Welcome to Memoir Land—a newsletter 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. (Plus an associated quarterly reading series hosted by Lilly Dancyger.)
First Person Singular, featuring original personal essays. Recently I published “The Sound of Grief” by Vishakha Singh, edited by
.A new essay is coming soon.
(***Submissions for First Person Singular are now PAUSED. An overwhelming number of new submissions have recently come in. There are more essays in my inbox than I could publish in two years. And I’m too overwhelmed to keep bringing in more to read before I go through all those already in there, even with help from recently appointed contributing editor Katie Kosma.
*Going forward, there will be specific limited submission periods, which I will announce here. You can find submissions guidelines and more on the “About” page, but, again, submissions are currently PAUSED.)
The Lit Lab, featuring interviews and essays on craft and publishing. It is primarily for paid subscribers. Recently I published, “From Memoir to Movie Script,” an interview with The Same River Twice author
.
Essays from partner publications…
Rewilding the Fairy Tale
by Kaitlyn Teer
“As a mother, I’m most interested in telling my children stories that will help them adapt and survive—through their relationships, their resourcefulness, their enchantments—on a damaged planet….Sometimes a coat can make a fox of a daughter, a story can remake a map, and rain can river the sky.”
My Mother Was Also a First Mermaid of Color
by Anri Wheeler
“My mother rewrote her story as well. At age 27, pivoting away from a career as a professional ballerina, she used most of her savings to fly from Tokyo to Tampa. Her only hope of staying in the US: a successful Weeki Wachee audition. Then, the mermaids of Weeki Wachee Springs were local celebrities, performing eight shows daily to 500,000 annual visitors. My mother arrived speaking little English and became Weeki Wachee’s first mermaid of color—by some accounts, one of only two to date.”
Another Patagonia
by Louis Rogers
“Bruce Chatwin begins his book about travelling to Patagonia with the ostensive reason for his trip. It is esoteric, personal, verging on the fetishistic: a scrap of giant sloth skin, brought back from Patagonia by his Uncle Charley and preserved in a cabinet in his grandmother’s home in Birmingham, ‘thick and leathery, with strands of coarse, reddish hair.’ Chatwin was obsessed – ‘Never in my life have I wanted anything as I wanted that piece of skin’ – and developed a further obsession with the place it had come from. I first read In Patagonia two years before travelling there for my own reasons. The place was hazy in my mind then. I knew where it was, more or less, but basically thought of it as a cipher for the remote: the horizon line on those t-shirts marketed on far-flung adventure; the vast, generic distance Melville summons with the phrase ‘a thousand Patagonian sights and sounds’; the place Iris Murdoch was talking about when she said bad reviews made as much difference to her as whether it was raining in Patagonia.”
Every Stepfather Has His Day
by Kevin Chong
“To love a woman with a child, you have to assimilate into an already established family unit. You adhere to the habits of their pre-existing household. You play board games. You come to understand that hot-tempered outbursts blow away quickly. You get teary yourself now. You need to ask before you take the last pork chop if anyone else wants it. In your own family, you just took it.”
Letter To My Younger Self #5: Trust Your Heart. And Tinder.
by
“Early in 2022, after you’ve been doing this on and off for seven years, one friend tells you, with great authority, that if you don’t open yourself up emotionally with sexual partners, you’ll never grow. By this time, you’ve mostly quit second guessing yourself, and your response is, ‘Why does sex have to be life school? Can’t it just be fun?’”
I Think of My Book As A Naked Version of Myself
by Manuel Betancourt
“To open that Google Drive folder (“Photographs: Manuel” ) is to run through the gamut of my amateur modeling career. I began that journey as a way to see myself anew; to find others who would gaze at me through their lens the way I’d gazed at men in underwear ads, sexy magazine photo shoots, and increasingly thirst-trappy Instagram posts. In hopes, I guess, of being able to wield whatever confidence boost I’d get from them in my day to day life. I yearned to find ways of feeling wanted and to find power in letting myself be so desired—you know, the very thing my book is all about.”
Essays from around the web…
Bad Waitress
by Becca Schuh
“I do think being a waitress has done one great thing with respect to writing: it has made me understand deeply and fundamentally how many writers are full of shit. It has altered my view of privilege and money and the ways that people complain that mask the fact that in their world, they would never have to do a job that equates to basic manual labor, because their intelligence is worth more than waiting on others.”
I’m an Indie Music Nerd With a (Not So) Secret Passion for Top 40 Music
by Jesse Sposato
“Singers crooned in my earbuds about bad breakups, meeting up on the dance floor, being better off on their own. I hadn’t been single in years or to a club since teen night in eighth grade, but the un-relatability was perhaps part of the appeal. It was the audio equivalent of binging two seasons of The Bachelor late into the night.”
Walking with an Egret, Trees and Wilderness Eased My Regrets About Moving to Houston
by Isobella Jade
“The word ‘egret’ is hiding inside the word ‘regret,’ and I held a lot of regret for being in Houston when I arrived here in the spring of 2016. There was a time not long ago when Houston felt like the end. I never planned to live here. It was my ex-husband’s hometown, not mine. It wasn’t on my life plan to leave the Northeast. As a New York transplant, I originally thought Texas would be temporary when I moved to the Bayou City for the sake of my vows and family. Year two went by and then three, then everything fell apart.”
My two dads: The one I had, and the one I deserve
by Jason Prokowiew
“I’m not surprised by what my father-in-law did for Dave back then. He’s the same man who, when I asked for his blessing to propose, said, ‘You don’t need my blessing, but you have it.’ He’s the man who, when he toasted his son and me at our wedding, said, ‘A parent finds peace when his child finds love, and when Dave and Jason found each other, we found peace.’”
Adam’s Tattoo
by Judy Bolton-Fasman
“Adam is the first person in our family to tattoo his body. He is 25 years old, a medical student and a queer man who has not always been comfortable in his body. He came out to his father and me on a Saturday morning in the kitchen when he was 16…His was a rushed yet pointed declaration: ‘I am gay.’”
Like Grant Took Richmond; Orange Order Fair, 1952
by
“Eddie and I wandered for a while through barns full of cattle, pigs, sheep and draft horses, or duller stuff like quilts, jams, pies and giant squashes, until his father found us and led us to a table under the tent. The punch in the kids’ bowls was a different color from the grownups’. Theirs looked smoky; ours was orange. For some reason, Eddie’s mom drank from the orange one. Everybody loved her, but to me she always looked a little sad.”
🚨Announcements:
📢
has some new workshops on offer! On Thursdays from 7/20 through 8/31 there’s The Braided Essay, a generative workshop. On 7/22, there’s Telling Shared Stories: Writing About Other People in Memoir, a one-day workshop. There are other options, too!📢 From Writing Class Radio: Join our First Draft writing groups Tuesdays 12-1 (ET) and/or Thursdays 8-9 p.m. (ET). Participants will write to a prompt and share (if you want) what you wrote. Sign up to get the Zoom link. First session is free.
📢 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.
A paragraph or a few lines from the piece that will most entice readers.
Because of data limits for many email platforms, going forward we will only include artwork from our partner publications. No need to send art.
*Please be advised, however, 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!