A Fresh Batch of Stellar Personal Essays to Read this Week...
Plus some great workshops in the announcements.
Welcome to Memoir Land—a newsletter edited by
, now featuring three 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 Water Spirits Will Carry Us,” by
, selected and guest-edited by my talented colleague. A new essay is coming Wednesday.The Lit Lab, featuring interviews and essays on craft and publishing, plus writing prompts and exercises. It is primarily for paid subscribers. Recently I posted “The Prompt-O-Matic #7,” the latest in my writing prompt series.
*Please note: I am no longer posting about these roundups on X/Twitter.*
Essays from partner publications…
I, Ghost
by Youssef Rakha
“At eighteen, I leave Cairo to attend university in the North of England. It costs my parents an arm and a leg, but everyone agrees this is the best move I can make, academically. My secret plan is to transform my social life, and I think I will fit right in. I’ve read Tayeb Salih’s Season of Migration to the North, and I think women will be crazy about me. I’ve read Waguih Ghali’s Beer in the Snooker Club, and I think I’ll be talking Arab politics at the union bar. The closest I actually come to any acknowledgment of my identity is drunken students doing “Walk Like an Egyptian” dance moves while they point at me.”
Why We Should All Read Hannah Arendt Now
by Lyndsey Stonebridge
“A book that is engrossing enough to read in the bath has to have a considerable pull and The Origins of Totalitarianism is indeed grimly compelling. Arendt depicts a society of lonely, atomized, lifeless people, one great unorganized, structureless mass of furious individuals, characterized by hatred, fear, organized terror, mass death, and unspeakable suffering. This is a world of science-fiction-level horror; utterly alien, incredible and outrageous.”
The Golden Seed
by
“I’m marching and singing along with nine preschool kids, leading an imaginary reptile parade, when one of them suddenly stops, points at me and shouts, “You’re the momma dinosaur!” It surprises me at first, to hear myself be called mama. The word stirs up a sadness I thought I’d left behind.”
From Zanzibar to Marbach
by Abdulrazak Gurnah
“I first came across Friedrich Schiller and his work in the aftermath of the revolution in Zanzibar in January 1964. Among the victorious insurgents was a left-leaning group called the Umma Party. There is a long tale to be told about the formation of this group and its fate. In the early 1960s, members of the Umma, right under the eyes of the British colonial administration, went off to Cuba for military training. The connection with Cuba meant that the Umma had friends and supporters in the Soviet bloc of nations. After the revolution, the group had significant influence in the new power-balance in the government. It was no doubt through the influence of the Umma faction, as well as through expediency, that the post-revolutionary government invited or accepted the fraternal assistance of the ‘socialist’ group of nations.”
Joni Mitchell’s Best Album Is Turning Fifty. It’s Not Blue
by KC Hoard
“I’d like to think that I have acknowledged and uprooted a lot of my youthful assholery. And as I reckoned with my selfishness, as I started to grow up, I began to see myself less in Blue and more in Court and Spark. Where Blue is stormy and snarling, Court and Spark is wild, sunny, and free. It’s about how funny and strange people are, how boxes were created to be smashed, how life is full of pleasures when you move beyond what plagued you as a naive kid.”
Time Stands Still in San Diego’s Frozen Zoo
by Natalie Middleton
“Marlys meets me in front of a window where we can view the Frozen Zoo. “It’s kind of a little nursery,” she says, smiling as together we peer through the glass. The cryotanks may as well be bassinets lined up in a mid-century hospital. This is not the cold, clinical setting I was expecting. It almost feels like a maternity ward.
I Brought My Kids On Tour For A Book About Motherhood
by Minna Dubin
“I’ve wanted to be an author for as long as I’ve wanted to be a mother, which is to say, forever. I didn’t anticipate that the two identities would end up in competition with each other. I stopped writing for years because the creative labor of mothering took every piece of me. Once I was able to write again, I found I did my best work away from the children. I tried writing in my bedroom, but their presence permeated the locked door. I left the house and wrote at coffee shops, but only ever had a couple of hours before mom-life beckoned. I crossed bridges and counties to attend artist residencies, needing to transform out of my mother-self to be my best author-self. For years I mothered and wrote like this—separately.”
Skiing and Crying
by
“I’m not at all direct about my lack of interest, for the same reason I’m not vocal about most things I’d prefer not to do: I believe I’m supposed to feel differently. As a general rule, any time I have an instinct that runs counter to most other people’s instincts, I instantly try to override it. I want to be perceived as Up for anything! Low-maintenance!”
Essays from around the web…
The Birth of My Daughter, The Death of My Marriage
by Leslie Jamison
“When people said, It must be exhausting to take a newborn on a book tour, their assumption made me feel like a liar. How could I tell anyone the truth, that it was more exhausting at home? By the time our daughter arrived, we’d already been in couples therapy for three years, most of our relationship. Once a week, we went to a basement office and I squinted at the small bar of visible sky. The harder our home life got, the more guilty I felt for wanting to leave it.”
How Chronic Pain Changed My Writing Process
by Heather Sweeney
“Thanks to my chronic pain, I’ve become a more flexible writer. I know now that regardless of whether I have one spoon to exert or a whole handful, ten minutes for a writing session or two hours, a clean desk or the Notes app on my phone in the waiting rooms of doctors, I can always find a way to get some words on the page.”
Pawn
by Starr Davis
“The day I left with my infant, it was a beautiful day for running. It was a windless, sunny day down there in Texas. Her diaper bag was packed with as much as I could carry on my back. Her soft body was strapped to my chest. When the window of opportunity came, I finally took it without looking back at my possessions. That day, I did not know that I would be inducted into a league of women who mastered the ability to leave their possessions to save their lives and the lives of their children. We escaped violence but fell into the hands of poverty.”
My Father’s Battle
by Laura Grace Weldon
“My 83-year-old father and I meet regularly at a quiet small-town eatery. Large windows light up the whole place. He remarried after my mother’s long illness and death, now able to relax back into bird watching and church choir…For years he made lists of things to talk about on the phone or in-person, an eccentric way to handle his shyness, but now we talk easily.”
Metamorphoses
by Sabrina Bustamente
“If you want to do damage, you can do it in Target. You can build a small grave for yourself out of five to six items and you can lie in it and die. There are places here that will ruin you. Winding through the store, I slip into my basket whatever I can muster a use for. I did not bring a list because I am trying for authentic spontaneity.”
🚨Announcements:
📢 Is Leading a New Writing Workshop and I’ll be Zooming in to Guest Lecture
Beginning February 13th, for four weeks, Blaise Allysen Kearsley will be leading Writing New York: Personal Narratives That Could Only Happen Here over Zoom. “Whether you love New York or hate it, whether you live here now or lived here in another life, what are your most resonant and vital New York stories—the ones that could only happen here?…We'll have a discussion with Sari Botton, writer and editor of Goodbye To All That: Writers on Loving and Leaving New York, and read short pieces by Colson Whitehead, Joan Didion, and Michael Barrish.”
📢 is Leading a One-Day Music & Memoir Virtual Writing Workshop
"Join me for another round of my one-day Music & Memoir Virtual Writing Workshop on Feb 15th, 7-8:30 EST. Whether your goal is to write a personal essay, or a book, or simply unlock your creativity, writers of all levels will have the opportunity to write and share their stories using music as a portal for inspiration.” Register at Starinawrites@gmail.com
📢 Narratively is now offering results-driven classes, seminars and writing critiques taught by Narratively’s editors, contributors and storytelling heroes.
Narratively Academy's debut lineup of classes includes Telling Your Story: The 60-Minute Seminar for Kickstarting Your Memoir, with instructor Kern Carter on Tuesday, February 13, and The Art of Writing a Nonfiction Book That Reads Like a Novel, an 8-week workshop with Audrey Clare Farley starting February 15.
📢 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!
The motherhood essay about the death of her marriage by Leslie jamison was stunning