A Fresh Batch of Stellar Personal Essays...
Plus a three-hour Narratively Academy seminar with Kavita Das 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 published “To Be Well” by
, the first in “Writing the Mother Wound,” a series edited by Mártir and Danielle A. Jackson, originally published by Longreads.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 Prompt-O-Matic #13,” and “The Memoir Land Author Questionnaire #10: Lilly Dancyger,” the ninth 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 “You Are Where You Eat,” by Vivian Manning-Schaffel.
*Please note: I am no longer posting about these roundups on X/Twitter.*
Essays from partner publications…
It Is Decidedly So
by Sara Baume
“We are all very small, standing together in the hall, and a teacher tells us not to hold hands, not to huddle up, but to step away from each other, to spread our arms as far as they will reach and swing them back and forth and clear a horizontal, arm’s-length circle of space around our bodies. On the first day of school, here is a new unit of measurement that can also be used as a weapon, if applied correctly, like a rock in a sock – our arms the socks, our fists the rocks.”
Killing the Rabbit
by Amber Flora Thomas
“Looking around the table, I saw everyone hunkered over their bowls of stew, shoveling big spoonfuls into their mouths. We were poor and sometimes starving. Neither of my parents worked. Instead, during the summers we traveled around the West from art shows to flea markets, where my parents sold wire-woven jewelry. We never earned enough money to get us through the winter months, so we skimped and struggled from one month to the next, poverty making us desperate and stupid to nearly everything but filling our bellies…The first time the stew was set before me, I went to bed hungry.”
A Salad Eating Competition
by Billy Lezra
“Carl Jung suggests that intellectualization masks the fear of direct experience, so here I go. Etymologically, “recovery” comes from the Anglo-French recoverie. In 1530, recovery was defined as: “the act or power of regaining or retaking something lost or taken away.” By 1580, the meaning evolved to include: “the restoration from a bad to a good condition.” The problem with this definition is that it implies the existence of (and return to) a prior good condition, and for me, there was none: anorexia is all I remember.”
House of Cards
by Shelley Youngblut
“This card room is the one place where I don’t have to give anything away. There’s just enough intimacy here. No one cares where you come from or who your daddy is—unless he or she can use that knowledge to needle you off your game. I love being a fly on the wall, soaking up a world that is at once reassuringly alien and dangerously familiar.”
Crow’s Feet
by
“Probably they’d been there awhile but I’d never looked so closely or at that time of day, when the sun had that wicked slant. After the jolt came a sadness, as for something lost and gone forever. Then a wave of alarm, tidal—oh, shit! Processes are taking place. Even if I can’t see them and don’t really believe in them, they are happening. And—conceptual breakthrough—if they’re happening on the outside, they’re happening on the inside, too.”
The Irrevocable Condition
by Hannah Paige
“I took a job working at a group home for at-risk foster youths. I cooked their meals, I helped with homework. If they asked me to play basketball, I needed a withstanding reason to say no. When I gave the children ‘behavioral checks,’ they called me a cunt, and I was expected to take a deep breath and suggest that they ‘take some space.’ This might have been a solution, if they felt it were possible in a place where their phone calls were monitored, their closets randomly searched.”
Essays from around the web…
The Myth of the Perfect Victim
by Emily Withnall
“Look at Scheherazade. Saving her own life was a monumental task, but freedom was not her reward. Instead, she traded death for marriage to a monarch who had killed one thousand women before her. The story of Scheherazade taking down the monarch does not exist. Call women emotional, hysterical, unstable, and irrational for centuries and you’ll find that unpeeling the lies from history causes history to come off in chunks, too. Your hands will never be large enough to hold the facade as it crumbles.”
Alam Ni Lola (Grandmother Knows)
by Shella Parcarey
“Know where your food comes from. Remember that the chicken hanging upside down in front you was, moments ago, pecking at grains in our yard. Its throat slit, its blood draining into a cup, it is the same fertilized egg you warmed in your hand, the same chick whose feathers you fluffed and petted, the same one you will gather with your fingers, mixed with rice and sauced with vinegar, soy sauce, and garlic for your adobo dinner.”
Ghost Girl
by Chanel Brenner
“After the initial shock in class, I attempted to take a deep breath, but something else filled my burning lungs, laden as if with a toxic chemical that ate all the oxygen. Is this how the dead feel when their spirits no longer need air? I can’t breathe! Why can’t I breathe? I tried to relax and inhale softly and slowly but failed. My body forgot how to breathe!”
Confidentially
by Marcia Yudkin
“Slightly taller than me, with fluffy white-blond hair and a trim figure, she dropped the professional air outside of the classroom. Over lunch at the Faculty Club or out to dinner downtown, she would primp her hair while her eyes roved around the room, trying to pick out men who might represent prospects. Jill was divorcing her husband, whom I never met because he ran a particle physics lab halfway across the country. ‘It wasn’t the commuting that doomed the marriage,’ she confided. ‘He didn’t want kids but wouldn’t say so, and now I’m almost over the hill to have a baby.’”
Grief
by Madelaine Zadik
“Grief is in my blood. Actually, my first contact with grief was through the amniotic fluid. When I was born, my mother had been grieving the loss of her sister Helga for ten years.”
Anselm’s Grave
by Judith Teich
“Minutes pass slowly as my father and I stand in silence, tearfully contemplating this last reminder of his brother’s life. I don’t know what to say, cannot find words that feel right, my voice is caught in my throat. All I can do is take my father’s hand, trying to convey that I understand his pain, although I’m sure that I don’t. We search carefully for a few small stones to place gently on Anselm’s headstone, ashes to ashes, dust to dust. Holding tightly to one another’s hand, we find our way back along dark and winding gravel paths.”
🚨Announcements:📢 Tomorrow, Tuesday, May 14th! A Narratively Academy course with Kavita Das
Want to write first-person essays and op-eds that cover intense social issues? Join Kavita Das, author of the book Craft and Conscience, for Narratively Academy's 3-hour seminar, "How to Write About Social Issues in Unprecedented Times."
📢 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!
Great links thanks