A Fresh Batch of Stella Personal Essays...
Plus, Southern Vermont Writer's Conference scholarships, Electric Literature's Masquerade, Raising Mothers' open submissions, Narratively Academy's social justice writing class with Kavita Das...
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 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 Memoir Land Author Questionnaire #42: Charles Bock, “The Prompt-O-Matic #34,” and “The Memoir Land Author Questionnaire #43: Katherine May”.
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 “Cinema and the City” by Michael A. Gonzales.
Essays from partner publications…
Yes, Listening to Music Is Therapy
by Daniel J. Levitin
“Picking up my guitar or sitting at the piano, it’s as if I’m in a bubble—feeling safe, contented, and that all is right in the world. And when playing music with Victor Wooten, Rosanne Cash, or Carlos Reyes on a good night, we feel that bubble extend out into the back of the room and lift up everyone in it.”
Thoughts on Bloodletting
by Maria Robinson
“In college, I read a book about a pianist who eschewed his instrument for one full year, instead practicing for hours every day on a soundless wooden board notched with 88 keys. It was a sort of penance, a kind of prayer, a form of mourning. The pianist’s brother had gone missing and the silence was a tribute—and tether—to his absence.”
“Brilliant, Unquiet Minds.” Remembering the Writers Who Struggled With Their Demons
by Betsy Lerner
“It was raining the day I met Elizabeth Wurtzel. She arrived at our offices wrapped in a wool scarf. I was a newly minted editor at Houghton Mifflin, and we were considering her memoir on depression, then titled “I Feel So Down I Want to Die.” She apologized for being late. She fished in her bag for some pills and asked for water. I noticed her hand tremored when she lifted the glass to her lips. She was warm, funny, sort of absurd.”
Chamber Pots and Candlelight: Meet the Families Who Live Off the Grid on a Remote French Island
by Michelle Young
“I was first brought to this bay by my then-boyfriend and now husband, Augustin, in 2011. The invitation to a private island sounded glorious, but in addition to the warnings about the lack of electricity and running water, I was told to only bring what I could carry on my back. “It’s like camping,” said Augustin, who had been coming here since he was a baby, “but with a nice house.” I had been camping only once in my life, but I was an avid backpacker. It sounded appealing.”
Cinema and the City
by Michael A. Gonzales
“A month after running into the Serpico crew, I witnessed the filming of a scene from the now-classic Blaxploitation-era film Claudine on the corner of my block. It starred Diahann Carroll as the beautiful welfare mama title character, who was dating cool trash man “Rupert,” played by burly James Earl Jones. One highlight of the night was getting Carroll’s autograph. The other was simply seeing a film being shot.”
The Kid in the Undershirt Stays in the Picture
by Carolita Johnson
“Now, wearing an undershirt makes me feel like a kid, but not in the way I hated when I was an actual kid. Instead of being an emblem of my obedience born of dependence upon my parents and my subjugation to their opinions and whims, wearing an undershirt now reminds me of the days when I was small and thin enough to slip between the wrought iron bars of fences to explore places I wasn’t supposed to be, adventure beckoning.” (Ed. note: I’m including this 2023 again because it just received notable mention in The Best American Essays 2024, edited by Wesley Morris.)
Essays from around the web…
The Sexiest Year of My Life Involved Zero Sex
by Melissa Febos
“A friend confided to me recently that she was burned out on dating. Cruising the apps in midlife felt humiliating, and she repeatedly confronted the same obstacles in her relationships. I told her I had faced similar challenges, until I spent a year intentionally celibate. She pointed out that a year was a long time to live without intimacy. I assured her that abstaining from sex for a year was not only the best thing I ever did for my future romantic prospects, it was also the most erotic year of my life.”
The Minotaur
by Michael Nagle
“No one ever told you the Minotaur was hung. You’d heard whispers, but always wondered if that was a little racist, like “all monsters are hung,” that kind of thing. But when you saw him for the first time? You gaped. You stared. You felt small and you felt…was the reddening from shame, or from sex? You felt turned on.”
Penumbra
by Teri Stein
“You decide you’ll read the law as if it were literature; you’ll look for the ways in which narratives are constructed, for the spaces where language can mean acknowledgment or erasure. You know something about erasure. Last year you sat in a courtroom across from the teenager who had assaulted you in the subway. You listened as his lawyer wielded your words against you. You and the teenager who had assaulted you both walked out of the courtroom, ostensibly free. You wonder if law school can help you make sense of this. You want your words back.”
Don't Listen to Anybody
by Jason Prokowiew
“We’re all going to meet these naysayers along the way, some so entrenched in their own stories and beliefs about what good writing is, they’ll say the wackiest things to us. Recognize it as wacky. Put it in a mental bin of wacky things people say.”
The Particular Sadness of Paper Towels
by Ginger
“This is when I began to associate the remainder of the paper towels with the remainder of my mom’s life. I would make bacon for the family, tearing a couple rectangles off to catch the grease, and I’d think, There goes another one. I’d think, that day in October 2022 was officially the last time your Mom was ever able to take care of you, and this is all that remains. I’d want to call her, so badly, and I’d refrain because I knew it hurt her to talk, so instead I’d record a voice memo for her and send it on Messenger. She’d reply in text, and I’d imagine the words in her full voice, as warm as cornbread.”
Electric Body
by Diana Heald
“I woke up in the middle of the night with a sharp gnaw in my pelvis and repeated the words my neurologist taught me each time I reported a new symptom: This is perfectly normal. His notes in the MyChart app said, The patient is anxious and tearful at times. I wanted the doctor I respected to respect me. I wanted to be a good patient. So I ignored the pain, just like the good doctor taught me.”
I Was Mean To My Mom For Years — Until A Chance Meeting With A Stranger Changed Everything
by Jodie Sadowsky
“I survived it all. But so, it seemed, did my resentment. Thirty years later, all Mom had to say was “In other words...” at the start of a sentence, and I could feel my impatience bubbling up. Her other words bothered me too. She used “nevertheless” with alarming frequency. She often started a story in the middle, throwing in the names of people I didn’t know without any background. She commented on people’s appearances more than I liked. And then there was her phone etiquette. Whoever invented the iPhone never imagined their mother shouting “Hey Siri” to make a dinner reservation from the post office, or loudly FaceTiming at Starbucks.”
Love Molds™ Analysis #26
by Marcia Yudkin
“On our first date, for ice cream, he told me about his two heroes, Darwin and Mozart. I told him about the sexism I constantly fought in my department and my own hero, the Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. On our second date, we gabbed into the wee hours, more and more enthralled with one another. Before going home, he invited me to go swimming the next afternoon at a local no-trespassing waterfall. “It’s a skinny-dipping spot,” he added, raising an eyebrow in a subtle challenge. I smiled.”
Saying goodbye on her own terms: My sister's physician-assisted death in Switzerland
by Amy Banks
“Before we gathered in Kate’s hotel room to meet with the doctor, we joined Kate in getting her hair washed and combed out at a local salon — no leaving this Earth with a flat top! My sister was always the most effortlessly stylish person in any group. ”
🚨Announcements:
📢 I’ll Be Leading a Workshop at Southern Vermont Writer’s Conference Next March and There are Scholarships…
I’m thrilled to be leading a personal essay/memoir workshop at the Southern Vermont Writers’ Conference March 30-April 4 2025. The conference has announced some scholarships:
1) The Third Act Scholarship is for a Writer 65+ who now has more time to devote to their craft. Sponsored by a wonderful group of supporters in the Dorset/Manchester area, this scholarship covers the conference fee.
2) The Yvonne Daley Memorial Scholarship is designated for a Vermont Writer. Sponsored by Consie West, this scholarship covers the conference fee.
3) The Stockbridge-Munsee Mohican Scholarship is for an Indigenous writer to come and write in their ancestral homelands. Sponsored by Mary-Anne Van Degna, this scholarship covers the conference fee, lodging, and transportation.
“Applications are due Sunday, October 20, and we’ll make a decision by early November.”
📢 Attend Electric Literature’s Annual Masquerade, October 18th…
Calling all readers, writers, and book lovers: Electric Literature is hosting our literary masquerade, and this year we’re celebrating our 15th birthday! Join our hosts—authors Emma Copley Eisenberg, Vanessa Chan, Deesha Philyaw, and Clare Sestanovich—as well as EL’s editors, for an evening of drinks and dancing. Ticket price includes an open bar, free books and masks, a photobooth…and maybe some birthday cake, too!
📢 Raising Mothers is open for submissions!
Raising Mothers publishes experimental and traditional fiction, micro and flash, creative nonfiction, interviews, book reviews, photo essays, and comic/graphic narratives written exclusively by the global majority. We are particularly interested in unique column pitches, serialized fiction and our Books on Books section.
📢 Narratively Academy’s “How to Write About Social Issues” Workshop with Kavita Das
Explore how to write compelling first-person pieces, op-eds and more in Narratively Academy's 6-week workshop How to Write About Social Issues with Kavita Das, author of the book Craft and Conscience. Starts Thursday, October 10.
📢 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.
Aw, thanks for including my Kid in the Undershirt essay! Adds to the honor of having worked under your editorship, and the notable mention which I consider as belonging to both of us! ❤️
Thanks so much for including Penumbra in this week’s addition! Honored to be amongst such a fantastic group of writers. And congratulations, Carolita, on your notable mention!