A Lucky 13 Personal Essays to Enjoy this Week...
Welcome to Memoir Monday—a weekly newsletter featuring the best personal essays from around the web, and a quarterly reading series, brought to you by Narratively, The Rumpus, Catapult, Granta, Guernica, Oldster Magazine, Literary Hub, and Orion Magazine — plus many additional publications.
You might have noticed we also have a nice new logo, thanks to Ian MacAllen of Design is the Message!
In addition to the weekly curation, there are now original personal essays under the heading of First Person Singular, for paying subscribers.
The latest original essay, published in the First Person Singular series in November, is “My Big Break” by Jennifer Dines. The next original essay is coming later this month. Submissions are open. You can find submissions guidelines and more on the “About” page.
Our first in what will be a series of seminars was Publicity 101 For Writers with book publicist Lauren Cerand, was held October 8th. Paying subscribers can view the resulting video here.
Essays from partner publications…
The Last Book
by Kimberly Johnson
“The poet writing a book is not only writing a book, but also living a life. The poet goes to the supermarket for peanut butter. The poet cleans the toilet. The poet responds to emails. Indeed, the poet spends the lion’s share of time not writing poems."”
Maryse Meijer on Training to Be a Bullfighter (Who Will Never Fight Bulls)
by Maryse Meijer
“Every Saturday, from ten to noon, I pretend to be a bull. I also pretend to be a torero, shaking colored capes in my twin sister’s face as we stumble around the soft dirt of a public softball field. Children wander by, asking to be chased, shrieking as we take turns stalking them. Dogs snap at our capotes; the wind puffs dust in our eyes. An occasional observer laughs, calling out a mocking Ole!”
Insensible Loss
by Alessandra Colaianni
“Insensible losses accrue undetected — more quickly when a body doesn’t have skin to protect it, or when a body is laid open in the operating room, organs glistening under the bright lights. Insensible losses are liminal, mysterious, imprecise. Somewhere in this immeasurable ether is my connection to my own body.”
Chris Farley Taught Me to Laugh and to Grieve
by Abigail Weil
“What used to make me laugh now mostly strikes me as unfunny at best, unconscionable at worst (if you haven’t seen Ace Ventura since you were a kid, don’t). Returning to Farley’s work, though, is a unique sort of excavation. His comedy was so physical, so elemental and energetic, that it makes me laugh the same way it did when I was a child ... My response to Farley’s work may also be unwavering because all we have is his juvenilia, his pure and giddy “early” work. Only now, with my adult eyes, am I able to perceive the pathos in his performances and the potential he never had the chance to fulfill.”
Stillness
by Scott Russell Sanders
“Dust motes float lazily before me in a shaft of light, twitching as they collide with one another. I learned in freshman physics class that this perpetual shimmy is called Brownian motion, and the higher the temperature, the faster the particles move. In that same class I was also told that if you put a frog in a pot of cold water on a stove and then gradually raise the heat, the poor benighted creature will boil before it has the sense to jump out of the pot. I never tested this claim on a frog, but I have come to believe that a version of it holds true for many people, including myself.”
Personal Growth
by Marina Benjamin
“There’s a photograph my mother keeps on her bedside table, next to her vertigo pills and paracetamol, water glass and mobility alarm. An old black-and-white picture of me and my best friend, Clare. The two of us, not yet out of primary school, are in fancy dress, wearing matching white polo necks and black leggings. Our arms are slung around each other, so we’re pulled in close, and we’re holding an outsized pair of cut-out cardboard glasses across our chests. Along the top of them is written: ‘We’re making a spectacle of ourselves’. Clare is head and shoulders taller than me and the specs are askew.”
Why “Bros” Matters
by Scout Colmant
“For a late-to-the-party gay who came out around age 40, a mainstream movie featuring people like me, screened at the multiplex on a Friday night, filled with fellow gays and supportive allies, was a small miracle my inner 80s teen could never imagine.”
Essays from Around the Web…
On Going
by Dina Relles
“Where the roads meet at the top of the hill and you can see farmland stretch as far as the city lights, I become intimate with everything I’ll never know.”
Words, Words, Words
by Marcia Yudkin
“Words also gathered associations. Today I can’t hear the word “obstreperous” without thinking of my grandfather. Self-educated because he’d had to leave school at 13, he read mysteries and histories in a high-backed wing chair in our living room, tapping the lit tip of his Havana cigar into a beanbag ashtray. Even when we kids behaved well, he called us obstreperous, I think because he enjoyed having that complicated a word roll off his tongue. ”
The Club Q Shooting Is Not the Queer Story I Wanted to Tell
by Jason Prokowiew
“This is not the queer story I want to write about this week: That according to witnesses — the ones who lived to tell — bullets popped over the thumping club music. A rifle appeared where there shouldn’t have been one, where there ought to have only been arms flailing, women dancing with women, men with men. First kisses, familiar kisses, the shared joy of a new favorite Megan Thee Stallion jam.”
That Girl is Going to Get Herself Killed
by Krista Diamond
“In 2012, I was working at a hotel in Glacier National Park when a man I’d just met invited me for a day of tubing and drinking beer on the river. Little did I know, I would nearly drown in the rapids.”
No Time To Sleep: A Theatre Experience
by Farah Ahamed
“No Time to Sleep, is a twenty four hour live performance in the shoes of a dead man, showing acting at its most powerful. I watched it two years ago when I was in Lahore, but even now, I often wake up in the middle of the night thinking about it. The play is based on the final hours of Prisoner Z or Dr Zulfiqar Ali Khan, a person, charged with murder in Pakistan. Even though his lawyers argued that Zulfiqar had acted purely out of self-defence during an armed robbery he was found guilty of murder and sentenced to death. Zulfiqar spent seventeen years incarcerated, and seven years on the death-row during which time his execution was scheduled and halted more than twenty times. He was executed in 2015.”
All the Sexy Older Ladies
by Sari Botton
“…in recent years I’ve noticed a slight shift in the other direction, wherein a handful of middle-aged and older actresses portray self-possessed, vibrant characters—powerful, complicated, multifaceted humans who happen to also be sexual beings, both desirous of and desirable to others. And they’re being paired with younger partners, counter to the common trope of older men in relationships with much younger women.”
🚨Announcements:
📢 This Thursday, December 8th at 7pm Eastern, Zoom into this free, virtual event celebrating Poets & Writers magazine’s “5 Over 50” debut authors: Madhushree Ghosh, Shareen K. Murayama, David Santos Donaldson, Jane Campbell, and yours truly, Sari Botton.
📢 I had the great good fortune of speaking with Cheryl Strayed for my “How’s the Writing Going?” series in Catapult’s “Don’t Write Alone” series. Check it out.
📢 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!
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