Absorbing Personal Essays + Workshops + Calls for Submissions = Your Weekly Digest
Including workshops from Literary Liberation, Off Assignment, Margaret Juhae Lee, Alexander Chee; and calls for submissions: essays on Sinéad O’Connor, infidelity, and Literary Liberation.
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, Oldster Magazine, Literary Hub, Orion Magazine, The Walrus, and Electric Literature. Below is this week’s curation. ⬇️
First Person Singular, featuring original personal essays.
The Lit Lab, featuring interviews—The Memoir Land Author Questionnaire—and essays on craft and publishing. There are also weekly writing prompts and other exercises from, ahem, a New York Times bestselling ghostwriter of memoirs (that’s me) exclusively for paid subscribers.
Goodbye to All That, where I continue 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.
*While I have you…I could use some more support in the form of paid subscriptions. If I’ve featured your work or that of your publication’s contributors…if you’re a publicists whose clients I’ve regularly featured…if you just want to help me keep doing ALL THIS and paying contributors, please consider becoming a paid subscriber…*
Memoir Land is on Substack Notes and BlueSky.
Essays from partner publications…
A Miscarriage Is a Labyrinth with a Monster at Its Heart
by
“The collision happens on our way home from Christmas in New Jersey. Sitting in the passenger seat, I can feel that I’m still bleeding. It’s been three weeks since the miscarriage. A mauve-brown pulp, menacing as a hex, looms up at me each time I check my underwear. Fittingly, the weather has been strange all month, prone to sudden belches of pea soup fog, swirling like a cauldron with something foul. Sometimes the sun’s rays try to push out from behind so the fog seems lit from within. Like it has some spirit trapped inside, struggling to be released.”
On Killing a Coyote
by Helen Whybrow
“I have come to lie in this field at night not only to see a coyote but to kill one. The ribcage, spine, and head covered in a blood-soaked rag of white fleece—feet dangling like a marionette’s—that now lies near the spring is what remains of a valuable yearling ram I had promised to a buyer. It is the latest sheep we have lost this summer, and now our bait. My eyes accustomed to the dark, I stamp down a small area so our blanket will lie flat over the rough ground and tall weeds, space enough to lie and wait. I leave a fringe of goldenrod between us and the spring, parting the plants just enough to see through.”
Finding Baldwin
by Ifeanyichukwu Eze
“The books are on the floor, side by side. I begin to pick them up one by one. Lying beneath two old books is this one. The author’s name screams in white on a red strip at the top of the front cover. On the bottom right, the title reads: Go Tell It on the Mountain. A song with the same title rings in my head”
Key Changes
by Sabrina Imbler
“My voice is loud and clear, but also flat and often tone-deaf. I could never command a room as well as a talented singer, a fact I was reminded of whenever I karaoked with certain friends. When they sang, the rooms fell silent. I envied this attention, how it felt alchemic, sublimating into self-worth. I, too, wanted to conjure delight and affection. In this way, I suppose I am no different from any other creature.”
When Books Become a Container of Possibility for Black Girls
by
“My two selves, writer and not writer, are distinct, but indistinguishable, because poor Black girls exist perpetually in our dreams. My writing serves as a container for those dreams. Reading helps to chart the possibilities of my dreams.”
I No Longer Have a Red Dot on my Nose and I Don’t Know Why
by
“I can pinpoint the arrival and departure of the red dot with some accuracy because I take a lot of selfies and I take a lot of selfies because—this is absolutely subversive on my part—I like my face…I stand before you as a defender of the selfie. Not as a tool for getting people to click on affiliate links or as an aspirational thirst trap, but as an excellent record of one’s life.”
Essays from around the web…
Finding a Family of Boys: Leaving Brooklyn for a new life as a college student in Manhattan was in itself an act of becoming.
by
“In 1981, I was a student of art history at Columbia University. I was twenty-one and worked to support myself at a variety of jobs. Columbia was an all-boys school then. Old oak desks and a million cigarettes. (You could smoke in class.) I didn’t know much about the university—not even that it was an all-boys university—until I got there. It was a new world for me. I had lived most of my life until then in a family of girls. Now there was a family of boys.”
How It Felt to Have Sex for the First Time After My Husband Died
by
“Rory was a longtime close friend. As of a few moments before, he was also the first person I slept with after my husband of nearly a decade had died a year and a half prior. I couldn’t escape the feeling that what Rory and I had done was wrong. That I, grieving and widowed, was wrong. I wanted to return to a life I hadn’t chosen to leave.”
An Eating Disorder Got in the Way of My Travel Dreams—but My Recovery Helped Me Reclaim the World
by
“There was a time when I couldn’t imagine getting on a plane, let alone biting into a croissant in Paris or swimming in the Mediterranean. Or rather, I could imagine those things, but they lived in a fantasy life, far removed from the one I actually inhabited. That life belonged to a thinner, more disciplined version of me—someone who had finally earned joy, earned adventure, earned a seat at the table.”
I Dreamed About the Breakup of the United States
by
“For as long as I can remember, I've had dreams that were prescient. Years ago, I I dreamed that the states on a 3-D topological map of America were flying off their bearings, one by one, into oblivion.”
Frozen Tits: The Wisdom of Winter Swimming
by
“In the last decade, I’ve learned to swim through the numbness and tingling that used to frighten me by slowly increasing my time in the water. This is acclimation. I've learned that as long as I’m properly hydrated and fueled, I can keep going way longer than I ever thought possible. My fear of getting too cold or tired has become educated.”
Collecting the Dead: My Closet Is a Pet Cemetery
by
“With every loss, I second-guess myself. Was it the right time? Could I have done more? Would it have made a difference? I’ve had to make difficult choices for most of my pets, deciding when their suffering was too much. It’s a crushing responsibility, made bearable only by the belief that it’s the kindest thing I can do when all other options have been exhausted. Almost every time, I’ve been there in their final moments, whispering love and apologies as they slipped away.”
It Happened To Me: I Confronted The Girl Who Turned All My Friends Against Me In High School And Asked Her Why She Made My Life A Living Hell
by
“I have blocked out so much of what happened to me during those two years of high school. I can tell you the names of the girls who tormented me but no longer remember the words they used. In the hallways, in the classrooms, on the track team, on the school bus, I was truly alone. Even my friend group abandoned me, afraid of risking the public wrath of Sue and her minions. We never do really leave the high school cafeteria.”
The Need for Practice Space
by
“I’d always interpreted 'protest singer' as a euphemism for heterosexual: an idea that Morrissey seemed to wince at. My lone self standing around with an acoustic guitar playing my little songs always felt embarrassing—a lauded heterosexual pastime à la “anyways, here’s Wonderwall.” Even though I was out, I’d felt so far from other gay people. Yet, finally, in this case, my embarrassing habit was useful, since everyone else on my floor seemed to be straight. Maybe someone would want to talk to me about music.”
The Beating of our Hearts is the Only Sound
by
“Later, when some girls at my school were getting cars or plastic surgery for graduation, my girlfriend got me the morning after pill. She had gone into Planned Parenthood and told my story as her own. This was not possession. Of course she had permission to speak as my body.”
🚨Announcements:
📢 “Nuts and Bolts” Seeking Sinéad O’Connor essays…
To celebrate the July launch of the anthology Nothing Compares to You: What Sinéad O'Connor Means to Us (One Signal), with contributions from notable essayists including Lidia Yuknavitch, Porochista Khakpour, Rayne Fisher-Quan, Megan Stielstra, and many more, anthology editors Sonya Huber and Martha Bayne will be running a series of additional essays about Sinead on the Substack "Nuts and Bolts." To celebrate and explore the legacy and impact of Sinéad O'Connor's music, protest, spirituality, and example of living her truths. Please send pieces of 2,000 words or fewer to sineadanthology@gmail.com, with a deadline of August 31, 2025. Pieces selected will appear in Summer 2025. All rights revert to the author after publication, and previously published essays are acceptable as long as the author holds the rights. Compensation for those chosen for publication will be one copy of the hardcover anthology.
📢 Geography of Joy: A Workshop from :
For the inquisitive and joy bound: Geography of Joy invites you to trace the sacred coordinates of your becoming. We're archaeologists of delight, mapping the places where we discovered our power, felt our beauty, found our sanctuary.
Four sessions. Personal joy-maps woven with community celebration. The corner store conversations. The park bench revelations. The dance floors that held our freedom.
We're not just writing stories—we're honoring the landscapes that shaped us, celebrating the communities that held us, resisting narratives that forget our joy.
Dates: Saturdays, July 19-September 6, 11a-12:30p ET. Price: $175. 10 seats available.
📢 "Writing the Book Proposal" with Off Assignment
A book proposal must do the seemingly impossible: Pitch a project that doesn’t fully exist, while anchoring it in practical details like structure, audience, and timeline. It must function as sales document, project plan, and creative vision—all at once. How to craft such a thing? This five-week Masters’ Series course, led by essayist and journalist Raksha Vasudevan and featuring guest authors Elisa Gabbert, Anni Liu, Noelle Falcis-Math, and Lauren Markham, will unpack why proposals matter, how publishers evaluate them, and how this strange hybrid document can actually support the creative process rather than stifle it.
The course includes close readings, structured assignments, and sample proposals that led to book deals. By the end, students will have a working draft or detailed outline of their proposal (25–35 pages, not including sample chapters), and a deeper sense of how to shape it into something that excites agents, editors, and themselves. Open to writers at any stage, this course is designed to transform the proposal from a daunting publishing requirement into a generative, guiding force for the book to come. Scholarships are available, and asynchronous participation is welcome.
Dates: Mondays July 14 - August 11, 7-9 p.m. EST. Price: $400 (Memoir Monday readers can use code MEMOIR20 for 20% off)
📢 Eliciting Stories: how to talk to your loved ones about the past with Margaret Juhae Lee via Corporeal Writing
Workshop Sunday Aug. 17, 2025, 11 am to 1 pm (PST) over Zoom (a recording will be made available to all registrants for a limited period)
In this workshop, we will explore how to approach and speak to loved ones about the past, especially when painful memories are involved. Designed for writers in all genres, we will delve into creative approaches to opening up real (and imagined) conversations with family members, in particular, reticent elders—and even those who are no longer with us. A combination of writing exercises and practical advice from a seasoned journalist, this offering focuses on eliciting stories from those who might not want to remember, including ourselves.
📢 Craft Seminar: How To Write An Essay Collection with via The Shipman Agency (First session next Sunday!)
“This is a lecture class in two parts with suggested but not required readings and 6 writing prompts, 3 per class, that I have used to write essays for my next collection. There is no workshop component. Students will be sent a suggested reading list after registration. Reading the collections under discussion is recommended but not required.”
Two Sessions: Sundays, July 13 + 27 1:00-3:30pm ET; $200
📢 Call for Contributors to an Anthology about Infidelity
Tentative title: Stepping Out: Writings on Infidelity
Editors: Susan Ostrov Weisser, author of LOVELAND: A MEMOIR OF ROMANCE AND FICTION and Nan Bauer-Maglin, editor of GRAY LOVE and LOVING ARRANGEMENTS
This essay collection explores the enduring and complex issue of infidelity in romantic relationships, a topic that remains taboo and emotionally charged despite the evolving norms around love, commitment, and sexuality. The book will feature personal essays from those with direct or thoughtful insights into infidelity, whether as participants, victims, or observers. Analytic essays approaching the topic through psychological, sociological, historical, or literary lenses are welcomed. Reprints will be considered. Please send inquiries or a 1–2-page description to both Susan at weisser@adelphi.edu and Nan at Nan.Bauermaglin99@ret.gc.cuny.edu by August 31st. Be sure to include a short note about your previous writing, your profession, and any other relevant information about yourself.
📢 Call for Submissions for a Collaboration Between Memoir Land and Literary Liberation
Memoir Land and Literary Liberation will co-publish an essay series called “Writing A Liberatory Practice.” Rate: $150. For submissions guidelines, deadlines and more, visit Literary Liberation.
📢 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.
Your name and Substack profile link, if you have one, so I can tag you in the post.
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.
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Thanks so much for including "Collecting the Dead: My Closet is a Pet Cemetery" in your roundup! It means the world to me.