A Passel of Personal Essays to Read this Week
Plus, a Kingston-based workshop from Electric Literature Executive Director Halimah Marcus, and classes from Narratively Academy, in the announcements at the bottom.
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
“To Live For” by
.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 Prompt-O-Matic #29,” “The Memoir Land Author Questionnaire #32: Sadiya Ansari,” and “The Memoir Land Author Questionnaire #33: Jess H. Gutierrez”
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 reprinted “Minnesota Nice” by Cheryl Strayed, which appears in both editions of Goodbye to All That.
*Please note: I am no longer posting about these roundups on X/Twitter.*
Essays from partner publications…
Digging Out Bells: A Summer
by Afton Montgomery
“I fear that my sentences will add up to nothing, monotony in which the whole is no sum, just a repetition of its parts. I fear this of my summer, of my weed, of my body’s pain. But the simplicity of monotony is also, I suppose, what I want. Else why would I be here, in the yard. When there is no solace to be found in extricating meaning, perhaps there is solace in meaning’s lack.”
Oath to the Queen
by Xiaolu Guo
“Once I saw a newsreel of Queen Elizabeth II making a speech when I was still living in Beijing in the 1990s. I was puzzled by the way she spoke English, even though I could not understand half of what she said. I noticed that her lips barely moved when she spoke. She seemed to have the quality of a ventriloquist, but there was no little painted doll sitting on her shoulder flapping its lips. Her whole manner was strange and impenetrable. I never got to the bottom of my puzzlement. A few years later, however, after managing to get a scholarship, I came to Britain, and started to live in London. Then began a journey of discovering English and Englishness.”
Saying Goodbye to the Family Cottage
by Chris Goodyear
“I think what I’ve been looking for is a way to go back and experience these things in their old familiar settings once more . . . and maybe to say goodbye, in my own way. I bought some 110-format film and a tiny camera from the 1970s, and I recreated parts of the cottage in my basement.”
The Things that Remain
by
“It’s easy to understand why a sense of the transitory would have a grip on an octogenarian. At 10, say, a year represented a tenth of my lifespan, and time moved differently…Between the Decembers of 2023 and 2024, on the other hand, I’ll have lived a mere eighty-secondth of my life. No wonder some nights, days, weeks, months seem so brief they’re gone before they start.”
Essays from around the web…
My Disinheritance Gave Me What I Actually Needed
by Tracie McMillan
“I told my father I loved him, and that I had forgiven him for the things I found hard. Then I asked what he remembered about a “20-minute physical fight” between us the month before I started college. “I remember it happened; that’s about all,” he said. I nodded and looked at my notebook, numb. For years, my dad, that fight, and its aftermath were all I could see. Now it seemed clear that my father had never seen me at all.”
Wedding Colors
by Chante Owens
“I was a Brown girl raised by a Black father and a Filipina mother, but I was brought up with whiteness. White people were my classmates, friends, coworkers, neighbors, and lovers. I spent most of my formative years so immersed in whiteness that I stopped seeing my Blackness—like a drop of coffee diluted in a bowl of milk.”
Slipstreamed
by Leanne Phillips
“We enter the Salinas Valley from the south. As we drive into King City, California, it feels as if we are passing through a heavy curtain—the air feels old somehow, the way nostalgia might if it had an odor. It smells of mild onion and sweet dry grass and freshly-turned soil. John Ernst Steinbeck Sr. helped settle this town in 1890, and his son and namesake set his novel East of Eden here in 1952. He felt it, too, what I am feeling now. ‘I remember … what trees and seasons smelled like,’ Steinbeck wrote. ‘The memory of odors is very rich.’ This is the place where I was born, the place I reluctantly came home to when I had nowhere else to go.”
Learning To Open & Close The Curtains
by Hannah Sward
“When I was on meth, I was busy. Very busy. There was gardening to do, color-coding the closet, taking apart doorknobs, trying to put doorknobs back together and trips to Home Depot at 3 a.m. to look at light fixtures and nails. I had things to do, and whatever I was doing I was very interested in. Until I wasn’t, leaving the bathroom doorknob on the floor and moving on to some other project.”
Hot Crabs and Cold Lemonade, A Window into My Cajun Childhood
by Claude Barilleaux
“Friday was the night for crabs. My mother knew they satisfied the appetites of her five growing sons, and that my father found nothing more relaxing than hammering away the week’s aggravations on his favorite seafood…Cajuns ordinarily boil crabs outdoors, but not my mother. Reasoning that a few more degrees of heat wouldn’t make much of a difference, she brought the outdoors inside.”
Secrets From My Twilight Zone
by
“The memory fades, a whisper in the wind, but a name echoes in the silence – Rod Serling. Did she meet him here, in this very place, and confide in him about the burdens she carried? His voice, etched in her memory, narrated iconic episodes of The Twilight Zone – tales of lost souls, social pressures, and the blurred lines between fantasy and reality. Could her own story, a story shrouded in secrecy, have inspired one of his intriguing masterpieces? The uncertainty gnaws at her, the melody of the pianist in the hotel swirling around her like blue tobacco smoke in the shape of a question mark, begging for an answer.”
Saturn Return
by Jaclyn Griffith
“With every choice comes a non-choice: a road not taken, a potentially greener grass, a different life that’s sticky and sweet with the promise of fantasy, not yet tarnished by reality. Maybe there’s no point in planning and protesting because one day you’ll wake up and you’ll only be looking backward at all the things that have already happened, all the parties you went to and the lipstick smudged on your teeth and the houseplants you killed and it will all be over and done with, like leaving an air-conditioned movie theater and walking into a suffocating late summer heat, realizing the story you just felt connected to you were never really a part of anyway, and not knowing what hit you.”
The Children of the Russian Spy Couple Were Lied To
by Leslie Absher
“Code-switching is a part of spy family culture. All children of spies know how to do this. It helps me feel in control. I learned to do it so I could understand my dad. But I had other reasons too—namely, the fact that I liked girls. I knew it was wrong. I had been called a lezzie by a boy in the fifth grade. From that moment on, I hid who I was and pretended to have crushes on boys. Code-switching then, for me, was about moving between two secrets, not just one. Passing as straight was the lie I told myself and others but being lied to by my father felt different.”
Blindsided
by Jeanne Malmgren
“I lift my hand to my right eye. In a sweep of the index finger across my eyelid, the scleral shell is out and in the palm of my hand. I am naked in a way that’s a million times worse than if I were standing here with no clothes on…I look at the manager. I stare at her, full on, with the horror-movie ugliness of my blind eye unveiled. I want to burn a hole in her forehead with my gaze. I want her to feel pain. Embarrassment. Guilt. Anything, everything. I want her to remember this moment for a very long time.”
The Stain
by Rochelle Goldstein Bay
“Every night before they slept, the women would cook, they’d prepare feasts. They called it “cooking with the mouth.” These words, the syllables of starvation, bring back their memories. From Mrs. Weil, Wiener Knödel, Viennese Dumplings—Sprinkle dumplings with cinnamon and sugar or serve plain with roasts. She tells them this in the dark, with the blue light coming in through the half-moon windows, and tastes the sugar on her tongue as she speaks.”
This Is Not a Eulogy
by Kimberly Elkins
“I didn’t love you; I was never even in love with you in any conventional sense. I felt too strongly the desire to be you, to inhabit you, be under your skin and yes, inside your head, as miserable a shuttered room as that might have been. The only person I’ve ever wanted to be, and you didn’t want to be.”
The Lighthouse Keepers
by Jen Colclough
“When I was diagnosed with ADHD at twenty-six, I told a friend of mine who also has ADHD. The first thing he asked me was: ‘Are you at that stage where you’re angry with the adults in your life for not catching it sooner?’ Angry was a polite term—I was livid. How many times had I told teachers and family members that my brain was a comet that I trailed behind?”
🚨Announcements:
📢 Electric Literature is accepting applications for its first-ever writing workshop, led by Executive Director and Founding Editor of Recommended Reading Halimah Marcus.
This intimate six-week workshop will be held from 6 – 8 PM on Tuesdays beginning November 12 through December 17, 2024 in Kingston, NY. The cohort is limited to 12 participants, with two writers workshopped per class (each student will be workshopped once). The class will also discuss a selection of iconic and influential short stories, as time allows. Tuition: $625. (Electric Literature members receive a 5% discount.)
📢 New Writing Classes from Narratively Academy
Coming up at Narratively Academy: On Thursday, September 12, poet, activist and spoken word artist Nick Courmon leads A Pen for the People: Using Writing as a Tool for Action, a 90-minute seminar designed to help you develop tools to use your writing as a force for social justice. And on September 15 and 22, NEA and Fulbright Fellow Abeer Hoque leads The Insider's Guide to Writing Personal Statements and Applying for Grants & Residencies.
📢 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.
The Eulogy piece was beautiful and sad.