man in the Eating Disorder Unit?
by Justin Kobler
“But anorexia, bulimia, binge-eating … They are all related, and I was more alike to these women than I knew. Eating disorders, like many substance abuse disorders, involve distorted ego, an imbalanced swing from low self-esteem to egosyntonic—aka pride. I discovered that my anorexic co-patients, some of whom later became my dear friends, didn’t actually want to be thinner. They wanted to disappear. Too much self. The same way that the more I lifted weights and the bigger I got, the more I binged. Too much me.”
The Mother Who Lost Track of Time
by Jung Hae Chae
“It’s easy to lose track of time as a new mother. I did once, twice, three times...before I lost track. The year my daughter was born was the same year I packed up a few books, pictures of my dead mother, and other less sentimental belongings, uprooted the barely-there roots of my life as a 1.5 generation immigrant single woman, surviving, not at all thriving, in the Northeast pocket hole of America, and moved one thousand miles away to pursue an arguably useless advanced degree in poetry writing. The year of survival, I’d later quip.”
Are You North or South Korean?
by Iris Kim
“‘North or South?’ Most Koreans in the diaspora get asked this question at least once. I’ve often been asked right after a stranger discovers I’m Korean. ‘I’m South Korean,’ I’ve answered dozens of times…I know that this is a question I’ll never escape, not while the peninsula remains divided. But when I answer ‘South’ and the question-asker responds positively, I think of my North Korean kin, and the response I might get if I answered ‘North.’ As I talk about Korean music and TV, I can’t help but feel like I’m disavowing half my people and homeland.”
Imagery for Grieving
by Amy Scheiner
“My mother died, and I was not there but I remember her face, the way the creases of her skin smoothed into stillness, rooted from her eyes and mouth, etched into silence. The way her eyes emptied into pools on our hardwood floors.”
Dear Anna: Letters to My Ex-Metamour
by Allison Darcy
“The word, you told me, was metamour. That is what you call the person who is dating the same person you are. This is what good polyamory looks like, you said. You have to unlearn everything toxic. Us, we’ve let go of the idea that we can possess other people. We’ve let go of jealousy. We have no purpose for that obnoxious couple thing where people refer to each other in the plural. ‘We think.’ ‘We want.’ ‘We are.’”
🚨Announcements:
📢 The “Reckon True Stories” Podcast with and has launched.
Reckon and Ursa Story Company are proud to announce Reckon True Stories, a new podcast hosted by acclaimed authors Deesha Philyaw (The Secret Lives of Church Ladies) and Kiese Laymon (Heavy, How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America, Long Division), all about the stories we tell and how they impact our culture.
Guests for Season One include writers
, , , Minda Honey, , and .Reckon True Stories is a celebration of new and classic nonfiction – the essays, journalism, and memoirs that inspire us, that change the world, and help us connect with each other. (Ed. note: I’ll post my interview with them later this month! - Sari)
📢 New Workshops from !
Telling Shared Stories: Writing About Other People in Memoir, a one-day session that will guide writers in creating their own ethical rubrics and craft approaches to writing about the people in their lives—from legal reads and whether/when to share pages with loved ones, to navigating power dynamics and figuring out which stories might not be yours to tell at all. (Sunday, July 21)
Essay Collection Incubator, a nine-month workshop including author visits from Melissa Febos, Esmé Weijun Wang, Kiese Laymon, and Jill Christman; generative and revision exercises to develop individual essays and your collection as a whole; agent and editor panels and guidance on the book proposal, querying, and publishing process; and more. (Deadline to apply is July 15!)
📢 New Workshop from Literary Liberation!
-
July 27 | 11 AM - 1 PM ET
Throughout history, Black women have resisted oppression. From colonization to the #metoo movement, Black women have done the labor of building community, seeking justice, and creating safe spaces for others. LETTERS FOR REVOLUTION is a historical fiction writing course, where true historical stories of women who resisted oppression are combined with epistolary writing techniques. This story combines the best of history and fiction and gives you the tools to ground yourself in storytelling.
📢 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.
What a week it was for essays! A week in which my own writing suffered from needing to read more yet I have no regrets. Thank you for this roundup— there were a few I had missed.