An international murder case, accessibility, and a still life
Welcome back to Memoir Monday—a weekly newsletter and quarterly reading series, brought to you by Narratively, The Rumpus, Catapult, Granta, Guernica, and Literary Hub. Each essay in this newsletter has been selected by the editors at the above publications as the best of the week, delivered to you all in one place.
The International Murder Case That Changed My Reporting Career
by Nina Li Coomes (art by Leah Kwak)
As I sat down next to my team in the lobby to begin transcribing and editing our interviews, I mulled over the concierge’s response. Trinidad and Tobago was a small island, to be sure, and though Asami seemed to have gained a small amount of fame as the Japanese woman who played at Carnival, it didn’t make sense that everyone should feel so close to her death, or so responsible for her murder. Or was it that I was desensitized?
Sirens
by Christopher B. Derrick
I’m driving my family’s spanking-new black Ford Taurus station wagon, off to poison myself with some royal fast food. At this time and place in America’s history, the Taurus’ Syd Meade-inspired curves raise eyebrows. It is therefore too slick for Cleveland, and far too slick for a light-skin Black boy from one of its eastern suburbs to wield its keys.
Still Life
by Leanne Shapton
The light on the shelf, side and backlit by the two windows, is even, but dim. I find myself using it as a sort of altar. Placing things on it that I want to contemplate and look at. Because that’s what I’m doing a lot of; looking around the interiors I occupy, the corners of my occupied apartment.
What If Accessibility Was Also Inclusive?
by s.e. smith
It’s hard to articulate what it feels like to spend a lifetime being told that you are not allowed. Not always in so many words, but in gestures, in spaces, in thoughtlessness. You are abnormal, strange, unwanted. Your needs are not our needs. You deserve only what we are willing to give, no more.
Gregory Pardlo: A Letter to Juneteenth
by Gregory Pardlo
Call it systemic racism, call it white supremacy, there’s a kind of cultural inertia that will only yield to a substantially opposing force like the one that has risen in response to the murder of George Floyd.
Writers’ Resources
Read Morgan Jerkins interviewed by Donna Hemans, at The Rumpus!
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